Make It Easy to Work Hard

Many women feel like they’re in a bind. No time and no peace of mind. They are trying to run the house and raise the kids and earn the bread and make the grade. No matter who’s responsible, or whether they are working or not, American women are Homeward Bound. You might be feeling like this and wondering if there’s any way out. Here are some suggestions. 1. First, recognize that you are more than “your kids’ mom,” as conservative radio pundit Laura Schlesinger’s famous T Shirt says. What does “Dr.” Laura (she has a psychology degree) mean? She means that her primary human identity is as the producer of those offspring. She’s bought right into the motherhood mystique. She then tells American women that they should see themselves the same way. Stay at home, moms. Or to use the more serious term, stay at home, mothers. Shocking as it may seem, women need to recognize that they have identities beyond the moment of giving birth. Women are human beings and that they are entitled to every single aspect of a good human life. Ask yourself, who are you? Are you “your kids’ mom?” Or are you also, your employer’s employee, your spouse’s wife, your book club’s leader, your country’s citizen, your book’s reader. Maybe you aspire to be your company’s chief executive or your theatre's director. Your list should be so long you’ll need a T shirt dress to list all the ways in which a person leads a good human life, including the lives of working mothers or working women. Why in the world would any doctor, whether of psychology or anything else, confine half the human species to one line?2. Share your family with your spouse. We need to get to work. Women who want to live the lives of full people – a long T shirt DRESS life, rather than a one line life, have a harder road in front of them than men do. Female college graduates (what we used to call “coeds”) making a career choice to work outside the home still face a society that resists their dreams. Only women face issues of “work/family balance.” Why do we say that? Because, forty plus years after the feminist revolution, most Americans still believe that women should bear the lion’s share of the raising of children and the running of the household. Survey after survey shows that, whether they work outside the home or not, women do two-thirds of the work at home. They wake up earlier, they drop the kids off, they go to the dry cleaner, they make the grocery list and the Halloween costumes, they come home when called, they stand at the playground. Recently, a clergyman in a self-styled “liberal” congregation in Atlanta lectured his congregation about how he agrees with everything about feminism except that he believes it’s a woman’s job to stay home with small children. And that’s the liberal congregation. If women have to be the ones to stay home, and men never have to be the ones to stay home, women will never get out of the home bind.Repeat after me: family/career balance is a problem for all adults in a family. Not just for women. You need to know that in your heart. You need to share it with the person you share your household with. And you need to let the other person do his share.3. If you’re near a school, study hard.Surveys of college girls are starting to turn up an increasing number who have given up hope of staying in the workplace long enough – or being ambitious enough – to run the institutions of our society. The professions and government are starting to reflect that attitude: the legal profession is almost 40 female, but the law firm partners are 17, little higher than they were five years ago. The state legislatures have been stalled at less than a quarter female since the Nineties. There is now one woman on the United States Supreme Court, and a pitiful handful of nine or ten running the FIVE HUNDRED Fortune 500 Companies.The young girls coming up look at the women trying to do 70 of the housework and the hard work of qualifying to make or interpret the laws of the society or running the institutions of a modern economy. They give up in their own minds before they even start to try.4. Don’t give up!! Don’t let your daughters give up. Education is the key to success in a modern society, and they must take their educations seriously or they won’t stand a chance. Making a big commitment to your education is a clear sign to a future husband that women won’t take sole responsibility for their household work and child rearing. Why would they invest so much in their educations if they intended to confine their reading to “Goodnight, Moon?” School is not the last word, but it’s the first step.5. Take work seriouslySincere people trying to help women stay home with young children, as the “liberal” clergyman in Atlanta advised, since it is manifestly their problem and not the dads’ problem, tell them to engage in something called “sequencing.” Sequencing means that just as a woman’s career takes off, she quits to stay home with her young children, say, a couple of years with the first, then a temporary job for another two years, then a couple of years off with the second and another with the third. At the end of the day, a decade or so has gone by. Then they try to get back into the workplace.Let’s assume you own a successful small business, say, a beauty shop. What would you say to a beautician, who had been very good, who came to you after eight or ten years away from the chair and said she was ready to go back to work? Wouldn’t you say “You’re an apprentice. For at least two years and maybe more.What if you were a doctor or an accountant and your employee came back after six or eitht years? Would your customers want their tax return done by someone who had just spent eight or ten years away from the Internal Revenue Code? Or their appendixes removed?All these women giving up in college, staying home at their clergymen’s request, returning to their jobs as forty year old apprentices, is bad medicine -- bad for them and bad for society. 6. Have pink underwear.You probably think you do the wash better than your spouse does. Maybe he will put a red sock in the white load now and again. WEAR PINK UNDERWEAR. It’s better than having to do it yourself. Women need to learn to let men do an imperfect job sharing the burden of the household. Maybe he’ll shrink your T shirt. But at least it will have more than one line on it describing who you are.

Comments? Questions? Email Here

© HowtoAdvice.com

How to Advice .com