ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, Oct. 08 2009

A skewed view of stay-at-home motherhood
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

There I was, bleary-eyed after another night of round-the-clock feedings and
struggling to balance the morning's newspaper on my lap as I nursed two
squirming infants, when I read the latest rap on stay-at-home mothers.

It came courtesy of a new U.S. Census Bureau report, which profiled 5.6
million such women and concluded that they are typically younger, poorer, less
educated and more likely to be foreign-born than their work-outside-the-home
counterparts.

The younger part is obvious. Most women who choose to stay home do so because
they have young children, and younger children tend to have younger mothers.
But poor and uneducated? That characterization does not match the reality I
have seen among many high-achieving stay-at-home mothers who purposely scaled
back successful careers to spend more time with their children.

Nor does the report's implication — echoed by many commentators — that women
who devote themselves full-time to raising their children do so out of
desperation and disadvantage rather than maternal desire. As a woman who
consciously decided to follow a flexible and somewhat unorthodox career path so
that I could have more time to tend to my family, I find that generalization
more than a little insulting.

As I burped and swaddled two babies on my knees, I realized why reports about
the Mommy Wars often frustrate mothers. They rigidly divide us into categories
of "working" and "non-working" — a dichotomy that insults any woman who has
ever traded a brief case for a breast pump and learned the hard way that there
is no such thing as a non-working mother. More importantly, they ignore the
complex reality of most mothers' lives, a reality that often includes a longing
to devote ourselves unreservedly to our children paired with a desire to stay
connected to the wider world of paid work and public life.

The latest Census report on stay-at-home mothers is a perfect example. The
report limited its definition of stay-at-home mothers to those who did no paid
work in the previous year and had husbands who were employed all 52 weeks of
that year. Excluded from this definition were mothers whose husbands were not
continuously employed throughout the year and mothers who had spent at least
one week of the year in the labor force, even if they spent the rest of their
waking hours tending to their children.

By refusing to count these part-time workers as stay-at-home mothers — even
though many self-identify as such and work entirely from home during their
children's nap times and in-school hours — the Census report provided a skewed
view of stay-at-home motherhood as a vocation of last resort for women with few
other marketable skills.

In reality, American mothers increasingly consider part-time work a better fit
for their lives than the full-throttle, fast-track careers that the feminist
establishment says every self-respecting woman must want. A Pew poll released
last week found that when presented with three options — full-time work,
part-time work or no work at all outside the home — a plurality of mothers said
that part-time work was ideal for mothers of young children. Meanwhile, only 13
percent of mothers who work full-time said that having a mother who works
full-time is the ideal situation for a young child. And contrary to claims that
only privileged women want part-time work, an earlier Pew survey on the
question found that the appeal of part-time to mothers crosses income and
educational lines.

Many mothers have no choice but to work full-time outside the home. Others want
full-time jobs but cannot find any lucrative enough to offset child-care
expenses. Both groups deserve attention, but so does the growing contingent of
mothers who are finding ways to do what American women increasingly say they
want: savor the private and unhurried joys of motherhood without severing their
connection to the professions and public life.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St.
Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.