On "Real" Women

Tony Woodlief has a great takedown of the notions that some feminists have of what a "real, serious" woman is. His inspiration is a magazine that declares that it's aimed at "real" women, not those dumb homemakers who sit around watching soaps and eating bonbons all day. (As if!)

The real woman. Not the woman who sacrifices a career because she believes she can do more good in the world by raising and teaching her children herself. So what if she has wrestled for years with the challenges, for example, of raising her children in adherence to her faith? That doesn't compare with hustling to get appointed Executive Mid-Manager in MegaCorporation ABC, after all. Get real, mom. You are merely managing the moral, physical, and intellectual development of human beings; it's not like you are putting together PowerPoint slides comparing the costs of competing stationary vendors.

Not that the homemaker could do something like that, because she is, implies Betty, uneducated. Educated women, you see, don't stay home. How do we know? Because the sweethearts at Betty, along with their pseudo-intellectual ilk who infest the coastal cities, look around themselves and see educated women working. None of these smart women would dream of staying home with the kids. Ipso facto, educated women don't stoop to such an enterprise.

There's much more, of course.

I've seen this attitude even among some relatively non-feminist mothers who work outside the home. They believe that if a woman is educated and chooses to be a stay-at-home mother, she is "wasting" herself. And they usually assume that stay-at-home mothers are uneducated or submissive. Many of them have this disdainful attitude because their own mothers worked outside the home, so they never knew anything different.

I have a completely different view because my mother was a homemaker. If I ever have kids, I will be a stay-at-home mother, too. I have great respect for homemakers, and I think it's a shame that feminism has devalued such important work.