To feel sad some women are forced to go back to work

Can you explain it again then? Your point seemed to be that women don't have careers, only menial and unsatisfying jobs but I don't think that's borne out.

We wouldn't have had 3 kids if it meant using nurseries. It's just something we never considered doing at all. Nobody really discussed using nurseries then, definitely not all day every day for babies. The norm was they would go a few mornings per week at the age of about 2.5 or 3. If they didn't want to go on a given morning, or were tired, they just didn't go.

What's your point?

You have spectacularly missed my point

And totally by coincidence, in most cases the best interests of the family involves the mum stepping back her job, not the dad. 🤔

I agree with the PP who said that middle class women joining the workforce en masse in the 80's allowed housing pricing to start to climb and climb

The problem is capitalism, not feminism. That women have been afforded more opportunities is a good thing, not a bad thing. That we have a society in which women are represented across careers is a good thing for us and our children.

There is just so much emotive language on here about women being 'devastated' and 'torn' from their children. I get that some women absolutely feel like that. But on the flipside there are women frustrated and depressed and stifled by having no choice but to stay at home. And women living with abuse, trapped in desperate situations that they have no financial or practical means to escape. To focus only on the subset of women who would prefer to be SAHMs is a very narrow perspective.

You know, it's almost as though women are actually full human beings who find different kinds of lives fulfilling and satisfying and there is no 'one size fits all' approach.

Even in the ‘old days’ a man’s wage often wasn’t enough. Working class women have always worked - they were servants and wet nurses, farmers and laundresses, seamstresses, cooks and cleaners and factory workers and goose girls and piece workers and matchstick makers. The middle class were governesses and doctors assistants and nurses and secretaries. Only the rich got away with it - and they hired Nannie’s and nurses for their babies.

For a brief few decades women became housewives. It was short lived because life is expensive.

@sunandfizz What if you couldn't afford to pay the bills? Would you have still stayed at home?

I'm surprised everyone saying that in the past all working class women were out working, my gran had 10 kids and wasn't out working in the 50's, she certainly wasn't rich either, they lived in a council house all their lives and got by on my grandads wages.

My mum was a SAHM too and I adored having a SAHM, so that was what I wanted for mine. I'd have been devastated if that wasn't possible. I agree with the PP who said that middle class women joining the workforce en masse in the 80's allowed housing pricing to start to climb and climb - until the point now where there is no choice but for women to work so they can afford to live.

I agree with you OP, I think that it's a real shame for those who would like to be SAHM's and the kids that would love to have a SAHM. But you'll never convince the hugely defensive MC working mothers that dominate here.

When I had mine maternity leave was only 6 months long, a year sounds like bliss and you even get money to help, we got nothing. There was no golden age either, my grandmothers worked, kids were farmed out to unregulated childcare often, my mother was made to give up her well paid job because there was no right to maternity leave.

Very dramatic! I don't think any of the women I know - teachers, doctors, lawyers, charity workers, PRs, editors, copywriters, to name a few - would call themselves menial wage slaves. They'd definitely describe themselves as having careers. And in talking to my friends about juggling work and motherhood, the concept of being 'torn away' from our kids isn't one I can say sounds very familiar.

Well yeah, the fact it is named mumsnet is part of it.

Though, it was named mumsnet back in the 90's/early 00's which I believe is the timeline OP was talking about.

Maybe the clue is in the name of the site, MUMSnet?!

Many of these women are not "having a career" they're torn away from their kids to be menial wageslaves. Bring back the 1950s

Then why are threads like this always about women?

Nobody is “offered” anything. Two loving parents who work as a team choose what works best for them and what is in the best interest of THEIR family.

They're 'allowed' to be sad.

The rest of us are allowed not to care.

It's an option for men in theory but I mean, even this thread only has women in the title and I doubt anyone would make a thread about feeling sorry for fathers who have to go back to work 2 weeks later and saying how sad it is that they don't get a choice.

My point is that in society, it is women who are offered that choice and this thread is a good example of it.

I can't either.

It's not that nobody is allowed to be sad. Of course they are. It's the idea that one sector of society's sadness is something we should be doing something about.

We've all got bills to pay. That situation doesn't magically end because of children. So we all do what we can to get those bills paid. It's not some new thing.

It would be lovely if we could all do what makes us happy. Unfortunately, there isn't a magic money tree to enable that. The COL crisis means a lot of us are working harder to pay bills. Are you sad for all of us? We all have days when we don't want to be on the treadmill any more. Should we all have the choice to just down tools?

Well, my mother was a full time teacher in those same olden days and I went to a childminder. I can't remember any of my friends whose mothers didn't work in the 80s.

But again, and you seem to keep ignoring this point that not only I have made several times, but several others have made, we'd all like to do what makes us happy, but we are all constrained by the necessity of having to earn a living. Somebody's got to empty the bins and clean the streets, etc.

I've spent most of my life working to pay the bills. I have got on with it as a necessary thing, like most people do. I'm just grateful that these days I haven't got to come home and make a fire to boil water for my bath, or use a washtub and scrubbing board to get the weekly wash done like my Great Gran did.

What 'angst and drama' do you find people engage in about being with their own babies, and wouldn't you describe If I'd had to have put a baby in a nursery, I would have been beyond devastated as fairly angsty and dramatic @sunandfizz ?

And again, not all babies in childcare are in nursery. Many are looked after by grandparents or childminders. I'm so suspicious of people coming on the thread bemoaning 'loveless' nurseries as though any mother going out to work is dropping her baby off in a gulag - when she's very likely to be sending the baby to grandparents anyway.