'Justa' Homemaker: one Canadian's fight for recognition

Commonweal, Feb 27, 1998 by Beverly Smith

I am not arguing that I am a better mother than others, or that raising kids at home is better than day care. Not at all. It's true that women were once more or less chained to the sink, and that was bad. Today - unless we can freely choose where we want to be - we are chained to the office desk. Speaking strictly as a feminist, I think that belittling women's work in the home was and is wrong. Allowing women to enter the professions was right, but it moved only halfway. To say women now have value because they can do what was men's work still says that only what was men's work has value. Women's work has value wherever it happens; if it is in the home in a very traditional role, it is as good as any other role. Women have to be seen not only as equals of men but as equals of one another.

If this way of thinking makes me a radical, so be it. My formal complaint to the United Nations accusing my government of official discrimination against homemakers has been accepted and will be heard by the UN's Division for the Advancement of Women, an arm of the Commission on the Status of Women, when this body meets in New York March 2-13. Two Canadian women's groups, Kids First and Mothers Are Women, have officially backed my complaint, and Endeavor Forum in Australia will support it with a matching one against their own government. I have received encouragement as well from Parents Rights in the United States, Unione Intercontinentale Caslinghe in Rome, Great Britain's National Assembly of Women, and the World Movement of Mothers in Paris. There's irony here, in that what was traditional, a societal norm, is now seen as aberrant. But that's okay. I'm up for it.

Beverly Smith is a free-lance writer, a former teacher of French in grades seven through nine, and the mother of four children, ages seventeen through twenty-three. She lives in Calgary, Alberta.