Get To Work?

We tend to avoid controversial topics here at The Peanut Gallery, but we had the misfortune of running across this book excerpt online, and we feel the need to make a brief comment.

To sum up the gist of the argument, Ms. Hirshman has authored a book in which she argues that women ought to return to the work force. She bemoans the fact that women *still* seem to be "homeward bound," in spite of all the best efforts of feminists like Betty Friedan and others. She is sick of all of the relativistic talk that casts the decision to stay at home or work as "choices" of equal merit , and says that working is just. plain. better.

Working provides a better, more fulfilling life, and it allows women to contribute to society in a meaningful way, according to Ms. Hirshman. In the linked excerpt, she tells the story of one woman who decided to stay home with her infant son, and decries the fact that this was
"condemning her to spend her talents on tasks that people with no degree at all can do."
I will refrain from stepping onto my soapbox and turning this into a long entry. Suffice it to say that I vehemently disagree with the above quote. No, it does not take a degree to care for one's children. But it is not something that any "people" can do. *No one* can raise my children the way I can, because *no one* (apart from my husband) can care for them as much as I do. And caring for them is the most exciting, interesting, and freeing work of which I have ever been a part. Ms. Hirshman would, no doubt, argue that this is a platitude that I have swallowed due to my cultural upbringing. All I can offer in response is my experience. I have lived both lives -- I have earned a degree, gone to graduate school, worked for a major corporation . . . and I have been a mother.

Being a mother wins. Hands down.

Hirshman claims that:

The family with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks is a necessary part of life and has obvious emotional and immediate rewards, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government.

Ironically, I have found just the opposite to be true. A career can have it's "immediate rewards", but the investment of myself into my children has been where I have found true "human flourishing." I have flourished, and so have they.

Very little of Hirshman's argument in this excerpt adequately deals with the fate of children who are separated at an unnaturally early age from their parents, so that women can "get to work."

One of my many, oh-so-fulfilling jobs of the past was that of substitute teacher at various elementary schools. I remember well some of the young children who would break into sobs at the end of the day because they didn't want to go to after-school daycare. They had already been at school since 7 AM. They *missed* their parents. They wanted to be home. With mom. Wouldn't any child in their shoes want the same thing? Are we to say to this child, "Sorry, Johnny, but Mommy must fulfill her duty to society at large and therefore cannot focus her attention solely on you and your siblings. Time to toughen up! Time to get with the program and enjoy your institutionalized life!"

How about allowing for the fact that I can contribute to society in the best possible way by raising my children and, with them, involving myself in the larger community in a variety of profitable ways?

OK, I am now firmly situated atop the soapbox I vowed not to ascend. I will decend by simply saying that we are feeling nostalgic this week about the approaching birthday of Master. A year gone by already. A wasted year, in which I should have been using my talents elsewhere? I think not.

Not a wasted year from his perspective. And, perhaps even more so, not a wasted year from mine.