About those "selfish" college women who are planning to stay home [View All]

[Nikki Stone 1]

Yesterday there was a thread on DU with an article about Ivy League coeds (at Yale), 60% of whom were planning not to work with their college degrees but to stay home and raise their children.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5282783&mesg_id=5282783

The article overtly stated that these young women were selfish, taking slots at major Ivy League universities when many people, female and male, were being denied admission, and that these people were intending to use their degrees.

I understand why the writer of this article was so angry. Back in the 50s, college women were understood to be in college to look for a husband to support them (the MRS. "degree"), and serious female students had a hard time being taken seriously. Coeds were directed towards majors in Home Ec or the liberal arts. A woman who wanted to be in the sciences or business faced hurdles. And even when she got out of school, she was often not hired because it was assumed she would be leaving her job once she got married. It took until the 1980s before this was no longer an automatic assumption that could be acted upon by employers.

Feminists fought hard for the right to a better education and the right to be taken seriously as intellectual equals. This new crop of girls, post feminist (and some fundamentalist) in orientation, seem to be throwing this newly won seriousness away. That is why the article was so bitter.

But there is another old feminist idea that might need brushing off here, and that is pay for motherhood and housework. In the 70s, when many women were still stay-at-home mothers/housekeepers, the argument was made that women did a tremendous amount of unpaid labor at home, and that until it became paid work, it would not be respected.

If motherhood were paid, a college degree in liberal arts or accounting etc. might make more sense to people. Just a thought.


Even without pay, and even if girls are planning to stay home, it is still better for society and for their children that they are educated and have college degrees. Considering that 50% of all new marriages end in divorce, there is a good chance that these girls will end up having to work anyway, and it is better for their children if these girls have a higher level of education to sell on the job market.

Even if they do not end up divorced, these girls may still end up working for economic reasons. Or, they may end up wanting to home school their children, start a business from home, or teach in the public schools once their children go to school themselves. There are a lot of reasons why women who stay home with young children may need a college degree.

This is an issue that feminists in particular have to be very careful with. It is extremely easy to get caught up in the anger against young girls who appear to be throwing away everything that feminism has worked so hard for.

But, the world of work is changing, too. It is not the same as it was in the 50s, when there was a good chance that once you were hired by a company you'd stay until you got the gold watch. Most people change jobs 5 or 6 times in their lives. Many people start home businesses. The world of work is not monolithic.

We have to be very careful to convey to universities and employers that women who stay home to raise their children are not "a waste" of an education. That they pass on their education to their children and to their communities in many ways that are very beneficial to society. That they will most likely return to the job market after their children are old enough or grown. And that ultimately, educated mothers, regardless of whether they work in or out of the home, are always better for society.

And it would be only fair if society realized the work that housewives/stay at home mothers do and paid them for it.