Voluntary Servitude
December 3, 2010
AMERICA’S schools routinely use mothers as unpaid slaves. That would be okay if the tasks they demanded were necessary or interesting. But they ask for things that are typically make-work: bake sales and craft projects and fund-raisers everyone could easily do without. I remember once working hard on some ridiculous fund-raiser at my older son’s school, only to be told the money would be spent on a hideous steel jungle gym that was ripped out two years later.
This trivial servitude, which can be found at churches as well, turns many women away from their families and homes. They get paid jobs to escape this depressing round of cupcake ventures. There is often a subtext to these volunteer duties. Mothers rightly come to believe that their children will not be favored if they do not sign on as volunteers. They are made to feel guilty if they have any leisure time for their families or themselves. I strongly recommend that women with children only volunteer when they enjoy it or feel it is genuinely necessary. The communal realm is not superior to the private. Volunteer work should not interfere with family happiness. What is the use of all this activity when it prevents a visit to someone who is old and sick or a few kind words to a husband at the end of the day?
A husband who has a wife who is chronically irritable should consider her schedule and whether she is locked in this volunteer bind and feels she cannot get out.
Here is a very good piece in The New York Times about mothers who are rebelling against this servitude.
— Comments —
Lisa writes:
Laura wrote “…a wife who is chronically irritable should consider her schedule and whether she is locked in this volunteer bind and feels she cannot get out.”
This can happen to stay-at-home mothers also, as we are the ones home in the community, so when a neighbor is sick, needs help, another two or three need a favor, etc., the “non-working” woman at home can receive many requests because other wives and mothers are elsewhere and unavailable. I do love being able to help neighbors, as it should be, but it is sad that there is a shortage of those who might otherwise be available to help family and neighbor friends…
Laura writes:
It is absolutely essential that the unemployed wife or mother learn to say this magic word: No. She does not have the cover of a job to explain her inability to do everything for others so must sometimes just say no without explaining.
That does not mean she should fail to be charitable. Typically it is in her nature to be charitable and empathetic. But she cannot be charitable effectively unless her own home is happy. She cannot be charitable effectively if she never has a minute off or never does things purely because they give her pleasure. I have seen women give up, leave it all, simply because they could not say no to others. It is a terrible weakness.
Mabel LeBeau writes:
Commenting on volunteering at school, I’ve always felt it my ‘duty’ to be involved in my child’s school day. If there’d been the least resistance to my presence, I’d have complained to not only the principal, but the school board. That’s just the way I was raised as a teacher’s kid. One never really knows for sure what is going on unless there’s some periodic interaction. When my first child was in kindergarten, we walked every day to school. In second grade I was some kind of monthly volunteer. But, by third and fourth grade my son was attending schools under difficult circumstances, and I don’t think he ever fully recovered from this uncertainty about life. I’ve not always been able to touch base with teachers on a semi-daily or even weekly basis due to work or other commitments, and for that I’ve always looked at the time with regret and a real sense of loss.
With my second son, I vowed he would have not have a similar experience to the older son, and when my work schedule changed, I found time to volunteer regularly at his school. When he was in elementary school, there were plenty of opportunities to help out and unobtrusively keep an eye on what was going on in his classroom. In sixth-grade I was one of the lunch-time activity monitors when the kids got out their chess sets and other board games, and had plenty of involvement with extra-curricular activities.
When my son was older, I looked to the community to volunteer time. One time I chose an activity that started out with stapling papers, then it was answering the phones and helping keep payment information together. Eventually, the agency asked for help in ‘fund-raising’. Looking back on it, that’s when I began to feel very uncomfortable with what I was doing, and eventually quit. I suppose selection of what I chose to spend my time doing was unwise to begin with, but it wasn’t an entirely wasted endeavor and in a small way, my involvement benefited others, which was the point of volunteering.
Now that my youngest is in college, I suppose I should be more involved in keeping house, and efforts at self-improvement, but am sorely tempted to offer my services at one of the disadvantaged schools in the district–schools without a lot of parental participation. Schools always need people to work with reading and mastery of basic skills. To dream big, I have an idea of spending Friday afternoons with a a group of a dozen children, spending time reading to help develop a love of reading, and then assisting in preparations for national spelling bee competition. I was thinking that we could read books together that have big words in them, then go over the spelling list for 10 minutes, like whetting one’s spelling acumen on vocabulary development. Maybe next year when my house is in order.
Laura writes:
Volunteering as a teacher’s aide can be a useful and satisfying way to help. But today’s schools go far beyond that type of thing. They even expect parents to sell frozens foods and wrapping paper. The financial needs of schools are arguably bottomless. They can always say these fund-raisers are necessary. When one considers the volunteering and homework demands of having a child in public school, homeschooling is not more work.
