This morning at dooce, Heather talked about motherhood and the choice to stay at home. She questioned one woman’s assertion that it’s a mistake when educated women fail to pursue careers in order to stay home. And that brought up a good question.

When women choose to stay home, does that negate all the accomplishments of the feminist movement?

I don’t think so, and I actually get very aggravated when others, especially women, think so. In my honest (and bold) opinion, this type of thinking demonstrates a level of naivete. This discussion comes right on the heels of something I read yesterday in which a woman complained that the feminist movement had it all wrong. What were they thinking by taking women out of the home and encouraging her to work? Now she has to feel guilty about giving up her job to stay at home with her kids. Couldn’t those feminists have kept their mouths shut and we all could have continuted to enjoy our domestic roles?

This is so, so wrong. The femiminists didn’t force women out of the home and they don’t now force women to work. The movement gave them choices. It made it acceptable for women to work, it paved the way for women to be accepted in the workplace. It gave them the option to go to college and use their degrees to pursue careers. That doesn’t mean that you (any woman) have to go to college; you don’t have to work; you can choose to stay home and not feel guilty about that.

But please. Don’t say the feminist movement had it all wrong. Please. What about those women who didn’t want to stay home? Who felt trapped in their wife/mother roles? If you try to take the feminist movement away, you trap all those women back in the roles they despised. Instead, embrace the options you have and proudly choose to stay home! Or work! Or both!

Dooce asked what our mothers did and what we wish for our daughters. This is what I commented:

My mom worked. She had to. She wasn’t college-educated so she cleaned houses, waited tables and now drives a school bus. All this while being a magnificent single mother to five children. She’s amazing in so many ways, and the only thing I would change is the fact that she HAD to work the jobs she did. I would have found a way to get her a college education because she would have thrived there. I would have given her options, like you said, to choose where and when and how often she worked.

As for my daughters, when I have them, I hope only that they understand that the feminist movement doesn’t demand that they pursue a career first and foremost or risk wasting their minds and talents. But rather that the feminist movement asks them and everyone else to value their womanhood and embrace the fact that they are not forced by society into a role of wife/mother, but rather can choose (hopefully) any combination of wife/mother/careerwoman they want.