The idea that being a stay-at-home Mom is boring, demeaning and inadequately challenging comes from the 1960s; specifically, Betty Friedan‘s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. “Betty Friedan’s” real name was Naomi Goldstein. She had been a communist propagandist since her student days. She dropped out of graduate school to become a reporter for a communist news service. From 1946 -1952 she worked for the newspaper of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, (UE) “the largest Communist-led institution of any kind in the United States.” In 1947, Congress targeted the UE as a Communist front and its membership began a steady decline.
In other words, The Feminine Mystique was communist propaganda designed to destroy the family.
For some women, that is all they need to know to drop this “women are unfulfilled in the home” garbage and rush back to their children and husbands. But, most women need a little more than this.
The book did make a connection with women, mostly those that were graduates of the better colleges. They felt that spending their time with household drudgery was a waste of their potential. They were bored. So they rushed off to work.
This is actually rather stupid. No housewife should be spending very much of her time on “household drudgery.” You have to clean the toilet and vacuum the floors whether you have a full-time job or not. It should take about the same amount of time. If you are spending more than one hour a day at it, it is taking too long. A lot of this “drudgery” is really childcare. Children require a lot of care. Wealthy women have always had others do it for them: nannies, governesses, tutors, maids and so forth. Yet, a woman who is unwilling to undertake the process of raising and educating her children, and considers it drudgery beneath her station, should not be a mother. You are unfit for it. Go be a barren accountant; but please do not get married or have children.
No, the main reason that these women — this small set of upper-class well-educated women — were bored is not that their days were full of mopping and cleaning toilets. It was that mopping and cleaning the toilet took only a few minutes, and then they were bored.
This boredom arose, I would guess, primarily due to a lack of imagination. They couldn’t think of anything more worthwhile to do than labor for some corporation. They could have become more involved in their children’s upbringing and education. Today, they could become homeschoolers, which would engage the most able minds to their full capacity. They could continue to educate themselves — basically, read good books. They could socialize with other bored women. They could adopt various hobbies, like playing the piano. They could undertake the homemaking process with greater ambition — to become an ambitious cook, or maintain an ambitious flower garden, or become an ambitious interior decorator. They could get involved in some sort of community organization. They could get involved in some sort of national organization. They could become a Level 5 Housewife, or a fitness Mom.
Certainly, these women had some energy and ability, or they wouldn’t have graduated from one of the better colleges. But, they don’t seem that intelligent to me, or they would have thought of one of these things, rather than being conned by communist propaganda. For fifty years.
Unfortunately, as I think of this, it again reinforces the perception that women really need men to tell them what to do — to guide and protect them. Women, it seems, just can’t figure out even obvious subversive communist horseshit like this. They fall for it like total idiots. So, I am going to tell them what to do: stuff this toxic filth in the garbage.
Housekeeping, and raising and educating children, is a milieu with many opportunities to challenge the most able women. But, if a woman has additional time and energy beyond that, there are many, many worthwhile things to do. A woman who is actually bored has nobody to blame but herself.
Cornerstone 