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pennygadgetAugust 29, 2024
Not just this, but fathers get kudos for doing basic childcare while mothers have their EVERY decision scrutinized and judged. If a man gives his baby a bottle, people will swoon about what an involved dad he is. It a woman gives the baby a bottle, she gets judged for not breastfeeding
GrimeldaSAugust 29, 2024
Or when they call it 'babysitting' when dad is looking after his own damn kids.
cranberrysalad [OP]August 29, 2024
Exactly this. Just as there is no unmarked woman, there is no unjudged mother.
delicate_silicateAugust 29, 2024
I say we ditch that phrase and start using "jobless sperm donor" instead.
asmahanAugust 29, 2024
I think the comments in this thread so far (and most likely ones to come) are better/more thoughtful examples than the original prompt.
Traditionally, the father would have gone out to work while the mother would have been a housewife looking after kids. So there's nothing remarkable about a dad who works, it's the expectation. You call out a "working mom" because she was an unusual exception. It's like Fox News idiotically talking about "homicide bombers" when they mean suicide bombers. Any bomber is expected to be taking other people's lives, the remarkable aspect of this bomber is that he's willing to take his own life in service of the goal.
Now, it may be that the cultural norm for porn-addicted, marxist-adjacent, woke millennial-and-younger men is that they don't work while their wives do (and continue to do all the housework/childcare while their spouse plays video games), in which case the original example might be a valid complaint. It seems bizarrely difficult to find statistics on this past 2012 but a search AI finally gave me a response of around 25% of women identifying as stay-at-home moms in 2022, so they're the minority of women but still a sizeable-enough chunk and paired with tradition, societal organization and institutions, I can see "working mom" still being seen as a class to be labeled and discussed separately from stay-at-home-mom, or childless female in the workforce, or male with offspring in or out of the workforce who probably doesn't pull his weight with respect to childcare. Meanwhile male labor force participation is around 88% while female is between 56-66%. So it still seems to be the normal expectation that a dad works and while a mom these days probably also does, there isn’t the same societal expectation.
At what point did moms “traditionally” not work? I think the housewife is a modern invention. Women have always worked inside and outside of the home.
hard_headed_womanAugust 29, 2024
Most married women still worked close to home - inside the home, family farm, or family business. My grandparents had a store with a huge room in the back set up as a small living/kitchen area. My grandmother cooked meals there, tended her kids till they were old enough for school, and helped with the store before going home and doing all the housework, etc. The store became just successful enough that she had a "maid" helping with the cooking and ironing at the store and cleaning at home. I can vaguely remember being there as a young child and watching the maid, Anna, (as she was called then) iron, and I remember sitting in my grandmother's lap as she took a break to "watch her stories" and tended the cooking. :)
Fanny_WrighterAugust 29, 2024
That is a sweet story. I was thinking of my own great grandmother who basically ran the farm while tending children because her husband had a job outside the home. And my grandma was a “preacher’s wife” which is a kind of job on its own plus raising the kids and having a small homestead. Then when she was in her 50s she went to school and became an RN and worked until she died.
hard_headed_womanAugust 29, 2024
Wow. Your grandmother was amazing, but then, I always thought mine set the moon in the sky. LOL
somegenerichandleAugust 29, 2024
tbf, I'm not sure i've really heard 'working mom' i know it's a thing, just not really used in my circles. It's more rare to be a mom who doesn't work.
CaeruleaAugust 29, 2024
Same here. The mothers still do most of the housework and child-care, though. Double shifts for the women.
When the dad walks off leaving a single mother, his parental responsibility is erased and he can go on perfectly fine as if he never had any kids, plus he gets to use his statues for pity points.
the mother gets vilified.
if the mother walks off leaving a single dad, the dad gets pity points and everyone tripping over themselves to say how great it is he's looking after his own children all on his own what a awesome dad he is.
the mother gets vilified.
Yes.
'Single mum': what did she do to drive the father away? He must be so unhappy to be separated from his kids.
'Single dad': poor guy, why did she leave him? Doesn't she love her kids?