MrsLarijani pointed me to a piece written by Amy Glass, within which she referenced this.
For her own sake, I hope Ms. Glass recovers from this lapse in intelligence. As she stands now, she is dismissing herself as a biological dead-end. In another generation, no one will either remember or care about her work. If marries and has children, that legacy will have a great chance of extending for hundreds of years.
But hey…I’m a libertarian sort. This is America, and I’m all for her right to live her life as she sees fit.
Do people really think that a stay at home mom is really on equal footing with a woman who works and takes care of herself? There’s no way those two things are the same.
Of course they are not on the same footing; the SAHM is on far-better footing, particularly if she homeschools her kids, thus providing the highest-percentage chance for those kids to grow up and be exceptionally intelligent and productive.
Moreover, those children will one day take care of their aging mother when she is old and cannot take care of herself. They will push her wheelchair, even bathe her and change her diaper and hold her hand in her last days.
The gal who intentionally chooses lifelong singleness, OTOH, will have none of that. While she may be able to afford a nice nursing home if she earns enough money, there is no substitute for family.
Ms. Glass is free to live as she chooses; whatever she does, it’s no skin off my back.
However, Ms. Glass, keep in mind that you are taking a course of action that even Gloria “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” Steinem eventually abandoned. Ms. Steinem eventually got married. Ms. Steinem sought fertility treatments, without success. Ms. Steinem was a fish who needed a bicycle.
While you are free to try to make this work for you, Ms. Glass, there is a logical reason why women generally get married and have children. Many of them do so in the midst of successful careers outside the home; many even ditch those careers so they can be with their kids.
In my 24 years in the professional world, I have met no small number of women–married, with children–who would like to give up their jobs and stay at home with their kids. I have met no small number of women who did exactly that and are happy with that decision. I have female friends in their 40s who are second-guessing themselves for not marrying, and who hope they still will be able to marry.
I can count one one hand the number of women I’ve known who married and had children, who wish they had done neither. They are in fact the most unpleasant and corrosive people to be around.
That said, this is America. I hope it works out for you, Ms. Glass.
This is one of those things that everyone knows but few discuss.
There are, in my experience, two types of women in this circumstance. The first is a type which rues some of her earlier decisions, wishes now she had made different ones, and very much wishes she were married and/or had kids. This is by far the most common of this type. The second is Amy Glass — she really *is* the smartindependentandempoweredwomyn — not just a stereotype, but in the flesh. This a very, very small number of actual women, but they do exist. And, the dirty little secret is that they look down on almost ALL other women. This has been known for years, but people don’t like to talk about it openly because frankly it’s quite ugly to hate other people for perpetuating the human race — but it exists, and now things have become so brazen as for someone like Amy Glass to “come out of the closet”, if you will (not that she is lesbian, but by analogy), with her hate. Hate is fine, now, as long as you hate a group which is socially approved to hate.
She’s pushing it here, because most people do not hate married women with children, but even though the number of women like Amy Glass is remarkably small, because of who they are, they wield disproportionate power in places like the academy, the media, the arts and so on, and so their messaging in terms of who is an appropriate hate target is much more powerful than their actual numbers would suggest.
In another generation, no one will either remember or care about her work.
Just like 99.999% of the rest of the human race.