I thought that the below article offered an interesting perspective on the decision to stay at home or work for those of us who have a choice...

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"American women are spending more time at work and having fewer children, both of which are fine, says Neil Gilbert, as long as that is what they really want. But some women may have been sold a bill of goods, warns the professor of social welfare at the University of California at Berkeley.


For many women, working outside the home is not an economic necessity, so they may be motivated by the perception that employment is freeing and personally fulfilling, he says.


Paid work "is widely associated with the virtues of personal empowerment, achievement, and self-realization, particularly by public-opinion makers -- professors, journalists, authors, artists, and pundits -- whose jobs tend to provide these benefits," he writes. "But the joys of work are not evenly distributed."


The elite few for whom paid work does impart joy and independence, he says, perpetuate the myth that such is the case for everyone. But "for most wage labor, the independence that comes with a paycheck is accompanied by obedience to the daily authority of supervisors, submission to the schedule and discipline of the work environment, deference to the demands of customers, and susceptibility to the vagaries of the marketplace," he writes.


While the expansion of employment opportunities for women is one of the "major social accomplishments of recent times," he says, and many women prefer a work-oriented lifestyle to a child-oriented one, others would rather have more children and
spend more time at home with them.


Those women should not be overly influenced, he says, by the current social expectation that women and men will both work full time while sharing child-rearing duties equally -- an expectation that has been "more influential in the socialization of women than men.""


The article, "Family Life: Sold on Work," is online for subscribers. Information about the journal is available at http://www.transactionpub.com/