Some time around the end of high school, possibly after I took my SAT and ACT, I started receiving a lot of recruitment letters from the various branches of the armed services. Now, as an ultra-liberal, disorganized sort of girl, who very much likes to be comfortable and not ever sweat, I wasn’t particularly interested in joining the armed services, so mostly I chucked the mail in the trash. That was, of course, before the Army offered me socks. I had a well-known weakness for colorful knee socks, and the Army offered to send me a pair of white knee socks with ARMY written down the sides in big, bright green letters, if only I’d send in the post card.
Suffice it to say, I sent in the post card.
After that, the phone calls began. At first, I demurred or just said I wasn’t interested, but the Army would not be swayed. I fielded quite a few calls from overzealous recruiters promising me the world (and to see the world, not realized I’d already seen quite a bit of it), if I would just enlist, which of course I had no intention of doing. One day, during a Girl Scout meeting, a recruiter called. I tried to politely extricate myself from the phone call (I’ll hang up on telemarketers, but have a harder time hanging up on the military), but it wasn’t until the recruiter started asking about my plans for the future that my escape route presented itself. “What do you see yourself doing with your future?” the recruiter asked. “I want to be a housewife,” I answered.
After a brief, silent pause, the recruiter said, “Well, thank you for your time.” That was the last phone call I ever received from any branch of the armed services.
Of course, at the time, being a housewife wasn’t actually my life’s aspiration. I was planning on going to college and do a nebulous something. I knew I wanted to have kids one day. I knew I wanted to stay home with my kids when I got around to having them. I didn’t, at that point, anticipate that in three years time or so, I’d find myself pregnant and facing an exceptionally truncated time line for “some day,” looking desperately for the avenue that would allow me to stay at home. Now, another nine years after that, I love staying home with my children, and continue to do so despite having gotten both my BA and my MA, which would allow me at least a few out-of-home career opportunities if I chose to pursue them. I like what I do (most days). I enjoy my current career as a mother and home educator.
What’s so important about all of this, though, is that I had a choice. I had plenty of options along the way, and stay-at-home-mom was just one of them. I had chances to pursue another career in my field, but chose another option, though I do think mothering is as much my field as writing and editing are.
One of the things that bothers me most about the ultra-fundie curricula is the complete lack of choices for little girls. You will grow up, get married to a suitor of our approval (if not outright choosing), have many babies, stay home and raise them, and maybe one day, when all the kids are grown, possibly be allowed to pursue college, work, or hobbies…if your husband approves it. Pearables’s Lessons in Responsibility for Girls books, which are alternately titled Home Economics for Homeschoolers (to make them more palatable?), teach all the important lessons in the domestic arts for girls who will never need any skills but those. Teach your long-skirted daughter to cook, clean, sew, and throw a party for her husband’s unexpected company. And goodness me, let’s not forget the importance of a young lady assembling a hope chest. Of course, a boy’s responsibilities include things like managing money, protecting the wimmens, being a priest in their home, and choosing a career. No such luck for girls. Girls, you see, don’t need options. Marry, have babies, keep house, and don’t pine for the fjords. Fjords are for boys.
I chose to be a wife. I chose to be a mother. I chose to stay at home as my primary occupation. I could have chosen a different path. I was educated well enough to have those paths readily available to me. I was raised knowing I could pursue any career my brother could, with the possible exceptions of a submariner (at the time, at least) and Chippendale dancer. I brushed the Army off with claims of wanting to be a housewife, but I could have enlisted if that had been my cuppa.
My daughter will have those same options available to her. If she chooses to stay at home and raise children, I’ll be supportive and proud of her choice. If she chooses to become a race car driver, painter, or CPA, I’ll be equally supportive and proud of her choice. I’ll see to it that she has the early education needed to provide a foundation for all of those choices. I will give her a broad, deep education to the best of my abilities and help her find others who can expand on that when my own resources fail. I won’t teach her to be a servant to her husband, that cleaning is woman’s work, that girls have to be protected by boys, or any of the other messages one can find in such treasure troves as the Vision Forum’s catalogs.
Secular education. Score one for the girls — the ones who want to enlist and the ones who just want to wear the knee socks. Choices are what it’s all about, and you can’t make a choice without the proper groundwork.
