In her comment on Pansy's post, Ellyn suggests:
Should it be daycare [in Circle VII] or those who have created a society necessitating the tearing of tiny ones from their mothers' bosoms (literally and figuratively) that gets relegated to that circle? While we're at it...could you add all day kindergarten and pre-school? At least in the cases where the children obviously don't want to be there.
I second that. My husband and I were talking about this last night. When feminists proclaimed that in order to Be Truly Fulfilled, women needed to work instead of wasting their intellects caring for children, it couldn't have worked out better for corporate America. The mass entry of women into the work force drove down the cost of labor, both because there were more workers available and because the custom of "the family wage" went out the window. Then, since Mom was at work, there was nobody at home to do the things she used to do, so the corporations got to take her place by selling those same things back to the family: convenience foods, day care, pet-walking services, restaurant and take-out meals, after-school activities, maid services, ready-made clothing. The upper-class women who wanted to self-actualize themselves at work walked right into the day-care trap, and they dragged the women of the working class in with them.
I also wonder if having the perceived extra money from having two incomes leads some couples to buy things that that they really could live without? I say perceived, because for some couples, by the time they subtract out the cost of working (clothes, gas, taxes, day care, restaurant meals, and so on) their second income doesn't amount to very much. Does all that extra buying drive inflation? I'm sure it has something to do with the high cost of housing around here -- the Washington, DC area has one of the highest numbers of two-income families in the country.
During my second year of nursing school, I had a part-time job as a nursing assistant in a hospital. While I was there, one of the nurses was expecting her first baby. She and her husband had already bought a spiffy new house in an outer suburb, but in order to meet the mortgage, she had to go back to work. She was able to leave her six-week-old baby with relatives, but she was still crying buckets of tears on her first day back at work because she missed her baby so much. But I guess it never occurred to her to sell the house and move to a cheaper one. Another co-worker used to talk about how she longed to stay home, but her family just couldn't afford it. I had to bite my tongue to keep from pointing out that perhaps skipping the yearly vacation to Disneyland would have been a step in the right direction.
Why do so many people now think that normal mothering is finding somebody else to take care of the children? Why are some mothers dropping off their kids at daycare while they themselves go off to work -- as nannies? Why are so many families blind to the changes they could make in their lives to enable a parent to stay home with the kids? Why are so many politicians so committed to the idea that caring for kids and helping families equals even more daycare -- to the idea that the village daycare is the proper place for little children? Is our society blind because it's forgotten how to see? or because it doesn't want to see?
By the way, one of the articles Pansy posted concludes with a good discussion of public policies that would enable more families to have a parent at home with their children.
