Are Smart Stay-at-Home Moms Wasting Their Brains?

There’s been a big debate lately about college-educated housewives, and if we’re wasting our brains and baccalaureates by abandoning good jobs to wipe little noses and butts all day. It started with Linda Hirshman’s “Homeward Bound” article in The American Prospect, wherein she decried homemaking as a detrimental road leading to a “demonstrable future loss of income, power, and security for the woman who quits.”

Intense reaction to the piece landed Hirshman in “Good Morning America” segments that engaged career, hybrid and at-home moms in side-by-side tête-à-têtes. One homemaker was asked if she feared her husband leaving her destitute. Hesitating slightly, a nanosecond of silence masking her dumbfounded state, she offered a terse and defensive, “No.”

If only she’d let down her more-motherly-than-thou guard long enough to tell the truth: that some of us save promising want ads until late-afternoon lessons with our kids compel us to toss them. That after heated fights with our husbands, we stare into nothingness and long for the freedom our discarded dollars might have bought, mentally calculating the months since the end date of the last “real job” on our resumes. That sometimes we ask: What the hell have I done?

When Two Bucks Become One
Housewives of the 1960s and ‘70s weren’t experiencing this dilemma; they were escaping their kitchens and storming boardrooms, copies of Betty Friedan’s 1963 call-to-work manifesto, The Feminine Mystique, tucked into their rigid Samsonite briefcases.

Of the 5.6 million moms who stayed home in 2005, I bet a good deal of them are like me, still reeling from the emotional upheaval that accompanies losing one’s entire income to rely completely on that of another. My question is: If those ERA-fueled ladies of yesteryear gained economic parity, greater independence and more autonomy by joining the rat race, have contemporary women who’ve opted-out now lost all those same things?