Hatred for Mothers and Wives
January 26, 2010
Notice how this article on women who earn more than their husbands is dripping with contempt for homemakers, portrayed in so many words as petty, materialistic, idle and obsequious. The writer, Sandra Tsing Loh, is the woman who announced her decision to leave her husband and the father of her two children for another man in Atlantic magazine last year. The upshot of this confusing essay seems to be that everyone, both man and woman, wants a wife, but a devoted wife is too much of an absurd and sick fantasy to exist in real life. Imagine a piece in any mainstream publication describing career women in similarly unflattering terms. This is extremely unlikely because:
1. The women who write for mainstream publications are careerists and promote masculine goals for women.
2. Homemakers are by temperament the least likely people to aggressively defend their vocation.
3. Children are not able to speak up.
— Comments —
Lisa writes:
When my husband and I had been married just three or four years, he received orders to Virginia for additional training in the Marine Corps. It was only a six-week course, and we had plenty of friends in the area, so we contacted my old roommate and her husband to see if we could stay with them part of the time. During the day, I and my two toddler sons would stay at home, doing laundry, cooking, playing, going to the park, reading, etc. while the husbands and my friend went to work. At the end of the first day, she and her husband got home about the same time. Music and the comforting aroma of a ready dinner filled the air. My friend plopped exhaustedly onto her couch, smiled, and said, “So this is what’s it’s like to have a wife!”
When women devote their mental and physical energy primarily into a job outside the home, their creativity and energy in homemaking must suffer. That is not a put-down, or an insult to working women. I experienced it too. Perhaps working women feel they must attack homemaking because they are frustrated or feel powerless to change, and are still victims of the unrealistic “I can have it all” message spouted by anti-family media programming.
