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Where is Susan Faludi when you need her? There's another backlash emerging, and I want someone there to document it.
Over the past year, we've had some important leaders in the women's and civil-rights movement die: Rosa Parks, Rosemary Brown, Betty Friedan. In this province, we've lost Grace Sparkes and, most recently, Patt Cowan.
I have been thinking about them as I have watched the debates unfold north and south of the border. While I have been listening to the machinations in Parliament and Congress -- especially here in Canada, with Prime Minister Harper's dismantling of the national child - care program -- I have also been dipping into the so-called "mommyblogs."
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A thread, though, that appears regularly -- much like the waves breaking on shore -- is about what sort of mommy knows best : stay-at-home moms or work-outside-the-home moms. Then there's the hybrid of work-at-home moms (because, as we all know, the Internet allows you to have the best of both worlds -- which is not really true, but we'll save that for another column).
To say the debate has raged white-hot is perhaps understating it...
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Whether you fall in one camp or another is immaterial. The bottom line -- there's no consensus. Both sides speak passionately about the rightness of their point of view.
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The issue is not so much about whether a mother chooses home or work. The issue really is about respecting the choices that a person makes as being right for them, given their circumstances.
That lack of respect extends to the current debate about day care in Canada. What ought to be a consensus-building exercise -- one that acknowledges that families with different incomes in different regions have different needs and aspirations -- has instead become polarized and unnecessarily political.
With the blogs, I can take a deep breath, click away and read something else. Not so with the state of child care funding. While, as a mother, I no longer have a direct stake in how the system works, as a citizen I hope to see a more mature approach evolve in the years to come.
-Reprinted from the Telegram (St. John's)