I found this NY Times article on Wednesday (hot tip from the ladies of Got Me a College Girl), read it over the course of a couple of days, and have been debating whether or not to make my response into a full-fledged essay. For now I think I'll just pick out enough quotes for brief commentary to encourage some discussion even if you aren't up to reading the whole article.
Many women at the nation's most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment....
Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children.
My first reaction was probably unwisely optimistic - I'm very excited to see women coming to their senses and realizing they can't do it all. But should we actually see a great number of women reclaiming the priority of family over career, there will no doubt be ugly reactions from a culture with a such skewed understanding of the roles of women who have families.
For some, full devotion to motherhood may be nothing more than an opportunity to exercise in the home the very same sort of selfish ambition that the culture encourages them to wield as CEOs and politicians. Women since Eve are highly inventive in manipulating to gain such power; the weirdly vehement effusions of one interviewee are sadly indicative of this:
"Parents have such an influence on their children...I want to have that influence. Me!"(That emphatic "me!" is what makes it rather scary to me.)
Among outside reactions, the article's author notes that an exodus of estrogen from the workplace "presents a conundrum." Harvard's perplexed director of undergrad admissions, a woman herself, asked the following on behalf of all who are wondering what has poisoned the water at the Ivy League girls dorms:
"It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?"
The feminists are similarly shocked:
"They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they're accepting it," said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women's and gender studies at Yale. "Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it."I really believed 25 years ago," Dr. Wexler added, "that this would be solved by now."
...
"What does concern me," said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, "is that so 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."
Nevertheless, something that partially restored my optimism was some consideration of what the Church could do with this in terms of ministry to young women. One obstacle is made clear when I hear students, in relating their plans for school and future years, rigidly compartmentalize their lives into school/work, church/faith, and family, or a similar set of categories that demand no such division. Within the Church, we should be guiding women who have been inculcated with cultural opinions regarding women and careers toward the idea that their ministry can and should be holistic; if this shift endures, it could be a harbinger of an expanding mission field for SAHMs whose neighbors will include these women. But there is also a responsibility for the Church's thinkers, both men and women, to step up and claim: only when we bring them around to acknowledging the biblical basis for so-called traditional roles can we really begin to strip down the authority of secular humanist and feminist powers in higher education.
(*SAHM = stay-at-home mom)
