Laura over at 11D has invited us to participate in a week long discussion about various mothers / workforce / childcare issues because she has the ear of a set of academics and writers who are very interested in this topic.
Today, she's talking about Mothers vs. Mothers. Go read her question and then here's my response (which I posted as a comment on her site.)
I feel like the animosity has decreased over the last three or four years, particularly with the boom of the internet and the various blogs from so many women and their varying choices on motherhood vs. work. There's so much more ability for us all to interact and get to know the cultures / lifestyles / choices behind the labels.
Like Lizbeth, I too freelance from home and sort of fit in easily with each group. A lot of SAHMs would seem defensive about their choices (they felt looked down on for not trying to "have it all" the way they were supposed to, in order to uphold the hard-won place in the workforce gained by feminism), and a lot of the work-force moms were defensive because they felt looked down upon as if they didn't value their child enough (if they had the choice to stay at home. Those who had to work for economic reasons figured it didn't much matter what people thought, they didn't have a choice anyway.)
The disparity increased as SAHMs were presumed not to be "doing" anything, and there was also the assumption that the SAHMs weren't going to be very interesting to talk to because they didn't "do" anything all day except play with their kids. It was as if as soon as a child had shown up, the SAHM had sacrificed her brain to the OB-GYN for the next fifteen years, and moms in the workplace wouldn't know what to talk about with a SAHM. I know a lot of SAHMs who felt invisible... there were no grown ups to talk to or interact with during the day and keeping up on news / events or topics of interest were much more difficult because there just wasn't the access to the info or people to talk to, and so the assumed divide widened. (Maybe it was a self-fulfiling prophecy. Maybe it was an inherent problem both sides felt defensive about.)
As a mom of two older boys (17 and 21), I started off raising my children while I freelanced from home and helped run our small construction company. The perception that because I was "at home" meant I was lazy and doing nothing was extremely common when my kids were small. People in the work force tended to assume I was uneducated (I have two masters) or lazy (or both) because I could have chosen to work outside the home. In the 80s, people tended to equate what you did with your value, your social identity and my not choosing to have a high-powered corporate career was often viewed as betrayal to those who were struggling against the glass ceilings. I could understand how they felt because they worried that my choosing to stay at home in spite of my degrees reinforced the stereotype of "don't hire moms, they have other priorities except for work and can't be relied upon for a career."
It has felt much different with the advent of journaling and then blogging online. The perceptions are still prevalent between the two groups, but the cross-overs or acceptance is a little more common now.
Posted by toni at October 6, 2004 02:28 PM