As you can tell, I made it out of Texas without a hitch yesterday. It was a good thing, though, that my connecting flight wasn’t in Houston. Then I would have been nervous.

I received an interesting article the other day from NNPCW alumna Mashadi Matabane from the New York Times about women at Ivy League schools who are training for high-powered careers, but plan to be full-time mothers (“Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,” September 20). My first thought, for those of you who read my May 27th post, “Ivy Souls for Jesus”—the Times seems fixated on conservative trends in the Ivies, when there are thousands of other diverse higher education institutions out there with a variety of perspectives. What they’re talking about isn’t that earth-shattering anyway. I knew several women of the type they’re describing when I attended Whitworth more than two years ago. Sheesh, tell me something I didn’t know.

Mashadi also forwarded me another article (at Slate.com) critiquing the journalism itself in the Times article. As it mentions, using terms like “many” and “some” are meaningless without hard data to back them up, something this article sadly lacks. So you surveyed some women, but what did you ask them? How large was the overall sample?

But those are all sidenotes to what I’m really thinking about, and why I’m wondering how much of these Ivy trends have relevance to the rest of us. And basically that has to do with the whole privilege factor. The women surveyed are likely children of the elite—I just read a statistic yesterday that your chances of being admitted to Harvard jump to 40% if you’re a “legacy,” compared to something like 12% for the overall admissions rate. And they’re probably going to marry the wealthy elite, as the article acknowledges. They actually do have a choice to be a full-time mom, a choice that is becoming increasingly closed to the middle class.

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke, by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, reports that an average middle class family needs both parents working to afford a house. I don’t know about you, but that’s definitely the category I would consider myself in. When I went to college, I didn’t see it as a fun exercise in the working world before I settled down. I saw it as a necessity, an investment into my own ability to provide for my family and myself in an increasingly uncertain future.

It is one thing to make choices that are the best for you in a given time, whether that is to provide care for children or stay in the workforce. Neither choice is good or bad in itself. In fact, I personally think about stay at home scenarios once in a while. But the sort of insinuation this article perpetuates, that women see their overriding purpose in life as that of mothers, just takes us right back to 1950. And it justifies all those discriminatory hiring and wage practices that assume women are just working as a hobby, that men are the real breadwinners and deserve higher wages as such. I can tell you right now that my mother is the primary breadwinner in her family, and I’m sure she’s not alone in the workforce. But an article of this tone from the New York Times can justify such myths as fact, which makes Mom’s everyday struggle to earn a living wage that much harder.

Because I’ve just been talking about the middle class—don’t even get me started on how the assumptions of this article fly in the face of students whose parents are part of the working class, students who must attend college to even have a chance in this world. Where are the interviews with those women? Would the response be different?

So maybe next time, the New York Times will expand beyond the Ivy League and look at how those of us in the rest of the country’s colleges are doing—those of us who don’t belong to the most powerful echelons of society. Maybe then they’ll see that portraying this generation’s young women as traditional domestic goddesses does a huge disservice to all of us who really have to make tough choices about the balance of family and career.

“I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them.” --Hosea 11:4

Kelsey

PS—What really got me, though? The part in the article about the men in the American Family class who thought it was “sexy” to want to be a stay-at-home mom. Of course they think it’s sexy!! They’re the ones who get the most benefit out of the deal! No significant childcare responsibilities, time to focus exclusively on one’s career…. Oooh, I’d better stop ranting. I might get myself in trouble soon.

Hi Kelsey,

I have been very busy today and didn't see your blog until tonight. (By the way I am very glad you got out of Texas safely.) I was really a bit bothered by your blog today. I guess that is because I have three daughters who are stay at home moms and none of them are well off or any part of the elite. In fact they are rather poor. Two of them have home schooled their children, one, with six children, while she is going to school herself. One daughter is married to a N.T. Professor who makes hardly anything, I think about 30, 000 dollars. They are so into debt from school loans that, although they do have three children they still don't have a home of their own. The point I am trying to make is that they are home because they want to be home, and it isn't because they are rich, they have learned to be thrifty and put what they consider important above the American dream of having everything. This is not to say that I think it is wrong for mothers to work, I just think sometimes that some feminist tend to look down too much on women who see their careers as being moms. In fact, one of the more interesting books I have read is by a woman historian, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Beside the book I am thinking of she wrote "Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South," the really first history of women in the South during the time of slavery. Any way the book I am thinking of is "Feminism is Not the Story of My Life." She interviewed a lot of different women, not just elite women, and found that the women's movement of today is really failing many women because they are tending to much to their own agendas and not enough to the real needs of real women. So I guess I am ranting too!
Blessings in Christ,
Viola Larson
p.s. By the way I have six children too and my husband put me through school several times, (two BAs and one MA) after the last one was three years old. And I haven't made any money for the poor man yet.

Hey, Kelsey!

Thanks for the shout out. I wonder how these girls will feel years from now when they look back at what came out of their mouths (read the second Slate article I sent you).

The whole mom at home thing evokes a weird knee jerk reaction since there are so many negative stereotypes attached to it for me: it sounds submissive, it's old school, etc. Really, my first thought is: BOR-ING! My second thought is: there is no way in the world I am going to be a stay-at-home mom after all the money spent on my degrees. My third thought is: every woman has the right to decide what she wants to do, so what do I care.

I'm sure all the ambiguity I feel is because I don't have a real understanding or, truthfully, an appreciation of motherhood, despite having been mothered extremely well by a working mother whose own mother was a stay-at-home mom for part of her life.

My mom says I'll understand the stay-at-home thing when I have kids. She said she felt the same until she had me and then she understood why having a parent home is a crucial and wonderful thing.

We'll see....in about 8 years when I'm in my mid-30s! LOL

Hey Viola and Mashadi,

Thanks for your comments... I knew this was a tricky one to take on, because you're right, Viola-- there are lots of women out there who have to sacrifice to stay at home with their kids. And I really don't want to discredit women who make that choice. Perhaps I would have taken the article better had it been featuring women like your daughters, Viola, who really had to make tough choices to prioritize family and who are consequently living something beyond the materialism that permeates our culture.

Like Mashadi, I feel quite a bit of ambiguity about this myself, as the product of a primarily stay-at-home mother. I do feel that my own sense of self-assurance came from having that support at home. Perhaps I will have a better perspective on it when I have kids of my own.

Kelsey