Becca Inman, Staff Writer
When I was a freshman I lived in a quad with three girls from very different backgrounds with very different world views. One of the girls would have long discussions with me on the subject of feminism and women’s place in society. Her lifelong dream was to become a doctor and to make a huge contribution to medicine. In her mind, the value of her education here at Notre Dame was defined by the career paths it would open up for her.
One day I confided to her that I’ve never really had a determined career path that I want to pursue. My primary goal is to get married and to have children, and I want to stay at home to raise those children as well as I can. By the end of our conversation, my roommate told me that I, by having “no ambition, but to be a stay at home mother,” was wasting scholarship money that could go to someone who “actually wants to DO something with their life.” My roommate thought my education was not valuable since I didn’t want to do anything “practical” with it. Why be educated if all you want to do is raise children?
I will comment only briefly on my roommate’s poor reasoning. First, there are few things more practical and meaningful than raising a child well from birth to maturity. Motherhood is the practical art par excellence. Second, the judging the value of an education based on how well it prepares one for the servile arts is a recent phenomenon. A liberal arts education is an education that makes you free, because it develops your ability to discriminate and discern the truth, not because it prepares you for servile work.
That being said, my roommate’s views, prevalent though they may be, were–and still are–odd to me. I find it shocking that women are now looked down upon for wanting to stay home to care for a family. Feminism no longer strives simply to make women equal to men by giving them the opportunity to work and enter professions that were formerly closed to them. Feminism now means that women must join the “workforce” and be as ambitious and successful as men, otherwise they are wasting their lives “doing nothing.”
This new feminism is certainly not liberating, nor is it pro-woman. It seems “anti-woman” to insist that a woman should only receive an education if she has a professional career she wishes to pursue. My education is valuable insofar as it develops my mind and insofar as it makes me better able to raise my future children.
My hope for the future is that people will again appreciate the value and importance of stay at home mothers. Women who want to stay home with their children are performing a labor of love that deserves to be commended as much, if not more than, women who become doctors or lawyers or politicians. By realizing that there is nothing shameful or antiquated about being a stay at home mother, women will ultimately become more liberated, rather than more constrained.
Rebecca Inman is a senior majoring in the Program of Liberal Studies. As a result of being born and raised on Guam, she is really good at cutting pineapples. Contact her at rinman@nd.edu.