The feminist mother-educator
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Parenting on 17 Jun 2009.
I first came across this post about feminism and homeschool at childofnarnia‘s blog. I was piqued because when my wife gave up her career, there were mumblings about ‘wasting your education’ and all that. What interested me was the revelation that there was some sort of feminist backlash at women who decided to abandon their career – highly educated ones at that – to stay home and educate their own children.
These mother-educators are giving up good-paying jobs to homeschool and nurture their kids. You know, in an age where women no longer have to be chained to the kitchen sink, more and more are deserting hard-earned gains in gender equality to embrace a pre-Women’s Lib (as it was called then) male dominated social order. Shocking! But as the writer Wendy McElroy argues, what women are abandoning is the singular agenda of feminist self-interest in favour of choice – in this case, finding fulfilment as a mother raising and homeschooling her own children. So is there a tension or contradiction between feminism and traditional values, or is homeschool a step backwards for women? Read on, and you decide.
Homeschooling constitutes a revolution in education. But it is also one of the most significant trends to affect women and families in decades, especially since it is led by mother-educators. Homeschooling is part of a social shift by which women are moving back toward traditional family values, not because they have to but because they want to do so.
Analysis of homeschooling has focused on the children—and properly so—but the relationship of mother-educators to feminism deserves investigation in its own right. Homeschooling is a trend that mainstream feminism is resisting because the teaching at-home mom threatens many of the values it espouses, including financial independence.
The tension between homeschooling and feminism arises not from feminism per se, but from the politically correct version that has dominated the movement for over a decade. PC feminism regards the traditional family as a training ground for patriarchy—that is, for the white male culture that oppresses women.
Fortunately, other schools of feminism view staying at home as simply one more choice that a self-respecting, intelligent woman can make or reject, depending on her goals in life. Individualist feminism is one example. For this school of feminism, freedom means having every peaceful choice possible and taking personal responsibility for all your actions. In this framework, one woman’s decision to stay at home is not politically better or worse than another woman’s choice to become a CEO. Both are personal matters. Both express the core of true feminism: choice.
Read the rest here. (Warning – really long post)
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