Feminists often say that the business world is pitted against them. Rubbish. As this graphic from a human resources outfit illustrates, corporations in general are happy to accommodate the working mother.

The underlying assumption in this graphic and the study it cites is that motherhood is not necessary or important. Replace the words “stay-at-home mom” and “motherhood” with “soldier” and “service in the military” and you can easily see what I mean. The trapped feelings of a soldier are not decisive in whether he performs his duties and defends his country. The feelings of a mother are decisive because maternal care is considered inessential.

It is not surprising that some women newly at home report feeling trapped, as if an office cubicle and long commute are not confining. That’s perfectly understandable given they are ill-prepared and have learned since early childhood that motherhood is a lesser occupation and that it is weak and risky to depend on a man. As for the “resentment” they reportedly feel toward “spouse and/or baby,” human resources departments would not cheerfully report such ugly feelings with regard to men and their family responsibilities. That’s because they do not have to persuade men to work. They do have to persuade women, and it’s good for the bottom line when they do.

The modern corporation, like the Communist state, is more than happy to collectivize motherhood. The assumptions of this human resources graphic are similar to the beliefs of Soviet bureaucrats. If it was true, however, that women by nature felt trapped and resentful when caring for their children and homes, the human race would have ceased to exist a long time ago.

—- Comments —

Eric writes:

I am jaded enough to think that feminism is nothing more or less than an ideological device to make women into wage laborers.

Why should children get the benefit of women’s labor when they could be making millionaires into billionaires?

Brenda writes:

There is so much on this site that you lined to that I hardly know where to begin:  the use of the word “only” to modify the percentage of women who report receiving paid maternity leave of two months or more, and the way the U.S. is bracketed with Papua New Guinea and Swaziland, are efforts to surprise the reader at how backward we are. The chart on Decision Making (which you used for this post), and the way the comparison is made between “working moms” and “stay-at-home moms” is poorly presented (as far as consistencey goes), but quite effective at influencing a tired mother who is on the fence about returning to work too early, or even at all.  The study of working moms clearly states the number of women questioned for the study.  The stay-at-home moms are represented by the word “many.”  Many?  Just how much is that?  Also, the stay-at-home mom bullet points are all feelings:  “I feel guilty”, “I feel trapped,” etc.  Not so on the working mom side of the chart.

If I’d told anyone that, after becoming a mother, I awoke each morning excited about everything I had to do that day, I’d have been telling a huge lie.  Nobody feels happy about their work all the time. But have we forgotten how wonderful contentment can feel?  Must we insist on evidence of success, and a quantifiable means of showing it, each step of the way?  Are we so weak-willed, and without vision too, that we can’t understand the complexity of bringing up a human being, and the rewards that follow?  It would seem that the answer to all three of my questions is “apparently so.”

 Laura writes:

The real howler on the chart is the bottom bubble which says working women report being “just as involved” with their children as non-working mothers. If they say so, it must be true.

Mark Moncrieff writes:

What an excellent point you make that it is not only new mothers who feel trapped and inadequate to the task at hand. The real reason so many new mothers feel this way is that they lack support. They have little to no contact with young children, often their mothers do not live nearby. In effect they are trying to carry out such a vital job alone. That is why post natal depression is so high, because they have such a steep learning curve.

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