What's A Woman to do?

When it was time to raise her three children, my mother—a Harvard graduate, an attorney, and a self-proclaimed feminist—decided to quit working to commit herself full-time to motherhood. A few years later, she returned to work part-time, allowing her to keep her foot in the door as a partner in a law firm, lobby for environmental causes, and volunteer at my siblings’ elementary school. Far from abandoning personal happiness for childrearing, she, like many women, found motherhood fulfilling—a choice that too many feminists view as a waste.

Of course, in her choice, my mother gave up certain career opportunities: She likely will never be managing partner at her law firm or have the chance to argue before the Supreme Court. Instead she’s logged hours and hours in school carpool lanes, watched hundreds of sports games in crowded school bleachers, and packed thousands of paper bag lunches.

For many feminists, however, my mother’s actions are dismaying. In her 2005 book “Are Men Necessary?,” The New York Times sweetheart Maureen Dowd bemoans this apparent lack of commitment to the feminist cause among so many modern ladies. Increasingly, Dowd fears, women are willing to opt out of careers to be professional mommies, forgoing jobs for juice boxes. These mothers are blind to the tooth-and-nail fights of the generations before them—the fights to have jobs and to hold professional degrees. This recent trend, she implies, is a horror.

But as my mother has often told me, there has been no greater joy in her life than motherhood. As far as she is concerned, the slogging associated with full-time mothering is more satisfying than the slogging associated with having a full-time job. She has given up some professional successes, perhaps, but had she worked full-time when her children were young, she believes, she would have missed out on a lot.

Still, many supposed feminists like Dowd would snub the choice my mother made. They view women who prioritize childrearing as either backwards pre-feminists or victims of a coercive patriarchal society that robs women of the opportunity to work. If they were not victims, why would Harvard-educated women cease working to be mothers? What even-headed woman would pick diapers over corporate chic heels and whirlwind business trips?

The notion that being a complete woman necessarily entails picking a career over children is the pitfall of feminism today. In reality, it is not the society of patriarchy that leads women to abandon their careers; quite the opposite, the problem lies in the darker side of feminist culture, which tells women that they are wasting themselves if they are merely mothers. This view ignores the fact that for most of these women, giving up jobs is a choice.

As today’s Harvard women graduate and confront the world of careers, marriages, and children, they too will face the dilemma my mother faced 20-some years ago. Many will choose the life of conference calls and long hours at a desk. Of those who have children in addition to jobs, many will feel constantly worried that they are not giving their children enough time and interest. Those who forgo mothering will sometimes feel the gap of not having children. They will reassure themselves, of course, that their work is more fulfilling than mothering could ever be.

Those who decide to commit themselves full-time to mothering, will not have to worry about whether their nannies are smacking the kids while they’re at the office; instead they will constantly be reminded that they are wasting their Harvard degrees. Their working friends from college will assume they lead boring lives. They’ll be brushed off and seldom thanked for their hard work raising their children.

In her book, “What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us,” author Danielle Crittenden sums up the situation aptly. Today’s feminists delude themselves into believing that women need to have careers to have fulfilling lives—that full-time mothering is a waste. But, as Crittenden notes, many women simply desire to care for their young; this choice should not be co-opted by the tired political banter of today’s feminists.

Today, in the rush to prove themselves men’s equals, some feminists have gone too far, losing sight of preserving their original values. They do not realize that they are hurting their own movement—that they are dismissing women’s oldest rights of all. Unquestionably, there are strides to be made in the feminist struggles. But for feminism to be truly successful, we must recognize that stay-at-home mothering is not a comedown, and, at times, is a more noble cause than its alternatives.

Although she acknowledged that women inevitably differ from one another, Eleanor Roosevelt was certain that for most females, there is a special concern for the well being of their children. “There are certain fundamental things that mean more to the great majority of women than to the great majority of men. These things are undoubtedly tied up with women’s biological functions. The women bear the children, and love them before they even come into the world.” In this modern era, we cannot lose sight of Roosevelt’s wisdom. After all, mother knows best.

Lucy M. Caldwell ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Wigglesworth Hall.