And that would be not considering raising children a "real job." If it's not a real job, why do all these working mothers have to PAY someone else to take care of their kids? Someone has to do it, and if it isn't done well that will be very bad on both the individual and societal level.

Your elitism is also truly disgusting to behold. Did it ever occur to you that most people (both men and women) have jobs that are boring and not intellectually stimulating? Not everyone gets paid to spout off about other people's life choices. Making work the center of your life because you're so passionate about it is something that only a tiny percentage of the population is willing or able to do.

What if your job was cleaning rich women's houses all day (like my mother did before I was born)? Can you see how ridiculous your "advice" sounds when someone has a normal blue-collar job? My father was a garbage man who worked two other (menial) jobs so that my mother could raise and school us, and believe me, he did not consider his job to be the most important part of his life.

Just because a woman stays home with children does not mean she isn't having an intellectual life. Have you ever heard of books? Lowly common people like my family now have access to them, and if you have a public library within 50 miles it is your own fault that you are not using your mind. My mother home schooled us using books from the library, and my household was always filled with rigorous intellectual debate, learning, and laughter. I'd say her life would have been considerably poorer if she had dumped me and my siblings in daycare and continued to scrub shit out of toilets to prove that her identity was "not just being a mother."

Your historical knowledge is quite poor, since you can't seem to grasp that throughout our stay on this planet people have worked *in order to provide for and raise their children*. If we weren't continuing our species, there would be no driving force to work. To elevate the means (the job that pays you money) rather than the end (a rich and happy family life with your offspring) is clearly the product of a rigid mind that cares more about ideology than anything resembling reality for billions of women.

This is what the Totalitarian Left looks like. Hirshman wants to take away people's control over their own lives in favor of her own vision of what the world should be like. She is as scary as anything on the far right.

The very essence of feminism is choice. Anyone who doesn't get that doesn't understand the very first thing about feminism.

Yesterday we're all up in arms because women can't breastfeed while working the register at Walmart. Now, we're offended because Linda Hirshman thinks that professionally-capable women should choose not to stay home.

Look, if more women stayed in their white collar jobs and earned promotions and greater power, then they would be in a position to demand and receive better workplace benefits for women, mothers, etc. This, in turn, can generate a trickle-down effect (if not outright social change) that will eventually provide all women with greater benefits and options - maternity, health care, flex time, etc.

I hate to say it, but if we really want to be in a position to affect positive change for the status of women in America, that position probably isn't going to be at home. And that's less a comment on staying at home than it is on how America and politics work.

While I haven't read Hirschmann's new book, judging from the reviews she's received, it seems either herself or her readers have fallen into a classic "Mommy Wars" style claptrap. What's at stake is a role for women in the public sphere. For better or worse, ours is a largely capitalist society with an economy weighted more to the free market than otherwise. Within this society, value is attributed through price, anything else is nine-tenths lip service, one-tenth wishful thinking. As an economy, we attribute little to no value to childminding or housework, stay at home mothers are not financially compensated and despite the rhetoric about the inestimable values of her labor, we pay the most marginalized, untrained people in society minimum wage or less to replace her efforts. After all, for all that men in high powered positions talk the talk about how much more fulfilling full-time motherhood is than the corporate world, very few of them ever demonstrate they believe it by heading home.

Nor is biology on our side. Childminding is widely acknowledged to be intense, exhausting business, made exponentially harder to incorporate with a career if the parents in question want to breastfeed or raise the child themself rather than in daycare, as most people admit would be preferable. If a child is to be breastfed and raised outside of daycare, biology has dictated the mother will be doing it (or spending hours daily strapped to pumps, time that is pretty much wasted). Even a few years taken out of a career will cripple that woman career-wise until she retires, but given our society's utter lack of compensation or respect for her work, it also leaves her entirely dependent on her partner for the duration. This state of affairs is excused simply by declaring the marginal improvement of the child's condition as "worth it," which frankly reveals how little a woman's contribution to the outside world is valued. As a society we all but conspire to maintain this system of biologically backed unpaid labor, then heap insult on injury by encouraging movements that sermonize on how women are not only predisposed to the circumstance by our relative physiology, but by universal instincts (which have failed to materialize in cross-cultural comparison). Is it any wonder so many women conclude children are simply not worth the sacrifice?

Without our own money and socially endorsed productivity, we women ourselves become almost invisible in society. With our waking hours devoted to a single human being, it takes Herculean effort to effect the culture through other avenues such as volunteering or grassroots lobbying. Instead the sum total of our influence on society is reduced to being the targets of irritating household cleaning ads. As more individual women opt to stay at home, a reasonable decision in light of the fact that we're equipped to be the caretakers of children, the influence of women in society at large diminishes. In other words, the dilemna is so difficult to resolve because both sides are absolutely right! A woman who stays home to raise her children is making a sacrifice for others, but it's a reasonable sacrifice to make. Women who work have every reason to be concerned that their collective bargaining power is reduced when women stay home, meaning women's rights will not figure in the political arena. If there can be a healthy resolution, it lies in changing social attitudes, fixing an economic value to the work, and providing social and government support for the work. That is, unless we really don't value such work, in which case those preaching women ought to stay at home have some explaining to do.