The Reality of the Feminine Mystique

There was a time when women were happy – they stayed home and cared for their families, baked pies in starched white aprons, and lovingly kissed and waved their husbands goodbye as they left for work. And all was well in paradise.

Then in 1963, came a cultural revolution in the form of Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, which argued that domesticity was like a "comfortable concentration camp" that kept women from realizing their true potential. She went so far as to say that women who stayed home were "parasites" who were less than humans because they never applied their minds or achieved anything more significant than their families. Her book also ingrained into feminism the idea that being a housewife was a state of oppression rather than a possible choice any intelligent woman could possibly make.

Many women who had been long dissatisfied with their limited roles in society and felt that being a housewife left their potential untapped found that this book voiced their unspoken thoughts. And this rousing text motivated countless women to step outside the boundaries of their secure home in a quest to achieve professional satisfaction in addition to their responsibilities to the home and family.

But Friedan failed to take into account the reality of the many women who find domesticity to be the best expression of who they are as human beings. Women like my mother and countless like her for whom staying home was the fulfillment they craved. Even though my mother did take up a job after my father's demise and had just retired a couple of years back, she remains a homemaker at heart.

These days, many young mothers, myself included, choose to stay home with their children during the early formative years. Why do we do it? Speaking for myself, I stay home because I would be sick with worry and it would be impossible for me to focus on my work if I leave a pre-school-age popol with a nanny or at daycare. Hell, I'm loath to trust even R with feeding, changing, and other daily stuff, when in all probability he will do equally fine if given half the chance. Granted that makes me a control freak, but irrespective of what the reason might be, it's a choice I've made because it works for me. I get to stay home and bear witness to every moment of Popol's growing up years, manage to do a bit of freelance writing on the side after he goes to bed, and despite the arrangement being physically demanding, I am happy with it because it's my choice.

For me that's the reality of the feminine mystique – choice! Isn't the ability to choose for oneself the cornerstone of feminism? And in denouncing women who choose to remain homebodies, don't the so-called feminists realize that they set the movement back by years? It's time they realized that domesticity is the same as any other choice women confront – right for some and wrong for others. The bottom-line is - women who choose to stay home deserve the same response from feminism as those who don't - respect.