Stay At Home Wives

According to an article on CNN, 10% of the women who do not work outside the home do not have children.  Meaning that they're staying home to take care of their husband and their house and not because they're rearing children.  These women are, usually, educated -- some of them have MBAs.  They have chosen to get off the career track to take care of their husbands. To some women, who lived through the women's lib movement, this could be regarded as a smack in the face.  In fact, one woman who was interviewed actually said, "I thought about the feminist movement -- all those women who worked so hard so that I could go out and have a good career, and I was kind of saying 'no thanks.'"

And, when I first started reading the article, that's what I was thinking.  How dare you stay at home when so many women fought for equal pay and equal respect.  I'm too young for the full force of the discrimination for women in the workforce, but when I was working for a campus police department in the mid to late 80's, I was often asked what it felt like to be doing a man's job.  (My mother taught me my standard response:  If it was a man's job, they would've given it to a man.)  My point is that it hasn't been all that long since women working is the standard -- although for women in the lower economic classes, it has always been the standard.  And, now, some young hotshot wants to stay home and stand by her man?!?  What's that all about?

Then, it dawned on me.  It was about having choices.  For some couples, that means a stay at home wife.  For other couples, that means a stay at home husband.  Some of the stay at homes will be rearing children and some will just be taking care of the home.  Whatever works for them should be just fine with the rest of us.

God Bless