The more things change, the more they stay the same, it seems. For going on five decades, the message to women has been: The revolution is finally over. Women have finally been given the freedom to pursue their professional passions. They have finally been liberated from the drudgery and injustice of childbearing and the servitude of the home. Now—now, things will change.
But they don’t.
Consider the recent article in Fortune admitting what everyone already knows: High-achieving professional women employ people to make possible the relatively smooth operation of their home and family life.
The national pastime of feminists seems to be bemoaning the endless studies showing that whatever professional advancement womankind make, they continue to do the lion’s share of the household chores. Even as more women become breadwinner, divvying up the dishes and kiddie doctor appointments disadvantage women. Or so we’re told.
It has been multiple generations of increasingly mainstream assertion of the rights of women to work outside the home in any profession they choose, yet the situation remains the same. That should clue us in to something about the situation.
Why is it that women wind up doing more of the domestic arts? Quite frankly, on average, it seems like many women care much more about them than their male counterparts. As we’ve previously discussed in a very stuffy and gendered way, many men are prone to hyperfocus. Many a man is simply unbothered by the normal detritus of daily life. On the other hand, there is a subset of women who gather in groups like the now defunct “Penelope Loves Lists” to celebrate and encourage their over-tidying neuroses and inability to leave the house without disassembling and stowing away every last Lego.
However anyone feels about mess and the particulars of daily household management, someone has to deal with them. That someone is often women. The patriarchy strikes again! Or does it? In any event, In a collection of Phyllis Schlafly’s singular musings “Feminist Fantasies,” she wrote more than thirty years ago about the same phenomenon.
Commenting on Art Buchwald’s humorously titled essay, “Liberation and the Self-Maid Woman,” Schlafly quoted: “behind every liberated woman, there is another woman who has to do the dirty work for her.” Schlafly remarks parenthetically, “We will overlook Buchwald’s bias that it is ‘dirtier’ to take care of children and cook family meals than it is to outwit, outmaneuver, and outlitigate an opponent in a lawsuit.”
Buchwald goes on to investigate a successful career woman, and, Schlafly notes, “He is shocked to find that, without Juanita mopping floors, Lila wouldn’t be liberated at all. As he put it in his exquisite hyperbole, ‘in order to be free, a woman must find another slave to replace her.’”
Slavery? Is that really what it is to serve a virtuous man and raise the children you love more than any other the world over? It can be effectively bondage to underpay migrant workers to manage all our “dirty work,” but it is not so for a mother to care for her own.
The committed feminists love to tut-tut about the lack of paid family leave and the lost wages of mothers at home with their children. If the government starts cutting a check for every mother who chooses to spend the bulk of her time with her children caring for and educating them, then we will have, in a sense, cheapened motherhood. It’s not just a “job,” interchangeable with any number of caring professions. It’s a lifestyle that makes a woman available to her husband and children in a way that transforms the world.
At the end of her brief musing on the subject, Schlafly writes, “But those who believe that it is a social good for children to be cared for by their own mothers in a family environment are not about to acquiesce in the elimination of the traditional rights of wives.” Alas, the “traditional rights of wives” are on their way out because we have created a hostile environment of such rancor and suspicion that men are afraid to get married and women who are married are bitter and angry. While both men and women are generally ill-equipped to get married these days, many women ensure that they do not stay married (women are the more likely to initiate divorce proceedings) and feel entitled to the last of big alimony settlements our nation will know given that they have become incomprehensible.
We have so hollowed out the home and the meaning of motherhood that most people will see it as no great loss if a newly single mother must find a place of regular employment. They may shrug and tell her, “Just go get a job.”
Forget about what women want for themselves for a minute, and consider the children who would like to know that someone will be available to pick them up from school if they are sick, someone has the time to make a tasty meal for dinner, someone can with clockwork regularity walk them to the park and tuck them into bed. It doesn’t have to be their mother, but someone has to do it, and if she is being paid for it, chances are she will be underpaid.
To accomplish the Herculean feats of managing a household and raising young children, give mothers the opportunity freely to choose a life of service. Not slavery, but service rendered with love.
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