This section focuses on the issues facing young women and their partners who decide to work together by taking on quite different, but complementary, roles to provide financial as well as day-to-day practical support for the family. Issues relevant to the stay-at-home mother include:
- retaining negotiating power within the relationship despite a lower income;
- ensuring that the woman has the opportunity for some degree of personal independence;
- trying to ensure mutual respect for the different roles that the partners assume; and
- ensuring that the man still retains a parenting role.
Many women find that the emotional experience of motherhood changes their focus from working life to family life. The emotional ties of a small baby can be overwhelming and difficult to understand until you become a mother. The early months can generate feelings of devotion and adoration similar to being in love again. Caring for the new light of your life can be the most rewarding task you can imagine and the attractions of the workplace (if there ever were any) can diminish overnight.
Women can gain a tremendous sense of personal fulfilment from having children. Although I have always loved my children very much, I have not felt the same personal drive, that other women obviously do, to be present for every moment of their childhood. I suspect that women react differently partly because of emotional make-up but also due to the confidence that we have to drive through our own achievements.
“As the feminist group the Redstockings put it, for many women marriage is one of the few forms of employment that is readily available.” (p79 The Hite Reports)
Many women see family as their personal achievement
I grew up accepting the conclusions of women’s liberation that women in the past had been disadvantaged by their childbearing role. In my twenties many of my female peers vowed that they would never have children and that they could not imagine ever wanting to give up their careers. Later when I reached my thirties I could not understand why so many other women gave up careers to support their families in the home. There was nothing for it, I resolved to approach some women I knew and ask them the question directly.
Why were women today not motivated to define and lead the spiritual, scientific, artistic, political and commercial aspects of humanity? I was quite taken aback when other women said that they did not view these achievements as significant. Not only did they consider these male goals to be largely irrelevant to women’s lives, they positively preferred spending their lives focused on the home and family. They valued the tasks of raising their children and providing a home as the most important personal achievement of all.
It was some time before I understood their point of view. I gradually come to appreciate how one-sided my view of humanity had been. Everything that I had read appeared to indicate that our society is defined solely by men’s achievements. What on earth were women doing all that time while men were busy inventing wheels and cataloguing the stars? The fact that women had also contributed to our social history had completely escaped me.
“What I have been trying to make people realise is that to be a wife and mother is more important than anything else.” Dame Barbara Cartland (romantic novelist) The Times newspaper Jan 5, 1998.