SALT LAKE CITY — We used to call them the Mommy Wars.

Back in the 1970s, when the modern feminist revolution was at its height, some women attacked other women for their choice to stay home; the women staying home countered defensively, lampooning their sisters in the business suits.

It was Stay-at-Home Moms against Office Moms, Us vs. Them, an argument that was really a non-argument, fomented by people with public voices who ultimately did not care about the individual woman and her individual life with her individual family and economic situation.

But individual women did — and some of us, despite enormous pressure to do otherwise, opted to stay home full-time and raise our kids. I, along with my husband, personally went the extra step and home-schooled them.

Related

Motherhood Matters: KSL's celebration of a mother's role

KSL kicked off a campaign to celebrate motherhood. The goal is to drive home the fact that motherhood is more than a title, more than a responsibility: A mother is someone to really celebrate, because motherhood really matters.

“These aren’t 'Leave it to Beaver' times,” we were told, referring to the 1950s television show about two mischievous boys, their dad with the mysterious office job, and their stay-at-home mom, June. “You’re lucky to have a husband who makes enough that you have the luxury to stay home.”

I fielded that one while finessing yet again a skimpy budget based upon an anemically moderate salary from a hard-working husband.

“What happens if he leaves you? You’ll have no job skills,” some argued. I often thought that the feminists, with their cry for social equity, could have spent time addressing the injustice of a man dumping his old responsibilities for new ones.

In the workforce women were promised new horizons, fresh prospects and unlimited scope for advancement. While some women did indeed make it as corporate lawyers and senators and police chiefs and high-ranking military personnel, other women’s stories found them on the night crew at box stores, entering data into computers while sitting in a carpeted office cubicle, and performing dead-end jobs for low pay at part-time wages, because with an added surge of the population flooding the workforce, there weren’t as many jobs to go around.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful to be a woman in the 21st century, and I’m glad that more opportunities abound. But I resent that, still, the option to stay home and raise one’s children is thought of as second best, copping out, not contributing to society, wasting a college education, a temporary fix, not really “working.”

And yet, a new, younger generation of men and women are seriously pursuing the stay-at-home-mom thing, and thanks to the digital age, these moms do not have to physically leave their homes to secure work and income.

They’re very Proverbs 31-like, these women; the 21st century model provides “food for her family,” “out of her earnings planting a vineyard,” clothes her charges, teaches, guides, works side by side with her husband on a lifelong partnership of her and him and their little thems.

Whether or not the stay-at-home mom brings in income, she makes money by saving it. She’s smart, savvy, diligent, contemporary, cool, chic and tired at the end of a long day — a working woman.

Along with my contemporaries, who made a vilified and ridiculed choice at a time that promised us unlimited options — other than the one we made, that is — I applaud you, this new and rising generation.

You go, girl.

Carolyn Henderson is a freelance author and writer of the blog, Middle Aged Plague (www.MiddleAgedPlague.AreaVoices.com). She is also the manager of Steve Henderson Fine Art (www.SteveHendersonFineArt.com).

Related topics