Should Smart Women be Housewives?
August 1, 2009
Jen writes:
After reading several of your posts, I’m intensely curious to know how you believe the mother’s childrearing “cycle” should go. If a housewife/stay-at-home-mom places the utmost importance on education for their children, a HUGE reason for staying home to literally raise their own children, what would be the expectation for their children to grow up to be? To further clarify, I read an article written a few years back about how many students at Ivy Leagues have decided to discontinue their careers and become stay-at-home moms once they have children.
Should the quest to give their children a chance to have amazing learning opportunities (given at Ivies and top-tier schools) be dropped down in prominence over the teachings of cooking and cleaning? I’m vastly serious here.
I’m curious to where this cycle began. Many of those children were also raised by their moms (as opposed to daycares and the like I mean). But did those moms invest energy, time and resources in preparing their little girls for the ivy league just to have them quit…….and eventually do the same to the grandkids? What if their children were truly gifted in the sciences or math? Should they not pursue becoming doctors just because they want to have children some day? What’s your opinion on this?
Realistically……can a child (who is gifted in math/science) grow up to attend an ivy and become a physican, but eventually become the stay at home mom they wish to be?
The line is just fuzzy for me (maybe ’cause it’s late) on where the hard-work of education brought on by the mom’s payoff by raising successful children who will eventually do the same. Hopefully you can help me on this. I would love your input. Thank you.
Laura writes:
For a full-time mother to raise her daughters to become physicians suggests a weird dissatisfaction with her own life. Or perhaps she thinks her daughters are uniquely unsuited to it. This has happened often enough in the past 50 years. Traditional women lost confidence. They often actively encouraged their daughters to lose confidence in their role as well. The sheer novelty of feminism was appealing. They also did it out of materialism and status seeking, envy of men, and because society fell to the belief that natural distinctions and hierarchy are evil and lead to personal unhappiness. The very opposite is true. Natural distinctions and hierarchy lead to happiness.
Are intellectual or “gifted” women unsuited to full-time motherhood? Must they pursue careers? No. There is no intellectual aptitude, scientific or artistic, that need go wasted. An intellectual woman presumably marries a man with compatible interests. If she participates in her children’s education, her knowledge and intelligence find no better means of expression. She may possess a few hours a day to pursue her interests. For the scientifically inclined, the world is almost too full of opportunities. Think of Aristotle. He possessed less in the way of scientific material than I do in my kitchen and yet was the inspiration for centuries of exploration. His curiosity and love of the natural world would not go unused no matter what period he lived in or what materials he possessed. Think of Jean Henri Fabre, the French scientist whom Darwin called the “Homer of Insects” and whom some consider the father of present-day entomology. He did his research on a scrubby plot of land in Provence with few resources due to poverty. “We all have our own talents, our special gifts. Sometimes these gifts seem to come to us from our forefathers, but more often it is difficult to trace their origins,” he said. The same is true of women. Many have special gifts, though very, very few possess the scientific genius of the greatest men. These gifts for women may not find lucrative expression at home, but there is ample room to express them, especially through instilling a love for culture and science in others, sharing in a husband’s interests, and pursuing avocations. Have you ever visited an art museum and been led on a tour by an educated woman volunteer and found her lecture to be as good as that of a paid art historian? How many women find the perfect outlet for their talents in their careers or only find this outlet at the cost of giving up all else? How much of a physician’s day-to-day life actually expresses his love of science and how much of it involves very repetitive tasks, the work of caring for people, dealing with various temperaments, managing a business, acquiring new technical knowledge about medicines and equipment, filling out paperwork? Part of the denigration of home stems from the romanticizing of work.
Jen asks:
“Realistically……can a child (who is gifted in math/science) grow up to attend an ivy and become a physican, but eventually become the stay at home mom they wish to be?”
That’s a lot of money to spend on training that goes unused. Most women with this highly expensive training never feel free to abandon it completely to full-time motherhood. I know several women lawyers whose expensive degrees are now merely pretty paper. They have no intention of returning to legal work at all. Their law school education wasn’t completely wasted, but that’s a lot to spend to acquaint oneself with the law. I would think they wouldn’t make the same mistake with their own daughters.
“Should the quest to give their children a chance to have amazing learning opportunities (given at Ivies and top-tier schools) be dropped down in prominence over the teachings of cooking and cleaning? I’m vastly serious here.”
No. Women shouldn’t just be taught to clean and cook. Education, especially a liberal arts education, is important. Even some early Greek and Roman philosophers recognized the value of education for women though their societies did not widely put this into practice. That is our tradition. Ivy League and top-tier schools are not necessarily the best places to get this good education anymore. Many students emerge from these schools with pedigree and little deep acculturation. Is it worth women going into enormous debt to get an education if they are not going to have lucrative careers? No, it is not. In an age of the Internet and advanced communications, there are opportunities to make higher education less expensive. There is little incentive to explore them. People would rather have women work, often throughout their offspring’s childhoods, to pay for these high tuitions. Women work to pay for women working. This is insane.
Melissa writes:
