Define “great things”. Women have been free to do pretty much what they want for over 50 years now. Where are the great companies founded and built by women? Where are the Nobel Prize winners in the hard sciences? Where are the amazing inventions one would expect from this huge infusion of human capital? Nearly non-existent.
Civilization is fragile. To survive, it doesn’t need women sitting in cubicles en-masse making PowerPoint presentations whilst strangers raise their kids. It needs them bringing up the next generation of responsible, well adjusted adults. There have always and will always be exceptions. Not everyone is called to marriage and raising a family. But I would posit that the vast majority of people who deny their gender roles (as you describe them) have failed, and they know it, at least subconsciously. It’s not for nothing that more than 1 in 4 women in the U.S. are on some type of anti depressant. I’d probably need to chomp Xanax too if I had to drop my kids off at the day care farm and head to a meaningless, soul crushing job just so I could drive a better car, have a bigger house, whatever.
The author of the book in the OP is a working woman and (as I recall from a previous thread) she says her husband helps out a lot.
Also, if a woman is supposed to “marry him and be submissive” and he says to keep working, then that probably means continuing to work. If you look around real life and the internet, it’s really not that difficult to find women who are working because their husbands insist that they do so. (My husband, for example, is very eager for me to start helping with our third set of private school tuitions.) There are not a lot of men happy with the idea of their wives never working a day after the first baby.
Furthermore, I think you should have a look at a list of female Nobelists in the sciences. While it is true that there are not a lot of female physics Nobelists (2), there are a few more female chemistry Nobelists (4–two of them are Curie family members!), and then there’s a fair number in the “physiology or medicine” category (12). Interestingly while all but one of the chemistry and physics Nobel prizes awarded to women were pre-1965, only one of the medicine/physiology prizes was awarded pre-1965. Here’s the distribution of medicine/physiology prizes awarded to women: 1940s (1), 1970s (1), 1980s (3), 1990s (1), oughts (4), teens (2). To my eye, it looks like there hasn’t been a lot of movement of women into the tippy top of research chemistry and physics over the last 50 years BUT that is exactly what has happened in medicine/physiology. While there is a lot of complaining/bragging about the lack of women in STEM, the people who do so are ignoring biology and medicine, which are fields that have seen a tremendous influx of women.
Also, why does “great things” need to mean the stuff that you personally value (being a CEO or inventor)? Those people are very unusual, even among men. There was only one Steve Jobs, there is only one Elon Musk, etc. It really is not true that employment consists purely of the two categories you describe–female Power Point presenters versus world-changing male CEOs, Nobel prize winners and inventors.
I used to be just as gungho as anybody about how every mother ought to be home with her kids, but then at some point as a SAHM, I started realizing that why yes, I did appreciate all these female preschool teachers, school teachers, principals, psychologists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, nurses, pediatricians, OB/GYNs, mammogram techs, ultrasound techs, phlebotomists and lab techs, x-ray techs, etc. who are making my and my family’s life better than they would be if all of those people just stayed home. (Really–I do not want a male mammographer or lactation consultant!) That, too, is civilization, just as much as it is to make a really thin cell phone or a snazzy electric car.
Furthermore, your view that employment of mothers causes female depression is a bit lacking in empirical grounding. For one thing, women just are very prone to depression.
mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/in-depth/depression/art-20047725
If you’ll look at that link, you’ll notice that female depression seems to be largely driven by hormonal issues–puberty, pregnancy, postpartum and perimenopause are all associated with depression.
Interestingly, if anything, being a SAHM is associated with more, not less depression among women and depression seems to be an occupational disease of SAHMs.
“The study found that 28 percent of stay-at-home moms reported depression a lot of the day when asked how they were feeling the day before, but only 17 percent of employed moms did. Of the group, 26 percent of SAHMs said they experienced depression, vs. just 16 percent of working moms. And 41 percent of the at-homers reported worry, compared to only 34 percent of their counterparts.”
metroparent.com/daily/parenting/parenting-issues-tips/stay-home-moms-depressed-angry-sad-study-says/
Obviously, there’s a casuality issue there (women with depression or other serious problems may be unable to work, triggering deeper depression), but this does demonstrate that staying home is not some sort of mental health cure-all for women and that SAHM’s mental health is something that we should be a lot more concerned about.
