Reply to SAHMs of children entering school age

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[quote=Anonymous]The problem isn't that some women choose to stay home with their kids. The problem is that almost no men do. Childcare is work. Taking care of a household is work. Taking care of aging or sick relatives is work. We just don't value it as a society, which is both why men don't choose to do it and why women who do get pilloried for "setting women back."

Also, when people say that a woman staying home with her kids is setting women back, this always seems to treat "women" as a group limited to UMC, mostly white women, in or near urban centers. No one really talks about or considers how this system shifts the burden of childcare and housework onto women of color and immigrant women who are often not paid very well because, again, we do not value this work in our society. This isn't me judging anyone who sends their kids to daycare or has a nanny or someone to come clean their house -- I support women in their choices. But I think if we are going to talk about what is setting women back, we should be talking about ALL women, not just women who look like you and have the same background as you.

Another thing I've noticed is that makes people very uncomfortable when you say you enjoy being a SAHM. There is a very pervasive notice that childcare is drudgery and anyone who enjoys it must be too stupid or uneducated to understand that it's not important work. When I was staying home with my daughter for the first few years of her life, people would ask me incredulously, "Aren't you bored? What do you do all day?" The hilarious thing about this was that before I took time off with her, I was bored out of my mind in a job people consider intellectual (editor at a legal publication), and I loved the years I spent with her, learning about early childhood development, teaching myself to be more flexible and creative and spontaneous. It's not an exaggeration to say it's probably the best job I've ever had, but when I say that out loud to other professional women, some of them look at me like I've been lobotomized.[/quote]

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