The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Deborah Taylor- Hollis

Women are not all alike

A month ago, I was screaming my head off about a new book concerning working mothers by Joan Peters called When Mothers Work: Loving Our Children Without Sacrificing Ourselves. At just about that same time, the "nanny trial" became the subject of intense debate nationwide. Two totally separate entities on a crash-and-burn course through the universe. Two opposing views that seem so timely and so equally irritating that I had to come out and put in my two cents' worth.

The Joan Peters book was a diatribe against women who stay home to raise their children. It was based strictly upon the problems one working woman faced when she jumped out of her secure Ph.D. world of teaching and tried to become a homemaker, without a clue about what she wanted or any help from her less-than-supportive mate. She became so miserable that she wrote a book denouncing women who don't work as "deeply insecure and very compulsive." She went on to claim that women who liked being home and had good, stable lives were brainwashed into thinking this and didn't know any better. About then is when I started to boil.

This was also the day that the trial of a British au pair became national news because the defense decided to use the working-mother angle against the anguished parents. Defense attorneys cast the couple in a selfish, unconcerned light--especially the mother, who was too driven in her career to raise her own children. Since they both had good careers as doctors, one of them, preferably the mother, should have "voluntarily" stayed home, the defense reasoned. Because they didn't make that choice, and the mother continued to work, she deserved having her child accidentally killed by an undertrained, emotional teenage sitter.

Both of these incidents led to a rash of phone calls at every talk-radio station nationwide, as well as countless editorials and conversations at the water cooler exploring the issue: Should women with small children work? Every one of you people who partook and ranted on and on about how women must work, women shouldn't work, women need to work, or even that these particular women were wrong, well, I want you all to go quietly down to the basement and soak your heads in a bucket of water. I'm here to tell you that you're all wrong.

Somehow, somewhere along the line, we forgot something very important about women: We are not all alike.

The problem is, you can't just take every female in America and paint her with the same brush. Putting forth the question "Should women work or stay home with their preschoolers?" is not appropriate. Some women should, if they want to. Some women shouldn't, if they don't like doing that all day. Some women may like it part time, and some women may like it with one child but not three. Some women like to be baby-sitters to whole herds of kids, and others might like to cuddle babies all day long up until they start walking. Some women cannot afford to stay home all day, and some are enrolled in mandatory programs that make it impossible for them to stay home all day.

Some women like rice, some women like potatoes. And some women don't like starch at all.

I hope you get what the real message is here: Women are not cookie cutters. We cannot be lumped together for a definitive answer about anything. And I'd like to report that, for myself, I really resent every single media voice that does this kind of thing. Men have become outraged (and justifiably so) when women lump them all together as "dolts who can't do laundry" or "idiots who won't ask directions." About the only thing you can say about men in general is that they are biologically unable to be mothers--as of now. Only women can give birth to children in this society, but that doesn't mean that we all can or that we all will or that we all want to.

This latest "public debate" about how we all should live our lives is truly demeaning and lessens our worth as human beings. If anyone should jump in and declare "Women need to (insert action here)" at this point, I'm probably gonna just smack 'em one. I just can't take being treated like a cookie-cutter item, an experiment in a petri dish for society's males to debate my future, or an unenlightened piece of property--the way Victorian women were viewed. I'm sure that violence doesn't solve too much in this world in the long run, but in the short run, I'm still gonna smack 'em. I'm basically results-oriented, and it is such a great tension release. I guess that's why men like boxing so much.

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