by Julie Bell

Created on: October 28, 2008   Last Updated: December 09, 2008

This is 'The Lament of the Real SAHM' - that would be, the 'Sometimes At Home Mother'.

One day there will be a movie about modern motherhood and it will be called: "Wife. Interrupt what's that darling? Interrupted."

Recently I saw an article lamenting the low status of Stay at Home Mothers in modern society.

The article started like it was going to be a welcome breath of fresh air a man has something sympathetic and sensitive to say about mothers? This I gotta read! I'm sure he meant well, but by the end of the article he had poured contempt on so many groups of women I hardly know where to start.

Instead of accurately recognizing that the low status of SAHMs in our society is largely a result of misogynism, the author made it seem as if it's really the cat-fighting and ungenerous attitudes of other women that make life as a childbearing, childrearing female in our society so miserable.

Housewives and mothers were looked down upon long before we had a chance to earn university degrees and equal pay. It was not women who degraded us. It still isn't.

Pure, unadulterated SAHM's are quite rare. Most of us are not Stay At Home Mothers and most of us are not Working Mothers.

Most of us, living lives a rubber band would not envy, are Sometimes At Home Mothers. We're Desperate Housewives all right but we don't live in opulent Wisteria Lane. More like Hysteria Cul-de-Sac. We don't have the rewards of working full-time. We can't have the luxury of staying home full time. We're demented with the juggling act of balancing Government payments, wages and childcare and trying to figure out which combination of the above will actually be feasible instead of counter-productive. Just about every Stay at Home Mother is trying to figure out some way of bringing a few extra dollars into the household kitty without totally abandoning her offspring and falling into the ever-widening Bad Mother chasm, be it through hourly wages or home-based enterprise.

The author of this particular article opined that 'SAHMs are scorned by feminists and seen as unworthy'. He has utterly mis-read the entire Women's Liberation movement. Feminists don't scorn mothers. Feminists don't scorn the idea of women staying home to nurture their children.

What feminists object to is the attitude that all women must be stay at home mothers and housewives, that this is their only function, their only option, and that any women who fails to comply is somehow deviant. What feminists oppose is oppressing women through removing

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