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Going on from here …
Speaking of trends in mothering, stats are showing a rise in SAHMs.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of mothers in the workforce climbed steadily from 1975 to the mid-1990s, shooting up from 47 to 70 percent nationwide. But since 1997, the rate has wavered, and in 2005, it slid to a slight eight-year low. The decline is a negligible few percentage points but might signal the end of a decades-long upward trend.
In 2000, the workforce participation rate of mothers with children under 18 reached a peak of nearly 73 percent. In 2005, the rate was 70.5 percent.
For an interesting read about one mom who decided to go out to work, here’s an article about Nancy Pelosi, the only House Speaker whose first career was as a SAHM.
Pelosi was not plucked from the kitchen to Congress. The stay-at-home mom label may be politically correct these days but technically incorrect. Pelosi, offspring of a political family, was always involved in a campaign, she says, “no matter how little my babies were, if I was wheeling them in a carriage or carrying them in my stomach.”
Nevertheless, she was the real mom McCoy, the cupcake-baking, jeep-driving, school-trip mother who made the pink and silver angel costume that her youngest daughter still has. When she first ran for Congress against 13 other candidates, she had to face billboards aimed snidely at that resume, asking whether she was “a legislator or a dilettante?”
Now, a grandmother of six and leader of 233 Democrats, Pelosi brags about her first career rather than burying it in her resume. So she may end up as one of the success stories that changes the way people think about “opting out” and “opting in.”
As a sidebar, NOW is pressing a pro-woman agenda for the 110th Congress, an agenda Speaker Pelosi will be sure to be paying attention to.
It’s not just staying home or deciding to parent as a single that reflects a changing world; the institution of marriage itself may be in peril.
For those who like to begin every new year with predictions of the end of civilisation as we know it, here’s a cracker: married women are officially in the minority for the first time. Furthermore, the rise of the singleton is clearly going to continue with some ferocity, given her marked showing among the younger set: fewer than one in three women in her late twenties is married, compared with 85 per cent as recently as 30 years ago.
Thus, in a single generation, crumbles the aspiration that has steered centuries, during which marriage has traditionally been the highest aim of women (and their mothers), propelled by a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of good sense must be in want of a husband.
The article goes on to point out reasons husbands can be considered excess baggage and way too much work … an attitude I’d have no problem finding proponents for.
Unless, of course, they can breastfeed.
Continued …
