“A married woman’s first duty is to her family.” One wholeheartedly agrees. “Therefore”, the argument triumphantly concludes, “no married woman should take and outside job. Mother’s place is in the home, twenty-four hours a day”.
The sheer impudence of that “therefore” reminds one of Mussolini’s sayings: “Every woman desires a child. Therefore, she should have as many as she can bear.” Of course, no one who values home life and understands how deeply small children in particular need security and love can feel happy about the kind of job which keeps the mother of a young family away from home from morning till night every working day of the year, and condemns her children to pass most of their waking hours in the impersonal, even inefficient, atmosphere of a day nursery.
Matters are still worse if the youngsters must be left to dubiously reliable baby sitters; and they are not much better even when the children are older and must come back from school to fend for themselves in a cold empty house till evening.
But this is not the only possible sort of outside work. Half-time; one day week; an occasional full-time spell, filling in for a holiday maker or an invalid while the children make a family visit; homework collected on periodical foraging expeditions. These can fit in perfectly with family life, an enrich it in more ways than the merely material.
Less obviously perhaps, but just as genuinely, the woman with less specialized and intellectual abilities benefits by keeping her hand in, by retaining friendships and interests in the world outside the four wall of home. Her family gains not merely by her earnings, which may make all the difference to its standards, but by her livelier, happier and more contented disposition.
Always, indeed, the family’s claims must settle where the balance can be struck between home and job; circumstances alter cases. This child would be emphatically the better for a bit less maternal brooding, that one’s special need for security overrides everything else. This job is a refreshing change that reduces its holder to a nervous wreck. There are women whose circumstances make it extremely unwise, both for them and for their families, to have more than one baby. No one argues, therefore, that a family of three or four must always be a mistake.
If too often the woman seeking an outside interest and better living standard for her family faces an all-or nothing choice- the choice between and exacting full-time job which deprives her children of their, birthright, and a full-time domesticity which wastes and frustrates her energies- then the answer is not to impose all-round frustration.
It is to organize more jobs in such a way that women can do them with a clear conscience, to the benefit of their own happiness, their children’s upbringing and national prosperity.
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