FEATURED QUESTION: Society

(This FEATURED QUESTION stuck here for few days. Please scroll down for other postings. I've been posting frequently, so there is a lot to explore!)

Back when I was a little girl, my mother worked outside the home until I was eight years old. I recall my grandmother later commenting somewhat as follows: "I always hated it that your mother had to work. A mother needs to stay home with her child." This, from a woman widowed at age twenty-seven, yet didn't work outside the home until she reached age forty-five! Instead of getting a job when her children were living at home with her, my grandmother moved back in with her parents.

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Frankly, I found my grandmother's statement unenlightened and old-fashioned. After all, at the time she made the comment, I was attending college and preparing for a career as a teacher.

A lot of years have now passed since those words my grandmother uttered, and many mothers now work outside the home, often out of financial necessity: paying the mortgage, keeping the house in good repair, laying aside money for their children's college fund, paying real-estate and personal-property taxes, etc. Nonetheless, many people, usually citing various problems with today's youth, now criticize this trend of working mothers.

Some go even further and specifically cite women's suffrage as damaging to family, society, and politics (hat tip to Karen of Eastern Right, citing Hilary Jane Margaret White of Orwell's Picnic):

...[O]ne of the triumphs of feminism is to teach women that they should not get married to an individual man. Marriage, so the legend goes, is slavery, particularly after the kids come. Feminism reveals its Marxist origins when it says that women should instead marry the State. Men leave, we are told, and leave us holding the child-rearing bag alone. Much better to be married to the state. The state will never abandon you.

Indeed, women who divorce are often encouraged by social workers to either take up welfare as a replacement marriage, or send their ex-men taken through the various government-sponsored wringers like Ontario's Family Responsibility Office. Institutions like the FRO are designed for a two-fold purpose. They enslave the woman to the state, make sure she depends on the FRO and the welfare office for all the defence and support we once expected a husband to provide, and to punish, impoverish and disempower men.

And when did such structures start being put into place? About the same time women got the vote and started taking over the driver's seat in politics. Socialism is woman's politics. Indeed, we call it the nanny state because it tends to infantilise entire societies. But really, the new state that the woman's vote has created should more properly be called the Daddy State...

Read the rest of Hilary Jane Margaret White's essay HERE.

Do outside-the-home employment for mothers and the feminist movement in general ultimately wreak damage upon the fabric of a society? If so, what do you see as the solution to this problem?