Are women choosing to stay home because they want to more than men do, or because they earn less than their husbands? Maybe if there wasn't a salary gap, you'd see more dads staying home while the moms go to work.

I must be an anomoly because my mother works while my step-father took early retirement and my step-mother (a VP) works and my father stays home.

Never ceases to amaze me how you broadsheet broads can turn things around.

Why aren't more men staying at home? Cause they can't find women who'd support them. Cause their women would be insulted by the idea of having to support them. Even if the men did all the housework, took care of the kids, did the grocery shopping - everything. It'd be stigmatizing to their wives to have a house-husband, and guess what? Women kind of don't like being stigmatized. How they're viewed socially is kinda sorta important to them.

Know where I first learned about that? Carol Gilligan. In A Different Voice. Look it up.

And maybe - just maybe - women are staying home in droves BECAUSE THEY CAN. Because they can get away with it. Because working life sucks. Because most people, whether they have college degrees or not, don't end up in the jobs they want (that includes men as well as women). Now, I know that doesn't include the daughters of the elite, who can use their family's connections to get cushy jobs, but it sure as shinola includes the majority of women. What the hell is so empowering about being a department manager at Target? It's a deadbeat job for bum pay. You might think about staying home, too, if that was your only option.

So maybe it's not the men who need to change, but pampered, overindulged columnists. Whaddya think?

Or, is the real problem that men are just not given enough encouragement to stay at home and take care of the house.

With all the time and effort spent to pave the way for women to have careers, I think everyone forgot that it is just as big a cultural shift for a man to stay at home with the kids. There remains an intense pressure for men to have successful careers. While it is certainly arguable that men have many more choices than women, it remains the case that the choice of staying home with the kids is almost never one of those options.

Having (very recently) chosen to give up my law career and stay home with my twins, I read this column with interest. As for my "anecdote", this is a choice I would never have made if I believed my career would advance like those of the men around me. After 14 years, it became clear that the glass ceiling is now made of concrete.

It's easy to blame some glass ceiling for your failures - most men don't get that option. When they fail, they take the blame upon themselves...

But yeah, it was the glass ceiling that kept you back, it could NEVER be that you just weren't as good!

I grew up in a working class neighborhood. The very idea of SAH parents, whether mothers or fathers, was completely foreign to me and, I'd wager, everyone else in our neighborhood - except the mothers who cleaned houses for the wealthy or comfortably middle-class mothers who stayed home.

Mothers who can both afford to and want to stay home do so because it's still the one socially acceptable reason for not working for years at a time, especially for wealthy white women in bubble worlds like Manhattan. In short, they're excused. No matter how much money (usually the money of others) they might have spent on education, no matter how many seats they may have occupied in Harvard MBA programs that other women would have given their toes for, it's acceptable for them to stay home because our Anne-Geddes-laden culture agrees "it's the most important job in the world".

This is still not the case for fathers. My brother-in-law has been a stay-at-home father for two years, since my nephew was born. This makes sense for my sister's family: She earns twice as much as a very successful drug rep than my brother-in-law did as a CPA (no kidding). Like it or not, very few women have salaries with which they can support a family (perhaps because so many have opted to stay home with children over time, perhaps because women tend to choose careers that offer less earning power), and fathers who aren't primary breadwinners are still viewed as failures in many cultures.

The misguided method of Hirshman's research is what prompted me to write. By focusing on the Times wedding announcements, she only interviewed women who chose to be married -- could it not be that some of them wanted to be married in order to have babies? And to stay at home with those children? For some women, marriage is a means to starting a family, especially as the biological clock is ticking. The advanced age of the brides that she references are a not-so-subtle testament to this. Nor does she reference the many single women who are out there, advancing their careers (thus meeting with her approval as the proper feminist calling?).

Hirshman also does not acknowledge that the upper-class strata which she studies is known to uphold conservative mores and traditions -- that's partly how social and economic hierarchies are maintained. Advanced education aside, the upper social class is hardly a vanguard of feminism. Even before they were "allowed" to work outside the home, royal and upper-class women always received the best education. For most anything to be a social movement in this country, it has to largely involve the middle class.

I also take issue with Hirshman equating feminism with a money-making career. This belabors the notion that working in the home is worthless and not an option if you are to call yourself a feminist. Well, I'm a feminist, I stay at home with my child, and I think that having the choice to do so is what feminism itself has made possible. My son is simply the most delightful person I know -- why would I trade the opportunity to stay with him for a cubicle and a computer? To fulfill some elitist's ideal of feminism? No way!