Brazil Loses its Mothers
May 20, 2011
THIS ARTICLE in today’s New York Times about nannies in Brazil and their ability to claim higher and higher salaries is written in the seemingly non-judgmental style of most articles about the abandonment of home and children by modern mothers. In truth, the article is highly approving of the trend. The writer Alexei Barrionuevo says the phenomenon has only one serious drawback – it’s hard for some women to instantly find a nanny.
Wealthy women have hired servants for many centuries. There is nothing wrong with that. But it is deeply wrong when a culture’s brightest and wealthiest women leave their homes en masse for jobs. It is immoral. Why?
1. This phenomenon creates more job competition, lessening the ability of men to support their families and forcing other women, including many middle class women, to work.
2. It creates unrealistic standards for the middle class and poor, standards which encourage the societal abandonment of child-rearing and lead to everyday domestic chaos for non-wealthy families.
3. It deprives families and communities of the moral, spiritual and intellectual vigilance of women whose lives are not directed to commercial activity.
4. It creates a society that worships technocratic competence and disparages love. It harms marriage and family bonds.
Many women who leave their homes every day for high-powered jobs love their children and do remarkable things for them. But a society of women who leave their families is soulless and corrupt.
— Comments —
Robin writes:
What are your thoughts regarding American women, predominantly registered nurses, working seventy to eighty hours a week and hiring in-home, part-time “nannies” to care for their children when their husbands are working as well? (When their husbands are home, they are full-time child caregivers and fathers while Mom works.)
There are not very many men who are interested in pursuing a nursing career (generally speaking.) Are these nurses taking jobs from the capable, male workforce as well? I ask in all sincerity, as I am not familiar with the statistics in these cases. I am, however, aware of many women who have chosen this career path and have also chosen a family: they now find themselves with small children and infants at home, but have severe hours with long, on-call situations that often require them to be away from home for twenty-four hour periods, as with Certified Nurse Midwives, Nurse Practitioners, etc. They keep hours much like a physician.
Very curious to hear your thoughts on this. Often these women earn significantly more money than their husbands, so I would imagine this is what precludes their taking a career sabbatical for a few years in order to raise their little ones until they begin schooling.
Is this worth their children’s tender years while they are in process of the “betterment of society” through offering their nursing expertise to women?
Nursing is a more serious career than it once was, involving much more training and expertise. It used to be something women did before they became mothers and wives or did for their entire lives if they didn’t marry or have children.
In the case of both teaching and nursing, they are now lifelong careers. It is a myth that both these careers easily meld with being a wife and mother, even during the years when children are not babies or toddlers. They can be very taxing jobs that require long hours away from home. It would be better if more nurses were men, and there already is a significant minority of male nurses. That’s not to say that the work of women nurses is less valuable. Nursing is always more than a job or, it should be viewed as more than a job. It’s a vocation, and anyone who does it well, no matter what their life circumstances, deserves praise and gratitude. But taking care of one’s children and husband is more important than working as a nurse, barring an extreme shortage that cannot possibly be filled by men.
That said, many women nurses are now in situations where they are supporting their families. Those who have no choice deserve credit for what they do.
Robin writes:
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I totally agree with you, I just do not quite understand how the shift is to occur that brings professional women home and thus opens professional opportunities for men in the nursing arena. While I do know a few men who are pursuing nursing degrees (and advanced ones), I have yet to meet a man interesting in midwifery or even pursuing such a degree. Would women patients trust a male midwife? I could see a male Nurse Practitioner, perhaps. I wonder if today’s “empowered” woman would pursue a male Midwife as they pursue a male physician.
How does one balance the need for safer and more natural birthing options for women in the U.S. with the need for good, educated male nurses to step in and perform these jobs to accomplish all that you speak of in re-strengthening society and returning women to the home (especially if they have small children?)
Midwifery, I understand, isn’t what it used to be either. Once upon a time, a midwife did not have to leave her children to perform Midwifery. She was not on a rotating call schedule and a rotating clinical schedule, having to choose. She simply had her children present, and cared for by another adult (probably family) during the hours when she was assisting the birthing woman. All is radically different now, as she spends her hours on hospital rounds and clinic rotations.
How does change take place in this area?
Laura writes:
I cannot say whether men will ever become midwives in large numbers. Perhaps not even though today’s midwife is similar to the male obstetrician of the past. Some professions are likely to always remain heavily female. I don’t envision a world in which no women have careers or no women are doctors, nurses or midwives. But careerism as the model for women, with motherhood and wifehood as beautiful hobbies, leads to social breakdown. It will take a long time to defeat the myths that have gotten us here. The jobs that provide incomes that can support families are a precious resource. They are not an unlimited resource. It’s important to re-establish the idea that the family-supporting job should go to a man first whenever possible.
Jesse Powell writes:
On the issue of women working as nurses and teachers, jobs that one can reasonably say are better done by women because of the feminine nature of the jobs, it needs to be remembered that not all women become mothers and not all women marry. Even before feminism not all women had children and not all women married; I believe historically, before feminism arrived, about 10% of women never married and 20% of women never had children. It makes perfect sense for the women who never marry to enter into the careers that are more feminine in nature, such as teaching and nursing. I imagine the women who married but didn’t have children focused on volunteer work in their communities and helped their neighbors in other ways. The point being is, there is no reason why women who are married and have children should work. The jobs that are well suited to women should be filled by women who do not have competing responsibilities and therefore do not create a harm by pitting one duty to the society against another.
The woman who is married and has children can fulfill herself by being a wife and a mother; the woman who is not married and does not have children can fulfill herself by being a teacher or a nurse; a woman should not try to “have it all” by being both a wife and mother and a teacher or nurse at the same time as that ends up harming her primary role as wife and mother.
Laura writes:
The certification and training required to become a nurse or a teacher are much different than they were in the day when largely unmarried or childless women were nurses and teachers. These requirements make it much more complicated for women in significant numbers to do either job for just a few years before marrying and having children. They also make it more difficult for a woman who discovers later that she is never going to marry to become a teacher or a nurse. These jobs also come with salaries that make it much more possible today to actually support a family on them, which is why they are more appropriate for men than they were in the past.
Jill F. writes:
There is one more thing I would add to Laura’s list in the original entry. An entire generation of young people will grow up with material affluence and a loss of conscience as they internalize the values of their parents who have chosen to put material possessions first.
Our eldest son works in a outdoor program called the School of Urban and Wilderness Survival. He has many wealthy young men who were raised by housekeepers in the program. They are rebellious, angry and are on the brink of felony convictions. Their parents pay a lot of money to have them live and work in a very rough camping environment (picture the movie Holes) in order to try a last ditch effort to turn their lives around.
The program is effective because the boys learn to build their own fires with a wood bow fire drill and cook their own simple meals (if they don’t learn the skills they go hungry) and take responsibility. They gain a sense of who they are…they gain a sense of worth; something they didn’t get from their parents.
My son told me he was sitting around the campfire listening to the boys argue whose parents owned more property in the most states and he had to correct them on their manners because no one had taught them to wipe their mouths after they ate.
May God turn the hearts of the Brazilian mamas back to their babies and deliver the country of Brazil from a future filled with angry young wealthy men.
