I dislike the word feminist.  It’s just so loaded.  But that’s what this article is about, until we come up with a better word.  Sandra Tsing Loh at The Atlantic Monthly says feminists have come to some unusual places in fifty years: getting out of the house, getting college degrees and terrific jobs, and then: wanting to go back to the house.  What gives?  Weren’t women supposed to take over the world? 

[A]ren’t women at home subject to the oppression of their chauvinistic, soul-crushing husbands? As if a mere human could compete with clogged freeways and Sisyphean paper pushing (or its more up-to-date equivalent, paperless pushing) and burnt-coffee-laced afternoons counting the acoustic tiles in stale conference rooms, and the hours spent arguing over the wording of a memo that within minutes after its dissemination will be dragged into the now-two-dimensional circular file [...]

Even providing a chilled martini at six o’clock and roast beef at seven to the legendary suburban alpha male of yore allowed most of one’s day to be fairly flexible. As for today’s poorer husbands, many of them are likely too tired from their job’s repetitious, socially invisible physical tasks to continually oppress their wives.

Of course, it’d still be hard for some women to admit this, to admit that they want to be home.  Just like it’s hard for more conservative stay-at-home-moms to admit that they might rather be out somewhere, working.  I still think the issue of working moms is too contentious to receive the more nuanced treatement it needs, at least from the Church.  Most of us Evangelicals are still too quick to condemn moms who work, moms who send their kids to pre-school, moms who do anything but stay at home and teach their children Latin. 

Until the home becomes as viable a workplace as it was a hundred years ago – when so many businesses and farms and means of employ were in the home or nearby – families are going to have to make tough decisions about what to do with the children, and what to do with the parents who tend to them.  It’s not a black and white matter of either A) loving your children or B) loving some selfish career.  Don’t you think?