THE JOURNALIST, who in this piece regrets having spent 14 years raising her sons and sees no problem in retrospect with day care for young children, is a typical modern narcissist who fails to utter one word of gratitude. Her husband worked all those years to make it possible for her to care for her children. Yet he receives no thanks from her. In fact, she appears to have divorced him.

Given Katy Read’s presumption that slogging away in a career for decades is only a form of personal fulfillment, it is no wonder she does not acknowledge his efforts. This is yet another legacy of feminism. If career is for self, then career is never for others. Thus a man who is the prime support for his family deserves no thanks. He is really working only for himself.

 In truth, the specialization required of men involves sacrifice by its very nature. As George Gilder wrote in Men and Marriage:

Among men the term dilettante is a pejorative. Yet, because the range of human knowledge and experience is so broad, the best that most people can ever achieve, if they respond as a whole person to their lives, is the curiosity, openness, and eclectic knowledge of the dilettante. Most men have to deny themselves this form of individual fulfillment. They have to limit themselves, at great psychological cost, in order to fit the functions of the economic division of labor. Most of them endure their submission to the marketplace chiefly in order to make enough money to suatain a home, to earn a place in hte houseold, to be needed by women.

It is because of the inherent sacrifices and limitations that go with being a man that women have certain natural obligations to men. One, they owe them absolute deference in hiring and education. The best jobs should go to men. All civil regulations and laws that require preference for women are wrong, a violation of the natural contract between the sexes. Men should receive preference in hiring not simply so that they can fulfill their economic obligations. They should receive preference so that they can more easily achieve satisfying work. As many paths as possible should be cleared for men to receive satisfaction in their work because men have no choice but to work.

The other thing women owe men is gratitude and customary deference, expressed in a hundred small ways at home and in the course of everyday life.

                                                          — Comments —

Alyson Davenport:

 I am not sure what you meant by a psychological sacrifice that men must make in the marketplace. My husband has a Phd and so it seems he has reached his intellectual fullest potential, unless he were to acquire an MD or another Phd in a different field. We got married while he was defending his dissertation and I was finishing my Masters degree. My intellectual curiosity and commitment to my field of work inspired his intellectual achievements as well. Also, at one point in time I worked to support him in order so he would not have to take a demeaning job but be able to finish his publications in his pursuit of becoming a professor, which is his lifelong goal. His funding was cut prematurely not due to affirmative action or any such thing but because soft money is always at the whim of politicians, and actually it was a Democrat who had up to that point been able to spare funding in the way of pork barreling. This was in West Virginia. I know that women in the workplace are not the ill factor in my husband’s line of work. Rather it is ignorance of the importance of funding for higher education and seafood science (which many people do not know exists).

At any rate, you should realize that the nation is a complex one and there are a plethora of reasons for men not working, one may be competition with women but it is by no means the main one. Also, you should realize that in many relationships, a mans intellectual lot can be bettered in a more equal partnership if a woman also works. For when the man cannot find a job or needs to pursue other intellectual endeavors in order to improve his intellect or collective lot in life he is able to do so while she works and vice versa. I know this has been the case for my husband and I and we enjoy a lovely, intellectually stimulating and rewarding marriage.

Due to my husbands job we have moved many times and we have alternated one having a job the other not both having a job like a seesaw.

Right now I stay home with our daughter but it goes back and forth.I may go back next year if it is worth the money. Also, as a professional in communication development, I think it best for my daughter to attend some form of preschool as I have worked in them and am aware that the curriculum they teach is good and essential for preliteracy. I can help my daughter talk, but due to my degree specialization their knowledge of preliteracy, how to teach numbers, shapes, etc trumps my knowledge. I would want her there so she could learn and because i have researched and learned the importance of these activities on early development. That is not to say that a child cannot be fully trained by a mother early on and be academically ready for kindergarten, but I do believe it would take a highly trained person and I am aware of my limitations. I do not view this as narcisstic but simply a reality, my degree is specialized to communication and there are other professionals better trained for the development of fine and gross motor skills and general academic and I would want my daughter to have this training. Most headstarts now require a great deal of academic training for individuals who work there, I have worked in and been privy to their creative curriculum in West Virginia. Anyway, I just wanted to make it known that there are more reasons than pure selfishness for a woman working and for her sending a child to preschool. Your views on daycare for younger children (1-3), I am not sure on but could research I have less experience in that setting although I did complete some clinical work in them during my graduate degree.

Laura writes:

A few quick points:

1. I have never said that women should not work at all. There are any number of reasons why women must and sometimes should work. While I believe it is not good for mothers to work, unless severe poverty is the alternative, in which case it is absolutely good and not harmful for a mother to work, my general point is that there should be no mandatory preference for women in hiring and, in fact, there should be customary, not legally enforced, preference for men. Let the market and the general views of society on this matter hold sway.

2. I have never said that women only work out of selfishness or that women only resort to day care out of selfishness. Some women have no choice but to use day care and thus day care is the right choice for them because it is the only alteranative. Day care is often viewed by women such as Katy Read as a good choice even in optional circumstances. The child-maternal bond is central to psychological health. It is difficult to maintain when a child is in day care for long hours. However, a mother who puts her child in day care because she has absolutely no alternative can presumably maintain that close bond with her child more easily than a mother who does it when there are other choices. The fact that she has voluntarily left her child is a sign of weakness in the relationship.

2. I have never said that the large-scale influx of women into the workplace is the only, or even the most important factor, in unemployment or underemployment for men. There are other important factors, especially the globalization of our economy and the loss of the nationalist, protectionist economic policy that governed early America. 

3. I criticized day care, but didn’t address the issue of nursery school. No training is necessary to teach children what they are taught in preschool. They learn their ABC’s and numbers. Ideally, they learn how to sing and paint and draw. Even a ten-year-old can teach a preschooler. Literacy was much higher before the widespread introduction of preschool. The main reason many women choose preschool today is because there are few children and mothers left in the nieghborhood with whom to socialize and there is no one to turn to for babysitting while a mother runs errands. In any event, a few hours of pre-school a week is not harmful.

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