The latest in the never ending, totally irritating, yet impossible to ignore attack on parents comes from a Dutch Labor Party Representative, Sharon Dijksma. Dijksma writes:
“A highly-educated woman who chooses to stay at home and not to work – that is destruction of capital… If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at the cost of society, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished.”
Margaret Solton takes a pause in her excellent coverage of the Duke rape case to compare SAHMs with advanced degrees to the Duke rapists. Both are examples of elites gone bad.
Should people be bound to their careers after receiving training in a professional or graduate school?
ROTC programs offer kids a college tuition, room and board, and spending cash in exchange for four years of active duty after college. A friend is getting a free ride in a business school in exchange for remaining with the company for 3 years after graduation. Both programs seem fair and reasonable to me. This proposal by this freak from Amsterdam is insane. What’s the difference?
1. The rules of the ROTC and business school sponsorship are very well spelled out ahead of time. Nobody enters into these programs without knowing exactly what is expected of them. If graduate students and law students were told that they had to stick with their profession or be penalized as this woman suggests, how many would accept that deal? Few people want to be restricted in that manner.
2. The student has a fairly good idea of his job prospects ahead of time. You get out of the ROTC and there’s a job waiting for you. In other fields, like academia, there is no such guarantee. It may require years of low pay and an itinerant life style. I do think that the realities of the job market should be laid out in black and white on Orientation Day. Need to scare those graduate students away.
3. The manitory service time after graduation is relatively short for my first examples. Anything more, as suggested by the Amsterdam freak, really should be called indentured servitude. Nobody should be held responsible for life for decisions made in their 20s.
4. The government or business pays all of the cost of education in the first examples, with the understanding that they will recoup their costs later. In contrast, few students get a free ride through business, law, or medical school. My graduate program gave almost no fellowships. They paid the tuition, but I had to work nearly full time and supplement with loans in order to make rent. I worked for the university, so they got low cost teaching talent and a ghost writer for the senior faculty. Most students get no benefits for eight years of free labor. I figure grad school owes me money.
But this recent guilt trip on parents isn’t about the wasted capital by government or universities. It’s about the perception of parenthood, which is seen as low skill labor. It’s about the perception of women who parent full time; they are seen as brainless, free riders, parasites, purposely oppressed, and somehow threatening. We can even talk about them and rapists in the same sentence.
Okay, let me explain some things. Why does a woman go to professional school, even if she hopes to someday stay at home and raise kids? Does she go there to get her MRS? Is she trolling for elite men? No. Please assume that women are smart, rational people. If I wanted to snare Mr. Moneybags, would I work my ass for years in high school and college to get As and then endure the rigors of the prestigious grad program? No way. I would get me some tight pants, maybe a boob job, and then become his secretary. Much easier and more cost efficient.
Women go into these graduate programs, because they don’t know if they will actually get married. Because they plan to return to work after the kids are older. Even if they get married, they don’t know that they will stay married. They don’t know for sure if they will love being home with the kids or hate it. Uncertainty about the future means that Warton is excellent insurance for the future mommies.
Why have they singled out women for this Draconian law? What about the guys who go to law school, but decide that they hate law and would rather run a bike shop later in life? No, it’s all about the mommies.
This mean spirited proposal forces all women down the same path where one is judged by one’s bank book. It penalizes women for smartly protecting themselves against the whims of fortune. Again, I have to ask, when did feminism become the hand maiden for capitalism?
Apt. 11d 
Does this stuff never end? I saw the Dutch news story earlier and wrote it off, because hey, it’s just Europe, and they do a lot of crazy stuff in Europe. But now here’s UD (whose Duke coverage has been so valuable and so sensible) going all NYT on us.
Here are a few points:
1. We don’t know that these women intend to leave the working world forever. Most likely, they’d love to come back some time, but are too busy right now.
2. It’s not like the working world is waiting with open arms to welcome us all back. I’m personally a bit scared at the thought of trying to get a job again.
3. There are a lot of other dubious uses of scarce educational slots going on. For instance, it is not unknown for elite universities to admit large numbers of legacies, former child actors, kids with famous last names, or people like the Yale Taliban guy.
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Margaret Solton talks about a backlash against misbehaving elites happening both at Duke, and against highly educated women who opt-out after having taken a spot at an elite school that might have gone to a more deserving person. I’m not sure that the resentment she’s talking about exists in quite the form she imagines. Wouldn’t the rage, if any, be confined to those who can plausibly imagine themselves taking one of those same slots?
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Laura, not that I’m defending the Dutch lady, but university is paid for by the government in the Netherlands. In that sense it’s more an equivalent to ROTC. Perhaps another argument for never taking money from anybody, as they’ll just try to make your decisions for you.
I wonder what happens in the Netherlands to people who simply work outside their field? Discover they don’t like the path they chose, etc?
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Wow, by some weird cosmic fluke I stumble upon this conversation as the “missing link”–a SAHM with advanced degree from…Duke.
For years I’ve suffered from the tiny voices in the back of my head–of past “geniuses” like Darwin, who claimed that advanced degrees for women would make them bad mothers; of living, well-intentioned souls like a grad advisor who joked that it was a waste of time admitting all us women into a program, knowing we’d all just drop out to have babies in the end. Nice to have a fresh Dutch-inflected woman’s voice to add in there.
With respect, Laura, I do have to quibble with the notion that the best way to get a high-quality MRS degree would have been via heels and a boob job. My own education, both undergrad and grad proved a bit of a bust professionally, but personally fitted me perfectly for life with a brainy man from a higher social class. Think of it as finishing school sans gloves. Interestingly, my hubby’s PhD was in an even more useless field than my own–but (once he got over the depression caused by his joblessness) he retooled professionally and now is quite successful and happy professionally. I took, in most respects, the easier way out and stayed home with les bebes. It works for now, but as per Amy P’s post, I don’t plan on it being permanent.
My neigborhood, by the way, is strewn with very smart SAHMs–lawyers, PhDs, MBAs–who are equally frustrated, but mostly coping, channeling a LOT of psychic energy into marathons, triathlons, yoga, hyperparenting and psychotic levels of school voluntarism. Well, it’s not always healthy. And there’s some drinkers out there too.
The suggestion that we are letting some imaginary societal side, however, would be met by a unanimous round of raspberries. It is indeed an insult to motherhood, which does take more than time than a coffee-break between closing deals, unlike what I learned as a 20year old feminist.
Then again, if I had enjoyed the highly subsidized, safe child care of the Netherlands and also lived in a country where demography pointed to an “all hands on deck” future, I might say the same thing. Here, however, we muddle through and work things out (or not) all on our own. I don’t disagree with her thesis–for western Europeans. I just think it has nothing to do with me.
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Yes, it does have nothing to do with us, thank God. First time since I have gotten interested in this work/family stuff that I’m quite happy to be living here.
Quibble with your quibble. Sounds like our paths have been very similar. I married a grad school buddy with a more worthless degree than mine who ended up making good in the corporate world. But that was a huge shocker for everybody. I mean you should have seen my cutie pie husband before the kids came. Alternative dressed boy with the big hair. Most grad students can’t make that transition to corporate life. It was a freakish thing that we entered the middle class. I still think the odds are better for snaring a rich guy as a boob enhanced secretary than as a classmate at graduate school.
Of course, you could also use Dan’s dating service.
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Excellent post, Laura. Just excellent.
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First time since I have gotten interested in this work/family stuff that I’m quite happy to be living here.
I’d just like to flag up that Europe isn’t monolithic, particularly when talking about maternal work patterns. The Netherlands are huge outliers in this regard, with very high rates of non-working mums and very low rates of, eg, kids in daycare. As for Kelli’s comment about the “highly subsidised childcare” of the Netherlands, I really think you are mistaking Holland for some of its neighbours. Here’s a quote from the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions:
The major obstacle preventing women with children from returning to work, or from remaining in work after their maternity leave , is the lack of adequate childcare facilities in the form of day nurseries, company crèches, childminders, etc. In 1988, places in subsidized day nurseries were available for only 2 per cent of children in the 0-4 age group. This is one of the reasons why the activity rate of mothers with small children is low in the Netherlands.
It’s possible that things have changed radically since then; if so, I’d love to hear about it.
I don’t know anything about the politics in Holland, but it is possible that this admittedly rather egregious proposal is part of a broader national anxiety about the workforce and overall productivity, rather than emblematic of a crusade against stay at home mums in particular. However, even if that is the case, the proposial would appear to be representative of the tendency to blame women/mums for the hassles that inevitably result when society goes through major shifts. Instead of providing a carrot in the form of work-friendly childcare strategies, this legislator would appear to want to focus on the stick, punishing mums for not overcoming the incredible barriers that Dutch policy puts in their way re returning to work.
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I often felt like my own education was wasted long before I dropped out of the workforce to stay home with the baby. I had lost a good job and spent a couple years temping before I threw in the towel. I received a lot of financial aid as well as federally subsidized student loans so I suppose one could argue that using my education to answer phones and do data entry was a terrible investment of those funds. If a government is going to meddle in a woman’s decision to work or not, it logically follows that the government should also be involved in job placement to ensure that those women who are still in the workforce are getting a good return on that educational investment.
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The economy of motherhood
My usual fodder for thought: Laura at 11D cites a proposal by a Dutch legislator that would fine women who do not enter the workforce after completing their education (Ive bungled that terribly but thats roughly it). The problem appears…
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