From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!CAD:tektronix!tekmdp!bronze!crimson!roberta
Newsgroups: net.women
Title: Working mothers
Article-I.D.: crimson.1451
Posted: Thu Jan 27 14:06:48 1983
Received: Sun Jan 30 09:09:01 1983


One hardly knows where to begin to respond to the article on "Working
(selfish) mothers". I must admit to some prejudice in the matter, since
I am a working mother. I am divorced and have the responsibility for
raising three teenagers. I've been raising them alone since 1975, with
regular financial help from their father to the tune of 00 a month.
We can't live on that, so I work.  How, pray, could I stay home and
"take care" of them?

Most marriages in this country end in divorce,
which means that, in most cases, women with children will
find themselves raising children alone. Most of those women don't have the
advantage I have of regular child support. Most of those women don't have
the advantage I have of a good education in a field that pays women almost
as well as it pays men. I don't know how those women manage because the
pressures of working and raising children are almost overwhelming to me
in my relatively "easy" situation.

What about the two-parent
families whose economic life is dependent on women working?
It's not "pin money" any more, it's milk and mortgage and medical bills
money that the wife's income provides. With the unemployment what it is,
many families have only the wife working. Shall she quit?

And what about the responsibility of the father for
the children? Shouldn't the father stay home and take care of the children,
or does his responsibility end with conception?

The "truth" hurts, simpers the author of the original article. What hurts
is having too much responsibility, too few resources, and the limitations
of being human. Many women live for years with that combination, and for
that man to look down from the height of his self-righteous pomposity and
give them the added burden of being the direct cause of teen-age pregnancy,
drug use, and the increase in crime shows just the kind of hypocrisy Jesus
condemned in the scribes and pharisees. "Their words are bold, but their
deeds are few. They bind up heavy loads, hard to carry, to lay on other
men's (women's) shoulders, while they themselves will not lift a finger
to budge them." Matthew 23:4, New American Bible translation, my amendment.

It is people like the author of the "Working (selfish) mothers" article
who make an impossible situation even worse.
It doesn't really matter that his "facts" are the baseless opinions of an
intellectually careless man who can't tell causality from proximity. He
brays out his ideas, and the sheer volume seems to give them legitimacy.
The only hope, I think, is that eventually voices of compassion, of
encouragement, of constructive change will prevail.