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[quote=Anonymous]Listen, everyone is different. I was a feminist my whole life and never expected to be a SAHM. Then I became one partially by choice (partially because sometimes your choices are garbage) and even though I was already a feminist, the experience was eye opening and radicalizing in terms of realizing the degree to which our society, including a lot of mainstream feminism, just ignores/dismisses/devalues care work. Like as I became friends with the neighborhood nannies and also listened to my friends who were returning to work talk about childcare and mothering, I realized a lot of us (me included) just have some very effed up misogynist ideas baked into our supposedly feminist ideas about labor and money and equality.

Now I'm working again but I carry that experience with me every day. For instance, I never refer to myself as a "working mom" except in the sense that we are all working moms. This phrase by itself totally ignores the work of caring for children or homes. All mothers are working mothers, and while sure there are SAHMs who don't labor that hard (due to privilege) there are also WOHM who don't labor that hard either (due to privilege). But simply being a mom is work.

But more than that, I have really come to embrace much more radical ideas about feminism, labor, and the social contract. I think a lot of the feminism I embraced when I was a young, childless, professional had been heavily filtered through capitalist ideals designed to extract as much value from laborers as possible. One thing I wound up loving about being a SAHM was how much of my labor benefitted society and my family but didn't earn some rich shareholder a dime. Including some of the crunchy SAHM activities that a lot of women will look down on as regressive. I know how this will sound, but breastfeeding, making your own baby food, and getting all your kids clothes and toys from buy-nothing groups or consignment shops owned and run by women feels effing powerful. It is a reminder that we are all a lot more competent and resourceful than contemporary capitalism would like us to believe, and that if you retake one of your most precious resources (TIME) you actually need a lot fewer consumer goods than you think.

I know, I know. My point is that being a SAHP gets painted as this freeloading activity, but if you've ever actually done if for any length of time, you might discover it's the opposite. I felt really liberated during that time. I returned to work because my family needed more money and also because I derive s significant part of my sense of self from my professional life. But I've never forgotten what it is to just feel divorced from capitalism for a bit. I think an MIL (or DIL) who understands that experience might be more supportive of of women who make different choices in this area because it's really not a binary of WOHM/feminist versus SAHM/regressive. At all.[/quote]

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