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Category:
Published: March 2007
Society's negative view of maternity leave.
Susan was an optometrist who had just merged her practice with a larger medical group. Amy was a theater major who had already had promising auditions with two off Broadway plays. Rachel was thirty-three years old and only two years away from making partner at her local law firm. Each woman had a promising career in front of them, and each woman decided to give up or defer their ambitions. The reason? They became pregnant.
Read the above paragraph over again and think about how it made you feel. Did you feel sorry for the women? Would telling you that it was a planned choice make you feel any different? These questions get at the heart of society's view of mothering. An ambitious and talented woman, society says, should not let a mere pregnancy or newborn get in the way of her job. And if she does decide to stay at home, she must not have wanted to succeed badly enough. She must be a quitter.
By all accounts, the opportunities for both pregnant and non-pregnant women has improved dramatically in the past quarter century. Women now comprise the majority of college graduates and over 59% of women are now part of the workforce, a 16% increase since 1970. Laws such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act protect women against workplace discrimination while the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 give them the right to take maternal leave. Perhaps more importantly, the view of women as inferior or less capable in the work place has been steadily dwindling, thanks in part to a new generation of parents who make sure to tell both their sons and daughters that they can be whatever they want to be.
But while respect for career-oriented women has skyrocketed in the past few decades, the praise given to women who choose to spend time mothering has been subdued at best. This is puzzling, especially considering that recent studies have shown that primary caregivers with young children spend more hours working than their employed counterparts. Ask any stay at home mother with a toddler what their schedule is from 6am to 8pm and you will see what I mean. Yet the cause is not that mothering has lost prestige in Western society, but rather that every other option for a woman has gained prestige while mothering has remained static. Think of what it was like fifty years ago. Becoming a mother at that time was not a career choice but an expectation. Today, that expectation is gone. For the first time, the average woman has some avenue of financial independence and can therefore choose what she wants to do. With society's increasing pressure on women to earn money and greater corporate prestige, it is no wonder that more and more are choosing to return or stay at the workplace instead of spending more time with their children.
While changing society's view on anything is not an overnight task, history has taught us that a concerted effort for greater respect and equality can lead to astonishing results. What our society needs to do is make the career of primary caregiver more attractive for young women. The first step is to dispel the myth that a mother chooses to stay at home and raise children because she has no other marketable skills or does not think that she can go any higher on the corporate ladder. While this is still sometimes the case, for the most part women today make an educated choice between a career path that they trained for in college and mothering. The second step is to show greater appreciation for just how difficult and vital the mothering role is in society. Both of these goals can be met the same way as other goals in the Women's Rights movement-a combination of legislation and public awareness campaigns that eventually encompass the school and the family.
Thirdly, both the federal government and private institutions should enact more vigorous maternity leave programs. The United States is one of only five countries that do not guarantee a form of paid maternity leave. The other nations are Lesotho, Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea. The Labor Department reported that the fastest growing segment of the labor force is mothers of children under the age of six, due in large part to economic pressure on the family. Psychological studies have shown that the first few years are the most critical for a child's intellectual growth. While not all women need to choose a career as a stay at home mom, all should have the option to at least spend one to two years with their newborn children. More importantly, those that choose to spend their years raising their children should not be seen as quitters, but caregivers of our nation's future.
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