Sunday, October 11, 2009

Working Poor Women's Unpaid Labor: Part III

I currently heard a news report on NPR's program Tell Me More titled "The Days of June Cleaver Have Come and Gone." The overall theme of the piece pertains to the fall of the commonality of women staying at home as mothers, and not working outside of their homes. Typically, society has viewed women who choose to stay at home with their children as able to do so because of their socioeconomic status: they either have familial wealth or husbands or partners who provide enough to allow their wife or partner to stay at home.

What has been found statistically is that the "there is no such thing as a 'typical' stay-at-home mother." Some women do not actually have a choice in whether they can stay at home or not. This is a group of women who cannot get jobs, cannot afford child care (perhaps wanting to save money on child care, also), or have held jobs that are incompatible with child care. Yet again, there is a group of women who feel that being a mother is a full-time job and the most important one that they can be carrying out. All of these women are lumped in with the women who compose the set of rich women who stay home as a luxury of sorts.

This diversification of the stay-at-home mother as someone who can be any color, of any class and be doing so for any reason. The major issue contended by Leslie Morgan Steiner is that motherhood as a full-time career is not all that beneficial to women. "... The unfortunate thing about motherhood is that it's a dead end job. And if you start out young and you didn't earn very much money before you had kids, no matter how long you stay home, your being a mom isn't going to improve your chances of taking care of yourself and your family financially," Steiner explained. This is true of all women, and, it should be noted, the longer someone, whether female or not, is out of the workforce, the more detrimental it is likely to be toward their professional skills.

Professor Stone sees current trends as showing that women are graduating from college at higher rates than ever, and after schooling is completed they want to work and spend time in their homes, and wanting both is difficult to deal with because there is no absolute, blanket support system. This signifies that no matter what class a woman belongs to, there is no set way of handling how she balances work and children because it is not a totally played-out trend.

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