When the Best and Brightest Stay at Home

It is hardly breaking news to report that many women choose to stay at home with their kids. However, when the women in question are the best and brightest of America’s top colleges, the New York Times notices: “Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others . . . say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.”¹ Peter Salovey, dean of Yale College, is troubled by this current trend. He seems to believe that unemployed mothers are unimaginative: “[S]o few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn’t constructed along traditional gender roles.”² Salovey protests too much, given the fact that nearly three-quarters of all American mothers are in the work force.³

Although the majority of mothers work, in recent years there has been a noticeable decline. In 1999, 77.1 percent of married mothers with children between the ages of six and seventeen worked.⁴ By 2004, the portion had dropped to 73.1 percent.⁵ Similarly, more mothers are choosing to stay home longer with their newborns. Between 1996 and 2002, the percentage of working mothers with children under one decreased from 59 to 55 percent. This was the first decline since the Census Bureau began recording these statistics in 1976.⁶ Nonetheless, what really causes shockwaves (as the Times article shows) is the discovery that mothers who are educated or already professionally employed plan to stay home: “an unprecedented 22 percent of mothers with graduate and professional degrees are home with children full time.”⁷ For several years, critics have grappled over what to make of these statistics.

Economic writer Ann Crittendon lamented that women should not have to choose between motherhood and a career. Her answer? Federal policies that make it easier for mothers to work.⁸ Writer Elizabeth Bauchner also rejected the notion that women should be faced with the choice between mothering and working. Her answer? Make fathers stay at home: “If the only options are to sacrifice a career or forgo mothering, what kind of a choice is that? Fathers are not expected nor asked to make those kinds of sacrifices, so why are the mothers?”⁹

However, it was columnist Ellen Goodman who tackled the issue of professional women exiting the labor force head-on. Goodman noted (more generously than either Crittendon or Bauchner) that women increasingly do not need to choose between home and office, they simply desire to be home. However, somewhere in this exercise of free-will, Goodman feared, is the loss of the feminist movement. Writing in 2004, she observed, “On many campuses, professors hold the tenured candle of the women’s movement. But they often face a generation of students described as post-feminists. They see how far they’ve come. But do they not know how far there is to go?”¹⁰ The implied answer is that they do not for, if they did, they would choose the board room over the nursery.

How should Christians respond to the small but increasing number of mothers opting out of the work force? On one hand, scriptural mothers are simply too involved in business (e.g. Prov. 31:16) to faithfully argue that a woman’s place is only in the home. On the other hand, the Church must say what society refuses to: namely, a mother who chooses to stay home with her kids (contra Goodman) is doing no damage to the cause of women. Her choice is an honorable one, and she would be wise to care less about what the feminists think and, instead, desire to see her children one day rise up and call her blessed (31:28).

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