Seriously, this poll is already being used around the blogosphere to fuel the Mommy Wars:
See?So what does this mean to you—members of the professional class? Well, I guess opting out of a demanding profession like law for full-time motherhood—especially if you're married to Mr. Money Bags—is likely to be a much more pleasant experience than that of your lower-income sisters. I can certainly understand the desire to escape the law, if you have other things going on your life.But I also believe that this issue transcends mere economic differences. From what I've seen, women—really, all people—have better self-esteem, better long-term options, if they maintain an outside identity (yes, I mean, a paying job), even if it means juggling the demands of work and family. Frankly, I've seen one too many women who quit their careers to stay home, only to find themselves in the job market years later, after a divorce or some other sudden shift in their lives. If that seems unromantic, I'm sorry.Obviously, if you are miserable with what you're doing, you don't have to do it forever. I'd find an alternative. But quit totally to run the school auction? Not a smart idea.
Oh, you knew it would! But let's look at what the poll really says.
The poll examined women aged 18 to 64 (e.g., before retirement age), and defined "stay at home mom" as "women who are not currently employed and have a child younger than 18 at home." The margin of error is +/- 1%.
In nearly every metric, the employed moms rated moderately "better" than the stay at home moms. This comes as very little surprise to me, personally, because, after all, taking care of a kid full time is hard. And I have discussed before how I feel that working outside the home is good for me, personally and psychologically. As you can also see, the survey also looked at employed women with no child at home. Those ladies, on the whole, are doing better than any of us mommies!
So maybe we just shouldn't have kids. Then we'll all be happier! Ummmm.
In most cases, the difference between SAHMs and working moms in these ratings is about 5 or 6 percentage points. The three areas in which the gap between SAHMs and working moms seems to be the greatest are sadness (26% of SHAMs versus 16% of working moms), depression (28% of SHAMs versus 17% of working moms), and thriving (55% of SAHMs versus 63% of working moms).
These three metrics, to me, go together. If you do not feel like you are thriving, you are more likely to be sad or depressed. And it also seems easy to me to see why one who spends her day chasing after other people to ensure that they thrive, may find herself feeling less personally actualized. It's the Problem That Has No Name, that Betty Friedan described in The Feminine Mystique:
"The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning [that is, a longing] that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries … she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?"
This is a very real problem that persists today, and we shouldn't ignore that taking care of small children full time is difficult, and that doing such to the exclusion of any other vocation is not necessarily the life's dream of every woman and mother.
But you'll notice too that if you flip those poll numbers around, 74% of SAHMs do not report sadness, 72% of SAHMs do not report depression, and 37% of working moms do not feel like they're thriving. Wow, those are some pretty big, potentially meaningful numbers.
Still, there are a significant number of women working in the home who do not find it completely fulfilling. And what should we do about that? We should find ways to let them out. We should support them and encourage them to work or find productive avocations, or, indeed, vocations. Why do you think there are so many Mommy Blogs out there? These moms are trying to find a productive intellectual outlet.
The numbers for worry (41% for SAHMs and 34% for working moms) and anger (19% for SAHMs and 14% for working moms) are interesting too. These two emotions, when I feel them in my life, tend to emanate from the same locus: lack of control. If a woman feels she lacks control over her own existence and future, which I can imagine being the situation of some segment of SAHMs, it is easy to see how she may feel more worried and angry than a woman who works and, therefore, sees a stream of income (and, for instance, a retirement account) that has her name on it. This problem of a lack of control may be particularly acute if the SAHM is married to a man who views his income as "his" money that he parcels out to her as a kind of allowance that requires an accounting. That sort of existence could be extremely stressful (50% of SAHMs and 48% of working moms reported feeling stress).
And, of course, many SAHMs are not SAHMs by choice, like my cohort -- the professional, relatively high-income women who choose to stay home, but could easily afford the childcare so that they could go to work if they wanted to. (Of course, there are also those in my cohort who opt to stay at home because professional advancement is stunted in pernicious and subtle ways by the mere fact of motherhood.) But many SHAMs are at home because daycare is not as economical as her giving up her job. And that's really the bottom line of the survey. Gallup pulled out the numbers relating to women with annual household incomes of less than $36,000. Here they are:
These women are really struggling. What should we do for them? Gallup suggests increasing employer-sponsored childcare of some other subsidized childcare for these women. That sounds great! How many employers do you think will voluntarily pay for childcare for their employees? Big companies, maybe, but what about small businesses? And subsidized childcare? More taxes? Can't you just hear the politicians likening it to welfare, even suggesting that the women should just stay home if they can't afford daycare? It's the free market, baby.
We require a fundamental shift in attitude that employment for women is just as important as employment for men. It should not be the case that if a family's income is low, the default answer is that mommy stays at home with the kids. If it would be better for mommy and for the family for mommy to work, then our country needs to see women not as the last resort childcare option, but as valuable employees who needs just as much support in their work as their valuable employee husbands. Until we truly see male workers and female worker identically, these polls will continue to show this sort of dissatisfaction among SAHMs, especially low income SAHMs. Because if being a SAHM is not truly voluntary -- if some economic, professional or social pressure forced the issue to make her a SHAM -- then she will not be happy in it. Just look at the polls.
