How Parenting Became A Full-Time Job, And Why That’s (Especially) Bad For Women
By Heather Kirn Lanier
The other day, a stranger asked me if I worked, and I answered “part-time.” Another woman who knows me corrected me. “You work all the time,” she said and winked. “A mother’s work never ends.” I conceded the point; with two kids, one of whom has significant disabilities, I do in fact feel like I’m busting my tail 24/7. But I also cringed.
“Stay-at-home mom” is a box on an employment questionnaire, and this is supposed to feel like a validating, even feminist development. We are honoring the work of women when we call motherhood “the hardest job on the planet.” But if a woman’s role as a mother is a round-the-clock job, then how can she ever justify leaving it to do another one? “Stay-at-home” begins to feel less like a descriptor and more like an order.
Is that precisely the point? Is the professionalization of parenting designed to push a woman back into the domestic spheres where gender normative roles insist she belongs?
In answering this question, it’s helpful to think about toilet scrubbing in the ’60s. In the Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan relays one way chemical companies marketed to the average 1960s American housewife: They encouraged her to buy a separate product for each of her household cleaning…
