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Leftist hatred of stay-at-home moms is not what it seems.
Source: Adobe Stock, digitalskillet1
There was a brilliant post yesterday about writing techniques in political propaganda. The article it discussed involved leftist disdain for stay-at-home moms. One normally thinks of a mother as the most wholesome of images, so convincing a majority of the population that stay-at-home moms are somehow devious and evil would seem to be a difficult goal. Why bother? Why do leftists want us all to hate stay-at-home moms so much? I have a few theories:
- The modern left is based on individual desires taking precedence over sacrifice for others. Be yourself. Don’t conform to society. Let your freak flag fly. Such people don’t believe in sacrificing one’s own desires for the benefit of someone else, like one’s children.
- Acknowledging the importance of stay-at-home moms would tend to undermine Democrats’ support of abortion. If raising kids is good, then perhaps killing them is bad.
- Modern feminists believe that men are bad, and women are best when they act like men. (It’s complicated.) Anyway, it’s more manly (and thus more desirable) to not get tied down at home.
- Feminists view motherhood as a submissive role (they obviously never met my mother). And no woman should be submissive to anybody.
- Leftists view paid labor to be important, and housework to be relatively unimportant. Like Marx, they consider money to be the ultimate measure of value – nothing else matters. So women should not limit themselves to low-paying jobs.
- Modern feminists feel guilty about abandoning their own families so they could pursue meaningless degrees and jobs nobody cares about. They hope to alleviate their guilt by pointing out the evils of stay-at-home motherhood.
- Feminists view marriage and motherhood as forms of slavery, which can be avoided by women earning their own money, separate from their husbands.
A few of those rationalizations make some sense, to a degree. Although, remember that I’m not writing about why it’s important that women have the opportunity to work outside the home – I think all of us agree on the benefits of everyone in society having the same opportunities. And this is not about families who decide that it would better if both parents worked, to improve their situation. That’s not at all what this is about.
This is about why leftists think that no woman should be a stay-at-home mom. Modern feminism is not pro-choice. Not in this realm. They think that any woman who chooses to be a stay-at-home mom is a failure or, even worse, a Republican. So I think all of those reasons above play some role in their extreme distaste for traditional stay-at-home moms.
But I suspect that there is one other reason, that may be more important than all the others:
- For a woman to be a stay-at-home mom, she needs a good husband, who works and sacrifices to provide for his family.
I think this may be the main problem with stay-at-home moms to Democrats.
Leftism is not about hope and love. It is about resentment and hate.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Democrats are known for raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for social programs for the poor. Those social programs usually make things worse for the poor people they ostensibly were designed to help. Sometimes MUCH worse. But that doesn’t matter. They keep doing it.
Because Democrats don’t love poor people. They just hate rich people.
This is similar, I think. I’m not sure that feminists hate stay-at-home moms as much as they hate the husbands who make such decisions possible.
I can understand why Democrats view stay-at-home moms as such a threat. They symbolize much of what is right with conservatism, and much of what is wrong with leftism. In many different ways, as I listed above.
Source: https://www.16af.af.mil. VIRIN: 201007-A-AB123-002
But I’m beginning to suspect that hatred of stay-at-home moms is more about the dads. Down with the patriarchy. It takes a village to raise a child, not two parents. The state is more important than the family. An independent family unit doesn’t need government, and is less likely to care what government wants them to do or think.
To the left, fathers are the real threat.
And this is just one more way to attack them.
Published in General
Which brings me to this again:
It’s female logic. They do it all the time. When you point it out, you sleep on the sofa.
Naw. If she’s that upset, SHE can sleep on the sofa.
I paid for the sofa too, and the room it’s in, but she can sleep there if she wants to.
When we’d adopted our only child, my wife left behind her job to be a SAHM. It was absolutely appalling and ridiculous the disdain with which her news was received by some of the same women she used to work with and had been social friends with. Incredible how they were more critical of her move than celebratory at our successfully adopting an infant. And that was some 40 years ago.
Yes, and Leftists are neo-Marxists that will support things that destroy institutions and/or create enmity among the people. Division is the tool and destruction and power is the goal.
We have to procreate FICA slaves. People babble about why it’s bad to not have natural, endemic population growth, but we have made the situation far worse because of Social Security and Medicare.
If a country is poor, having lots of offspring makes you better off. If a country is wealthy, having lots of offspring is a cost.
The geniuses that run everything in this country don’t have enough foresight about what is going on.
Neither does my dad who has full-blown narcissistic personality disorder.
The second the Soviet Union fell, we should have wiped out all of the non-public goods. We should have gotten completely serious about how screwed up Social Security and Medicare were. They should have figured out how to take the guns out and put them to people’s head so they had more babies, like wipe out all of their taxes if they had more than three that didn’t turn into felons.
It was Satan’s idea originally. The worst thing for him is when women help men have sons who represent them while they’re representing G-d on earth. Anything to interfere with that.
Excellent observations as usual Doc. A totally plausible theory to explain the seemingly inexplicable! :-)
Reminds me of this one I created a while back:
Psychology is world’s oldest profession???
Or maybe just leftism.
Simone de Beauvoir:
No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.
I don’t think that disdain for stay-at-home moms is limited to the so-called political Left.
How many people here raised their own daughters to be stay-at-home moms? College is probably not worth the time, effort, or money, if a girl is going to grow up to be a stay-at-home mom.
For the record, I think that the world would be a much better place if our girls were raised to be wives and stay-at-home moms, as they used to be. I cannot think of a single politician, Republican or Democrat, who would support such an agenda. I would guess that fewer than 5% of people here at Ricochet would support such an agenda.
She can learn some stuff later that she’ll use as a homeschool teacher.
If it’s a decent college education.
Most college is more trouble than it’s worth these days.
How does that make you feel as you love Academia?
Careful Henry, Oprah territory ahead.
Occasionally embarrassed.
Is that a typo for “leave”? I’m not sure I’m leaving.
Is that meant to say “love”? Gee, I don’t think it’s safe to say I love it.
I would like my daughter to be a stay at home mom. In the age of divorce, seems kind of high risk. When my daughter left high school, my wife went back to work.
College is probably not worth the time, effort, or money for a boy who is going to grow up to be a dad. He will be able to support a family working in a manual labor job.
Many of them should do just that. The debt-ridden leftist indoctrination with precious little Shakespeare and Latin will give him less money and less mental training than an honest job as a car mechanic.
I was being very snarky. :) I don’t agree that education is a waste of time, money, and effort for either men or women. :) :)
It’s extremely overpriced in most cases. That is the issue.
I have said this a million times already. I went to college a million years ago. I could not believe the number of people I met that were far smarter than me that thought that liberal arts was a waste of time and they made sure that they thought you were stupid if you didn’t think otherwise.
They need to drop accreditation as it’s done now.
We were lucky in that neutral observer worked out of the house when we adopted our three girls. There was one time when she switched jobs and had to work in Florida for a few months, but the girls were older and we treated visiting Mom as an adventure . . .
So are yachts and mansions and luxury cars.
The equation has many variables for each individual.
If you are close to the average ACT or SAT, spend as little as possible. Put your time and money into something else. Go to trade school. Nobody is going know the difference if you didn’t get the liberal arts education. I hate saying this, but I got a Big Ten finance degree and my math ACT was way too low for it. My overall, ACT was dead-on average. Nobody said anything to me. My grade point was very uneven and nobody said a thing about it. It wasn’t a waste of time, but it wasn’t as expensive back then.
The other thing is, given Kahn Academy etc., that makes it even more overpriced.
That’s probably good advice for some people.
But the bottom line is that the colleges and universities have the right to exist and to charge anything they want. And people have the right to buy the colleges’ and universities’ products or not.