Nor did i say that because I liked staying at home that it what all women should do. I suggested that it seems to be the situation that women in general are more interested in staying home to raise the children, when they have the opportunity. I don’t see any evidence at all that this is not the case.

Society generally seems to be anxious to seperate women from their children when they can, rather than encouraging them to stay with them. In Sweden, for instance, where they have a very generous parental leave allowance, they haven’t had much luck in persuading men to stay at home with the children. So now apparently they are planning to make paternity leave compulsory, so that men will have to stay at home with the children, and women will have to go back to work, regardless of whether that is what they want. This is not going to be good for the men, the women, or the children. Who stays at home and raises the children (if either do) is a matter that should be arranged privately, it isn’t something you should legislate for. Forcing women back to work when they’d rather be at home, and forcing men to stay at home when they’d rather be at work, is a reciple for disaster for all concerned.

In industrialised western societies, nobody is stopping women from going out to work if they want to, in fact they are actively encouraged to do so, whether they have children or not. The fact remains that a lot of women are more interested in focusing on their families than on careers or jobs. Why are so many high-powered women quitting their jobs to stay at home with their families, as was remarked on in an earlier comment?

To suggest that there is nothing natural about women’s desire to stay with their children is ridiculous. It is nature, not society, that has made women the ones to have babies, and to be responsible for raising them. It is a limitation imposed by old Stepmother Nature, not by society. Civilisation encourages women to get out to work, but it’s nature that gives some of them at leas the desire to pack it in and go home to the kids.

Louise

On the other hand, if it were natural, it would not have been necessary to enforce compliance by law. Indeed, after hundreds of years of forced compliance, it is insulting to claim that there is anything natural about the universality of the limitations of womens choices. The limitations of womens choices, to submit, or die, is an affront to nature and to God.

Of course, it’s nice that thousands of American women - high income, of course - are now more free to live without he support of a man. It’s a slight balance to the millions of women - of all incomes, but think of the poor - who are now expected to slave at home and on the job.

My friend misogynist Mike often tells me how lucky I am to have a wife to support me. If he had a wife making enough money he’d be out getting laid by other women all the time while she ran the house and paid the mortgage. He’s a bit of a pimp at heart. And he would guffaw loud and proud if I told him to his face!

I always cringe at the idea that an artificial construct such as culture has these ‘natural’ tendencies that can’t, presumably, be changed. Your Nigel would be very pleased at such sensible arguments, which need no foundation in fact other than the facts provided by those who devote themselves to proving them right by creating theoretical constructs to support them.

I should do a post about natural facts. Twisty has done it so much better than I could that I would need to go back and study her comments on it first. She is my guru.

And please, for the sake of common courtesy, do not equate a desire to find fulfillment outside the domestic realm with “ball breaking.” That is a tired, antifeminist charicature worthy of our friend Mysogynist Mike [see, TP, I came back to the point!]. My career satisfaction, and preference for being an aunt rather than a mother, does not make me a man-hater, or less of a woman. It just makes me me.

Among mammals, it’s the female of the species that looks after the young. This is obviously practical because in the early years the female is the only one who can feed the child. In hunter-gatherer societies, which are i believe the form of society that most people lived in for most of human existence, it is the females who gather plant food while the men go off hunting, because gathering is a lot easier to do when you have a young child in tow. Hunting while lugging a squawling baby or whining toddler around is impossible.

In medieval times, women tended to be involved in economic activities, either working in the fields alongside their husbands, or being involve din the family business, whatever it was. Some women were in business on their own account. Certain activities were traditionally female, like brewing ale for instance, the ale-wife was a familiar figure in medieval society. In the early years of the settling of America, women’s barter economy was vital to the survivial of the early settlers. The seperation of home and workplace that evolved in the early modern period led to a rapid decline in the number of women engaged in business, and women increasingly were supposed to devote themselves to home and children rather than to any kind of economic activity. Whether women actually found this a curse or a blessing I have no idea, our modern tendency to think that everyone wants to be working at some job rather than being at home with the family may not have been shared by women in olden times, it is impossible to say for sure.

Modern civilisation has given women options to not have children, to pursue careers, or to have children and still continue working. it is remarkable, though, that in spite of having these choices, large numbers of women in Western society still choose to put their families first, and any work they do comes second to the demands of family. I think people should be free to choose how they want to spend their lives, but I am not convinced that women who stay at home with their children, or who do only part-time work instead of pursuing a ball-breaking career, are doing so because they have been conditioned to do it, rather than because they want to.

Society seems, as far as i can make out, to encourage women to pursue careers, we are bombarded by images of succesful career-women in films TV shows, advertising etc. I don’t get the feeling that society is conditioning women to stay at home, on the contrary it appers to me to be discouraging that as much as possible. nevertheless women continue to do it. I think civilisation can do something to counteract natural instincts, but it can never suppress them entirely, and it seems that the instinct to concentrate on children rather than career is very strong for a lot of women.

Louise

Raising children is also seen as ‘women’s work’, which seems like a chicken-and-egg situation where I try to figure out if raising children or taking care of the home is deemed lesser because women do it (and so women are deemed less then men) or if women are deemed less then men (so raising children is also less then ‘men’s work’).

Either way, they’re conflated together now. Louise, I think what you’re talking about might be a culturally-created division where many women are taught since childhood to stay at home and disuaded from entering the business world, and so once they become adults, they think that’s the natural order of things.

What I do know is that once I graduated school, my first thought was, “How do I get a good job to provide for family and friends.” I don’t even like to work, I’d rather write all day or take care of the house. But I also know what I’ve been taught - a man is worthless without a job. I think women have been culturally brainwashed in the same way, but they have it worse because their cultural role is deemed lesser by some idiotic convention.

I mean, please feel free to put me in my place and all (since I’m talking about the gender role of a group I don’t have first-hand experience with), but I also feel that culture is a powerful force. And the one we’re stuck with, for now, is toxic.

It’s not some sinister patriarchal conspiracy that keeps women from wanting to rush off and have careers, it’s their own inclinations. Whenever surveys are carried out on whether women with children would prefer to work full time, part time, or stay at home full time, if they could choose, part-time work always seems to come out top. Most women would prefer to keep a foot in both the world of work and the world of home,if it was financially viable. They’d like a bit of money of their own, but they want to be able to spend timed with the kids as well.

In past centuries, when most people worked in or near their own homes,it was more common for the worlds of home and work to be blended rather than seperated, and most women were involved in business as well as homemaking (whether or not they wanted to be is another matter).

Personally, I am quite happy to be financially dependent on my husband, since it means I don’t have to worry about who is going to look after the kids etc whileI’m at work. I don’t want to have to spend my time worrying about what is going to happen to them while I’m at work. I’d rather be able to pick them up from school, come home and relax with them, play games, help them with their homework.

There are women who are able to focus on their careers and be ‘ball-breakers’ but many women simply are not suited to that sort of life. they’re more interested in their families. I come into this category. A lot of women simply do not want to be ‘ball-breakers’.

Louise