Who would have thought that in 2004, after all the gains of the 60s and 70s, we'd be fighting for reproductive rights for women, voting rights for African Americans and other peoples of color, free speech rights, rights to clean air and water and safe food and the availability of vaccines for common diseases? Who would have thought we'd see, within a single lifetime, another Vietnam-style disaster?
My comment in reply to Kanary was made late last night after a very frustrating day, but I meant the reference to "Mr. Mom" as a pop culture example of a mindset that says "when a man does it, it's real work; when a woman does it, it's just what she was naturally born to do." hell, it's been so long since I saw that stupid movie, I don't even remember much about it!
But I do remember the struggle of a friend of mine whose husband was killed in a car accident thirty years ago, leaving her to raise four young children. She was the quintessential "stay at home mom," busy baking cookies and hosting birthday parties with exuberance. Though Bob's insurance paid off the mortgage and social security provided Julie with some income, she simply couldn't raise four children without going to work -- or without living in poverty.
So I would question anyone who says, "If you VALUE your children, you'd stay at home and take care of them instead of going out and working." Is it "valuing" them to force them to live in poverty? Had Julie not found a job, she would have had no health insurance. Is that "valuing" our children? Obviously, I agree with the Kerry/Edwards statement that you can't have family values without valuing families. But the reality-based reality /sic/ is that for many women, whether they are married or not, they would be as reviled for "not valuing their children" if they stayed home and scrimped to get by on their husband's income as if they went out to work and "abandoned" their children to day care. (And many women are actually accused of being "lazy" if they stay home and don't "work"!)
The truth is, women are in a no-win situation, if they rely on what "they" say.
I went back to college at age 50 and earned both a BA and MA in women's studies, so I have all the zeal of a recent convert :D and I tend sometimes to get worked up about these issues. I remember in one of my classes, a young woman in the front row (I always sat in the back) burst into an angry tirade over feminists who said she was "wrong" for wanting to be a good wife, taking care of her husband, washing his clothes, making sure he had a clean house to come home to, etc. (She was a non-WS major, but the university required courses in a variety of areas, including gender studies, for graduation in all majors.) She accused feminists of hating women like her, of insisting that all women should ahve "jobs."
But when someone asked her why she was getting an education if she didn't have some intention of working for a living at some point in her life, she had no answer. And then someone else asked her what guarantees she had of always having a high-income husband to take care of her and her children. And then someone else pointed out that feminists -- in the narrow sense of the women's-rights activists of the 'ssecond wave' -- had fought and fought and were still fighting for the rights of women to make their own choices and to have the means of implementing those choices, no matter what they were.
The argument went on and on, with this young woman sputtering her defense and her hatred of "feminists" for probably half an hour or more. I don't know if we convinced her of anything, but some of the other students, young and "mature" alike, admitted that they had never understood feminism as defending the rights of "traditional" women before but they did now.
IMHO, no one should be denied the right to choose their "lifestyle" or be denied the means to follow it (within reason, of course). Our society has an obligation, IMHO, to guarantee that. We have an obligation to see that children, regardless the economic status of their parent(s), have adequate health care and educational opportunities. We have an obligation to see that everyone, young and old, rich and poor, black and white and brown and mauve, has clean air to breathe and pure water to drink. We have an obligation to see that everyone, inside our borders and outside, can live in peace. As a society that has managed to build weapons of mass destruction beyond any measure of world-destroying capacity, we have failed in our primary obligations. And the proof of it is that a woman with children to raise has to feel guilty and/or defend herself whether she stays home to raise them or goes into the "job" market to raise them. She's damned if she does and damned if she doesn't.
When a man, either through widowhood or abandonment by his wife, is left to raise children alone, he is consoled and praised and helped by everyone. This happened to my brother when his wife left him with two small daughters. He was such a hero to take on the challenge! And then one day I pointed out to my mother that he was no more a hero than any woman who gets left by a philandering husband, except that my brother had access to good-paying jobs and was looked upon with sympathy. He was never accused of "not being a good enough husband" and being the cause of his wife's departure. That conversation turned my mother into a feminist!
Enough ranting for the moment. I really must get back to the quilt I'm making for my daughter. It's taken me so long to write this, I've probably missed most of the discussion!