Guilty? Trapped? Brainwashed?

Should I feel guilty expecting to want to focus on a family later in life as a college-educated woman? I feel like that’s the essential question the readings for today have caused me to consider.

My mom had a well-paying job and when she and my dad planned for their first child, she quit her job and was a stay-at-home mom until I was a teenager. When I was thirteen and my little brother was eleven, she went back to work at a job for which she was overqualified, but which had conditions and hours that were perfect for how she wanted her work-life to shake out. My dad has worked his way up the engineering ladder since graduating State with a masters and now manages a team for RDS Engineering in Battle Creek. We’ve always had enough as far as money went—solidly middle class, though we always had to save up for vacations, my brother and I were not given cell phones until college, and we’ve had to take out loans for school.

Photo from Rants from Mommyland

Despite the budget, none of us would trade having my mom at home for anything. She was and still is superwoman. My dad always split the cooking with her since he loves to cook and handled all “fix-its,” but she was always the one cleaning, driving us places and picking us up, and doing the grocery and clothes shopping. And I guess she has served as my model of the right kind of American mother. Always there for her kids, always on time, a good cook, an avid reader, an excellent player of card games. I’ve been educated up the wazoo, I identify as liberal, but being liberal doesn’t mean I would ever look down on someone who might have foregone a professional career, but who has instead given her all to her kids and works very hard to make all aspects of her family’s life run smoothly. 

Of course, as Megan McArdle argues in The DailyBeast, “There are also costs to the old-style Mom's-home-Dad-works marriage arrangements, which have been well-enumerated by the feminist movement over the years.” A possible lack of opportunities to self-actualize, for example. This generation seems to believe, however, that despite those costs, staying at home is worth it, according to the U.S. Census Bureau: “In a 2005 study, the U.S. Census Bureau reported an estimated 5.6 million stay-at-home moms. That is a 22% increase from 1994” (Dulce Zamora). 

Photo from Generations

Granted, work rates have decreased for men as well, given the economy, but only 2.7%. Is there a squeeze on women to stay home or have attitudes shifted over a generation?—that is, are women being pushed into these decisions or are they choosing it? Or do they believe they are making a free choice when in reality society has already predisposed them? The picture Miller and Belkin paint is of a generation of women who are ‘opting out’. I think Belkin put it well when she said, “It’s not that women aren’t competitive; it’s just that they don’t want to compete along lines that are not compatible with their other goals.” If their priorities have raising a family over career goals, that is their choice. The important thing is for a woman to have the same choices a man does when it comes to their work-life balance.

But “having the same choices a man does” seems literally impossible. Women do not have the same choices men do from the moment they are born and given pink balloons. To see gender socialization in action on children only 3 or 4 years old, here’s a YouTube video. 1:40 on is particularly poignant.

Personally, the decision for me to stay home at least for five or six years to raise children would be in my mind a positive choice, not an unwilling reaction, based on my emotional priorities, but I still wonder if my seemingly free decision is based on socialized gender expectations and values.

These priority differences could be almost entirely due to the differences between male and female socialization and internalized gender roles, expectations, and mentalities. Both genders lose a little in this societal equation—men get less time raising their kids, women get less time in the work force. But even if my priorities are a product of socialization from my infancy, that does not change those priorities. I will still only be happy if I can devote the majority of my time to raising my children. In our “Two Income Trap” world, I may still have to work some of that time. I may even end up trapped, having to work in order to have means and therefore have to sacrifice time for my kids.

Hopefully I will be secure enough to at least be able achieve a balance which will give me the opportunity to advance my own causes and accomplish my personal goals as well as care of a family. Inevitably, however, my definition of success is not measurable by how many years I spent teaching or whether or not I ever got published. Success to me is measured in much the same way as the rest of the woman who are part of this so-called “opt-out revolution.” The mechanisms influencing those priories are less certain.