By JAMIE SELF
To work or not to work, that is the question. At least it is the latest question asked by researchers at the Pew Research Center of moms with kids younger than 18.
Six out of every ten moms say that part-time work would be ideal (although only 24 percent actually have part-time jobs). One in five moms said they’d prefer not to have to work at all outside the home. The number of working moms who view full-time work as the ideal option is down 11 percent over the last 10 years.
When the Pew Center released this survey, the results were featured in every major newspaper, most local papers, on morning television news programs, talk radio…and all I could think was, “is this even news?” Given the chance, wouldn’t most moms naturally want to work less so they can be home more? Is that so shocking?
As is so often the case in the news business, controversy sells. And this issue of moms working outside the home – or choosing not to – seems to stir up plenty of controversy.
Many papers even use the term “mommy wars” to describe the debate.
Interestingly, nearly everyone seems to be on the same side of one particular skirmish in the mommy wars. Pew researchers asked moms, as well as the rest of the general population, what they thought was best for children. There is a distinct difference in this question. What is best for kids? Not, “what would you prefer,” not “what is feasible.”
What is best for children? At least 90 percent of moms—and the rest of us—said that something other than full-time work for mothers was better for kids. People differed on whether they thought part-time work or no outside work at all was ideal, but very few saw full-time work as the best situation for the child.
In the great “mommy wars” it is complicated to tell who is on the side of “good “ and “bad” exactly, but it’s not hard to spot the ugly. In an effort to stay out of the ugly category myself, names will be left out to protect, well, the ugly. One highly educated woman has stated that smart, talented women who choose to leave the work force to care for their children are wasting their talents and doing a disservice to humanity. One Associated Press writer covering this new poll attributed the rising numbers of women who would prefer not to work full-time to guilt. “The guilt is almost tangible,” she wrote. Is that it? We’ve just spent the last decade making moms feel guilty for working, so now the guilty answer polls saying they’d prefer to work less?
The issue is much more complex, and every family is unique.
Notice again that most of the moms who say that part-time work would be ideal don’t actually work part-time. For those families who don’t feel they can financially rely on only one income, part-time work isn’t always easy to find. And remember too that many of the moms surveyed are single moms.
What option do they have, realistically, to stay at home or work part time?
And yet when a majority of women express a desire to work less, it seems there are plenty of other women waiting in the wings to belittle such a desire as an archaic, unintelligent notion. As if giving up (or postponing) a career for children somehow means giving up something greater for something menial?
It brings to mind a few enlightened comments G.K. Chesterton, the British journalist and scholar, made about this very subject. In the world of work, we are asked to give our best. And yet, when a woman leaves the work force to enter motherhood full (or even part) time, she does not just give her best – she gives her all.
A mother who is home with a child – full-time or part-time – is home with a human at a time when, as Chesterton puts it, “he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren’t.” He goes on:
Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world. But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question.
For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean.
How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness. Where children are involved, the only question to be asked, really, is “what is best for them.” Most of us seem agreed on that point. Now perhaps we can support women who are able to make the choice to stay home much or some of the time. And we can support those who would like to, but perhaps have yet to find a way. Perhaps it is time we restore the honor and dignity that comes from raising children. We should respect the grandness of the task it is to be a mother.
Our mothers are not simply carrying out a chore or exercising a skill. They did not teach us one trade, they introduced us to the world.
And to those sensationalizing the mommy wars: can we call a truce, at least for now?
