Radical Regressivists Attack the Stay-at-Home Mom

In a book review of "The Flipside of Feminism," a regressivist author claims that the feminist push for universal childcare is an attempt to "simply transfer women’s dependence on men to dependence on Uncle Sam" and create more government interference in the lives of good hardworking Americans.  The author of the article uses Superman and Lois Lane as an example, saying that the children of that duo would likely grow up maladjusted because they would be tragically neglected by their parents.

• First of all, he's Superman.  He can stay home with the kids if he wants.  He was never as good a reporter as Lois Lane in the first place, and he doesn't even need a baby monitor because he has super hearing.  Besides, the kid might be able to fly, depending on his genetic makeup, and then he could just join Superman on his crime fighting adventures, albeit in a supporting role.
• But despite the ridiculousness of this bizarre and troublesomely wholesome example, the authors ignore the simple fact that most moms have been working moms since history began.  It was only in the last century that the idea of a stay-at-home mom was able to enter the American ideal, and even that ideal was false.  While some upper middle class American women were staying at home with the children in the 1950's, most women, especially women of color, still had to work even during the hey day of the stay-at-home mom myth.
• Additionally, it was because of the social welfare state that the stay-at-home mom was even possible. Women in the tenement factories of the lower east side of New York stayed at home only because the deplorable conditions of their factories were in their own living rooms.  They weren't spending their time raising well adjusted children because they were too busy sewing together shirts.  If the factory wasn't in their home, they were traveling to the dangerous conditions of the Triangle Shirt Factory, or attempting to find milk that was unadulterated with bleach because there were no FDA regulations.  The women on the prairie weren't taking care of the kids while they waited around for their husbands to come back in from the fields.  They were growing vegetables, milking the cows, feeding the chickens, and doing the household repairs because how else were they to live before the price controls created in the New Deal.  In the stockyards in Chicago, there was no minimum wage, so wives went out to find work along side their husbands.  Oh yeah, and the absence of OSHA legislation meant that the men in the stockyards were often home for months at a time unable to work because of injuries.  The bosses didn't mind, because they could just replace them if they were injured.  After all, there were no unions.
• Meanwhile, during the 1950's (unquestionably the era of the regressivist's ideal stay-at-home mom), American union activity was at an all-time high, NASA was putting men into orbit, the federal government was crisscrossing the nation in freeways, and every dollar that an American earned over $1,000,000 was being taxed at 85%.  The regressivists want the benefits of the 1950's with the tax rate and deregulation of the 1890's.  But of course, it was the regulations and the taxes that made the 1950's what they were.  So maybe, it is the radical regressives who are truly trying to end the era of the stay-at-home mom if ever it actually existed.
• So lets talk about the true flip side of feminism.  When progressive policies created the conditions that made the stay-at-home mom an economic possibility, we neglected to recognize that we could have broken the mold of maleness and femaleness, instead we liked our hand and we doubled down.  Now that the regressivists feel that they are under attack, they are doubling down again.  Only this time, they are afraid that their dream of regression is never going to be possible.  In essence, they are bluffing. They want America to abandon feminism.  They want us to abandon our search for a better family, a better life, and liberation for men and women.

This is not the time to blink.  We have the opportunity to expand the benefits of feminism to men.  We have the opportunity to take the same benefits that created the possibility of the stay-at-home mom, and spread those benefits between working mom and working dad.  Perhaps we can create a world where moms and dads spend more time with their family, not based on their gender or their sex, but based on their love for their families.  It makes me angry to hear the women who wrote "Flipside" attacking universal day care and parental leave as evidence that feminism is a tool of the progress which they so fear, but it saddens me that their children will never truly know fathers who will spend their lives working for two, instead of learning how to be better dads.