Is it even possible to make SAHMotherhood a feminist option?

I don't understand why one has to STAY home with the children. Why can't the employers of the parents have onside childcare/crèche and schools, offer flexible patterns of working, allow parents to nurture AT work, keep babies WITH them.

We are not just living in a patriarchal society, we are living in an anti-child one.

The point about people returning to work for other reasons is a good one Bonsoir. It must cause a lot of damage to the economy and society, as well as having a personal cost, that people are expected to keep climbing in one career without a break. A lot of otherwise highly competent and talented people end up with stress related illnesses and are a loss to their profession.

I wonder how many good teachers we lose because they are not given the option of doing something else for a few years and then returning to their former profession renewed.

SeaHouses - I agree that red tape and prejudice prevent people from returning to jobs they are amply qualified for, and the same red tape and prejudice prevents people who need to from taking a career break and returning refreshed and matured.

I think that caring for children, whether you are a SAHM or work in a nursery, is an extremely important role.

I also think it is important that there are women doctors, politicians etc. I would not want the entire medical profession to be male, for example.

But I don't see how the two things are incompatible. Many men in socially influential jobs retire in their fifties - so lose a decade of their career. Women who take 10 years out to be SAHMs also lose a decade of their careers. There is no reason why not working for ten years should be mean you can't progress in your career later, except the prejudice in society against SAHMs returning to work and the prejudice against promoting older people in the workforce.

There was a thread on AIBU recently about a SAHM who was having all manner of difficulties put in her way by various rules in her attempts to return to work as a teacher. Given that many women do becomes SAHM for a while, I would consider that regulational discrimination, as it has more of an impact on women as a group than men as a group. As a society we need to get rid of that kind of discrimination.

And a lot of it is just prejudice. If somebody took a couple of years out in their early twenties to stay at home with a child, that would be seen negatively by many, yet the same person taking a couple of years out to travel to South America or Thailand or wherever (the modern equivalent of the grand tour) is seen as doing something worthwhile.

Absolutely ok to be SAHM and be a feminist. Although the utopian ideal is I suppose that whichever parent stayed at home with the children society would support them to be there and give economic value to nurturing and housework.

Lots of feminists in the early 80s wrote about the importance of mothering for women, many of them arguing that being a mother and having a child were the source of powerful feminine values that society should adopt as a whole. And many of these writers came out of the radical as opposed to the liberal feminist tradition, as it was radical feminists who were more likely to promote female values.

Anyhow, history and utopian ideals aside - if you have a partnership where one partner, in your case a man, supports you to stay at home to do child rearing. That is fine by me.

I am not a SAHM

answering the OP: it depends how many women do it. if all women were SAHM, i think that would be terrible for our equality.

i dont think it matters if we think work is important or not. it is the main acticvity people engage in outside the home, it is what runs the world. and it is what pays the bills.

if you want equality for women, we need more power. if you look accross the world, power is not held by people who care for children/look after the home. i dont think it ever has or will be.

a homemaker doesnt want to run the country, so never will.

it is a simple as: do you think women who are raped will get fair treatment without women being an equal part of the entire policing/justice system? do you think the average man would treat women differently if half of his bosses were women? if every man's mother had full equality in the home? do you want half the worlds leaders being women?

of course, its not SAHParenting that is the problem, its that there are very few men doing it. so a feminist way of being a SAHP is to encourage more men to do it, possibly even ones partner.

My ideal vision is that both parents ought to be able to be active parents and still maintain their career. That might mean both working PT or in a family friendly way, or it might mean one being a SAHP or PT for a few years and then the other.

The thing is it is relatively hard to do that when the current system pushes towards the worker having invisible children and the main carer having an invisible job. Men get pushed one way and women the other, and how ever equal your personal relationship it is hard to switch roles as you go.

Every woman who becomes a SAHP is not just personally scuttling her own career, she is also allowing her partner to continue to work in a way that assumes that senior/ambitious people don't work PT, don't leave at 5, never drop everything for a sick kid, can travel without limit etc... and so it continues to perpetuate the system of work which pushes mothers out.

I do sympathise with individual choices and dilemmas, but I think if couples that have a respectful, equal personal relationship can't work out a solution that allows both partners to be active parents and work then how is anything going to change?

I am a feminist. I am currently a SaHm. As a feminist I don't have to do any set of subscribed things. I refuse to engage in debates about what "type" of feminist I am, that is an issue for others not me.

I am a feminist and am currently raising a son and a daughter to be feminists.

Why is it perpetuating the idea that a woman's role is a nurturing role?

Although I do think that we have as women been conditioned to reject that for ourselves BECAUSE it has become so devalued.

starshitterrorise - why is it only women who are pressed to choose between workplace and "nurturing role" [boak] - and only women who are damned whatever they choose? Incentivising women to withdraw from the workplace is a huge step backwards - when it's not been even that long since they achieved the right to stay in paid employment no matter what their marital status or how many children they have.

Perpetuating the idea that the "nurturing role" is a woman's role is very damaging.

It'
Has a horrible name but isn't a horrible idea.

I think the alternative incentive of getting women into work ASAP and to remove their choice or the value of a nurturing role is far worse.

"Why not insist that childcare vouchers can accepted by SAHMs?"

They're talking about an idea like that in Germany - basically paying familiies which don't let their children go to nursery a "parenting premium" - unsurprisingly it has been nicknamed the "Herdpraemie" (kitchen premium") as it's further enticement for women to give up employment and stay in the kitchen where they belong.

I think that's a horrible horrible backwards idea. Also doesn't take into account that children benefit from childcare settings outside the home.

Isn't the key element here choice? We/you have chosen to stay at home for a myriad of reasons (probably). You aren't being made to stay at home by your spouse or by virtue of being sacked on marriage/pregnancy. It's an entirely reasonable decision and there is a great deal that can be achieved from your current position (and may not be the only position you have in life because you can choose to return to work).

Why do value structured/formal/institutional impact so highly, wordfactory? I don't think you are deluding yourself. I think you are buying into a patriarchal institutional set of values

Bonsoir I think it again comes down to the micro or macro level.
In my previous job I was able, and would, had I stuck with it, been increasingly able to make a difference to women and children's lives on a macro level.

Increasingly I've been thinking that though I don't want to go back to my old job, I should put myself out there again as being available publicly. I just hope I haven't left too long a gap and I'm past my sell by date.

I do try to do things when I can. In all my books I include (what I hope) are credible female characters. And I regulary give interview and take part in debates about women in fiction.

But I'd be deluding myself if I were to pretend that this has the day to day impact on women that ws part and parcel of my old job.

That's interesting, wordfactory. I certainly didn't feel that I was furthering the cause of feminism (or even humankind) in any shape or form in my latter career, though I had worthier aspects to my work in my first working role, where I was sometimes in the happy position of being one of two decision-makers (then rubber stamped by a board) in allocating scholarships to excessively deserving students, many of them women and all from developing countries, to study useful things in the UK.

I do get plenty of opportunity for worthy feelings about furthering the cause of women, and humankind, in my current life, thankfully. Not that I will get a Nobel prize or anything, but I don't have a trophy-seeking personality and knowing how I made a difference (even if no-one else particularly knows it) is just fine with me.

Possibly emphatic, though maybe swopping trad male and trad female still perpetuates the systems built under patriarchy.

I stayed off, have 'lost' easily 400 000 plus pension this far. Have retained work when I want, control our household money, feel merrily outside the system.

We are a team, we chat about role swops and I think we will though not for a few years. I used to be the breadwinner. Our dynamic doesn't change in response to jobs.

What has contributing in the workplace got to do with feminism?

Why compete against men?

Why not lobby for better recognition for your own contribution to society?

Why not insist that childcare vouchers can accepted by SAHMs?

"Also does feeling like a feminist make you a feminist?" I would say no (pls don't throw things at me) I would say thinking like a feminist does. It's about what you think and what you do with that knowledge.

I think a SAHP should be just as valued and so should their contribution be. I think the working parent is also dependent. Supposing your DH came home and sat down whilst you continued to work, or spent all the spare income on himself, would that be fair? No. But wouldn't life be hard for a working parent if they then had to do a full shift at home and work until 10 pm doing there own washing.

So whilst the working parent supports the non working parent in parenting the children through financial contribution, likewise the non wage earner makes it possible and supports the working parent. It's a simple dialectic which gets bogged down in arguments about money. If everything is reduced to people only being valued for waged labour we might extend that to being actively discriminatory of the basis of how much someone earns, not just if they earn.

Emphatic I personally have very conflicted views on this.

On the one hand I do not believe a person needs to work to bring value. And I do believe that the rasing of children is valuable work.

However, my biggest issue is that I view feminism from an almost missionary stance. I trully believe that we feminists have to take it out there to the patriarchy. And one of the easiest ways to do that is in the workplace. I'm not saying that a SAHP cannot do this, but most seem not to.

Certainly when I gave up work it seemed deeply unfeminist to me. But then that may have been to do with the fact that I was in a position to make a difference to many women and children's lives and also to have some impact on policy. Ducking out of that for my family felt like the right choice on a micro level but the wrong choice on the macro one.

You will feel like true a feminist if you know that you can always get your own way any important negotiation with your DH (and without him feeling remotely aggrieved ).

"Or is this pointless as no matter which way I try to twist it I'm still dependent on a man - a very nice, reasonable one but still a man?"

OP, he is as dependent on you as you are on him. He's relying on you to bring us the family and look after the home. So don't feel that your contribution isn't equal.

Regards the bank account, I don't see the need for separate ones if the relationship you have is built on trust and mutual respect, which is sounds as if it is, and if you feel you have as much access as he does.

To be honest, you sound as if you have a great setup