Is It a Mistake to Be a Stay-at-Home Mother?

A man’s career is linear, a women’s a patchwork quilt. That’s what a career coach told me when researching my book, The Mom Economy: The Mothers’ Guide to Getting Family-Friendly Work. When I wrote it, I considered whether I was stereotyping by targeting women alone. Based on the fact that 75 percent of the more than 200 women I interviewed and surveyed said they were responsible for the majority of daily domestic and child care tasks, I decided my target was apt. I wrote a book that neither advocated that women be employed nor that they "stay at home" (be non-employed); my book was a practical guide to help mothers determine how they best could meet their personal, professional and financial needs.

To sell more books, maybe I should have taken a different approach. Leslie Bennetts, a writer for Vanity Fair, has just published a book titled The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?. In a blog post on the Huffington Post, Bennington reacts with alarm at what she calls “the avalanche of blistering attacks by women who hadn't read (her) book but couldn't wait to condemn it.” Her intention in writing the book, she says, was to point out the risks of economic dependency and the benefits of work. “Women were being lulled into a dangerous sense of complacency about relinquishing their financial autonomy,” she decided on first considering the topic of the book. She continues: “My goal was to gather into a single neat package all the financial, legal, sociological, psychological, medical, labor-force, child-rearing and other information necessary for them to protect themselves.”

Like the women she criticizes, I have not yet read Bennetts’s book. And like the women her title seems to condemn, I have taken time out of the workforce. When my third child was born, my second developed a disease in which his blood stopped clotting. With three children aged four and under, I did not return to my job. I decided instead to research and write The Mom Economy, as there was very little information on how women like me could navigate a career.

For me, the more pressing question is not whether mothers should work (more than 70 percent of mothers with school-age children do), but how we can structure our society in a way to allow us to meet our caregiving needs. We, as men and women, bear some responsibility in that mandate, both to instill change within our organizations and within our own lives.

But we also need to cease looking at our professional lives as single-powered engines that stop and start and to begin viewing them contextually. We need to stop dividing mothers into those who work and those who don’t. We all work -- just some of us happen to be leveraging our skill sets in volunteer capacities that aren’t being valued in a quantifiable way.

Maybe one day, we all will view our careers as patchwork quilts. The important thing is to keep stitching, to keep building and leveraging our skill sets so that we can command the earnings we need. The mistake, if there is one, is not feminine, nor is it staying home. The mistake is failing to recognize the continuing role of our professional skill sets in our lives and the quantifiable value those can bring to the wider world.

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