Lazy Career Women

My wife is superwoman.  This is according to many of our female friends and some of our male friends.  We have five children.  We have been married seven years, and we waited until we were married (in fact, it took a year and a half before we got pregnant with our first).  In other words, my wife has spend a vast majority of our marriage pregnant.  We have had two or three in diapers at the same time for most of the time as well.  To make it worse, I have been in school for a majority of our marriage as well.  For the last few years, my wife has also been volunteering as a doula (a more involved labor coach). Now, my parents have 13 children, half of whom are still at home, so I have never seen the work my wife does as something epic or huge, though it is still certainly impressive.  She is both a great mother and a great wife.

Modern career women work far less than my wife.  This is probably what has earned her the title "superwoman" among our friends.  I realized something today though: One hundred years ago, most women worked about as hard as my wife.  Two hundred years ago, nearly all women worked harder than my wife (imagine doing laundry by hand).  Our modern culture paints the stay at home mom as the lazy one (and, I have heard that Obama recently told working moms that they need to get jobs, in a speech; more on this to come, assuming the claim is true).  Maybe caring for a single child is easier than a career, once the child is a few years old.  Maybe caring for two children is close to equivalent to a career.  Caring for more than two children, however, is certainly more work than a full time job.  Besides that, mothers have to work in multiple capacities.  A career woman might have several common tasks in her work, but they all relate to the same field.  A stay at home mom has to be a chef, a laundry woman, a baby sitter, a maid, a therapist, and any number of other things, mostly totally unrelated to each other.  A mother of young children has to be on call, even in the middle of the night, and a mother of an infant practically has scheduled interruptions throughout the night.  Even a stay at home mom of just one is likely working more than eight hours a day.  A stay at home mom of two or more is probably working 12 to 16 hours a day, counting nighttime interruptions.  This is how much the average mom has worked for a vast majority of human history.  Compared to her, even the most hard working modern career woman is lazy.

Now, I want to clarify something: I am not saying that men are not lazy.  In the past, men have traditionally worked 10 to 14 hours a day in hard labor.  The modern eight-hour-a-day working man is also lazy in comparison.  Men have traditionally done very physically taxing work, and even the most fit man is limited by the capacity of the human body.  Modern men, even when they do work 10 to 14 hours a day, are doing much easier work, physically, than ancient men.

I am also not trying to imply that women should work much more.  What I am trying to say is that only fools claim that a stay at home mom is lazy.  Maybe some, who are neglecting their children, are lazy.  Most, however, work harder than any working man or woman.  If my wife is superwoman, it is because she works as hard as women used to work, when most modern women are choosing the easier path.  She does not deserve derision for choosing to be a stay at home mom.  She deserves respect.