SOCIALISTS don’t think much of housewives. Why should they? Housewives don’t do much for the cause. The worker bee can be raised in an institution.

Last week, Chairman Obama, promoting the Marxist scheme of cheap daycare for all, said:

“Moms and dads deserve a great place to drop their kids off every day that doesn’t cost them an arm and a leg. We need better child care, day care, early child education policies.”

Doesn’t it make you cringe to hear a politician refer to grown men and women as “moms and dads?” He added:

“Sometimes, someone, usually Mom, leaves the workplace to stay home with the kids, which then leaves her earning a lower wage for the rest of her life as a result. That’s not a choice we want Americans to make.”

No president, I believe, has ever so baldly endorsed feminist thinking on the vocation of housewife. Socialists collectivize homes. That’s what they do. They also promise things they can’t possibly deliver. Quality daycare is an oxymoron. Though it can never be delivered, it can always be dreamed of, to the point of actually believing that parents have the right to someone else raising their children cheaply.

American presidents did not always think so little of those who personally raise the next generation in their homes. Theodore Roosevelt, speaking in 1905, said:

No piled-up wealth, no splendor of material growth, no brilliance of artistic development, will permanently avail any people unless its home life is healthy, unless the average man possesses honesty, courage, common sense, and decency, unless he works hard and is willing at need to fight hard; and unless the average woman is a good wife, a good mother, able and willing to perform the first and greatest duty of womanhood, able and willing to bear, and to bring up as they should be brought up, healthy children, sound in body, mind, and character, and numerous enough so that the race shall increase and not decrease.

There are certain old truths which will be true as long as this world endures, and which no amount of progress can alter. One of these is the truth that the primary duty of the husband is to be the home-maker, the breadwinner for his wife and children, and that the primary duty of the woman is to be the helpmate, the housewife, and mother. The woman should have ample educational advantages; but save in exceptional cases the man must be, and she need not be, and generally ought not to be, trained for a lifelong career as the family breadwinner; and, therefore, after a certain point, the training of the two must normally be different because the duties of the two are normally different. This does not mean inequality of function, but it does mean that normally there must be dissimilarity of function.

Universal daycare is a scheme for votes. Goodies for all.

— Comments —

Pan Dora:

With a bit of luck we will someday have a President who is actually concerned about being President.

Bob S. writes:

Obama could have said, “That’s not a choice we want Americans to have to make.” But in fact, that’s not a choice he wants people to make at all.

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