Women Shouldn’t Work Outside the Home Anymore

Feminism liberated women from the home but made them prisoners to Corporate America. Maybe returning to the home isn't a bad thing after all.

Photo by Marisa Howenstine on Unsplash

Feminism promised to liberate women from domestic life. Instead, it imprisoned them.

The last few decades has seen the rise of the career-first girlboss. Inspired by second-wave feminists, these women believed college diplomas and corporate careers were the keys to happiness and success.

The opposite has proven to be true.

Girlbosses have become overeducated and overleveraged. The careers they’ve chosen haven’t provided the financial return on investment they were supposed to. Mired in debt, career women can’t afford to buy homes or other assets that would otherwise provide them with the financial independence they were originally promised.

And girlbosses aren’t finding fulfillment through family life anymore either. Rather than managing their households, women prefer to compete for wages alongside men outside of the home. In doing so, they’ve become men.

Men want wives – not roommates. Unable to find women who are willing to wear the skirt in the relationship, men are opting out of relationships altogether.

This has left a growing number of women alone and childless. Girlbosses have proudly built careers for themselves, but beyond the bullet points on their resumes, they have little else to show for their lives.

This begs an important question: are girlbosses better off than their grandmothers? The evidence doesn’t suggest so.

Surveys reveal that liberal women – the demographic that most aligns with career-first feminist ideology – are much less satisfied with their lives than their more traditional, conservative peers. Many are medicating themselves to cope. Almost a quarter of women in their 40s and 50s are on antidepressants. Meanwhile, the rate of antidepressant usage for teen girls has surged since the pandemic.

And women aren’t better off financially either. Rather than finding financial freedom, women have become trapped in the same rat race as their male counterparts. They’re just as dependent on the benevolence of their employer’s biweekly paycheck as men are.

If career-first feminism was right, where is all the success and happiness women were promised? Why are so many modern women poor, childless, and struggling with mental health issues at an unprecedented scale?

While returning to the kitchen isn’t viable or desirable for many working women, maybe it’s time to start questioning the value of women working outside of the home. What if career feminism was wrong? What if women would be better off at home?

That’s what this essay will dive into. It will take the controversial opinion that most women shouldn’t work a traditional 9to5 job. Instead of climbing a corporate ladder that’s already been laid out for them, women would be better off creating their own careers. Careers that allow them to work from home, balancing work with family.

While women shouldn’t surrender their ability to earn a living or subordinate their vocational calling to motherhood, they shouldn’t sacrifice their womanhood for the benefit of Corporate America either.

Working women haven’t been financially liberated by their careers. It’s clear career feminism isn’t working. Maybe it’s time to try something new. Or rather, go back to what has always worked before.

Women have always worked. Historically, they’ve just worked better in jobs that prioritize family life.

Before we dive in, it’s important to understand how we got to where we are now.

There’s a common stereotype that women have always been oppressed by their husbands. Trapped in abusive relationships in the suburbs, women were forced to perform domestic duties without the means to earn a living for themselves.

That couldn’t be further from the truth. While suburban women did struggle with mental health issues and isolation, it was more to do with June Cleaver than their husbands. Women weren’t unhappy because their husbands were abusing them, women were unhappy because they couldn’t meet the expectations Hollywood and Madison Avenue had prescribed for them.

Reality got lost in translation. Feminists never once considered that women could be the ones who instigated abuse. Or that men, in an effort to sacrifice themselves in the rat race, were trying to liberate women from the world of work.

What modern women don’t understand is that historically speaking, working outside the home is the exception not the rule. It’s only very recently that women have surrendered their traditional duties of managing a house and raising children in exchange for a paycheck.

Women have always worked. They’ve always had an important role to play. They just haven’t always worked in the 9to5 jobs created by Corporate America.

If you go back to hunter-gatherer times, women had specific duties and responsibilities within their tribes. Even though women didn’t typically go on big game hunts with the men, they were still skilled hunters. They had to know how to hunt so they could teach those skills to their children.

Roman women managed their households no different than women in the 1950s. But they weren’t oppressed. They practiced medicine, participated in skilled trades like making clothing, and educated the children of wealthy families. And anyone who has studied Roman history knows that women held power and often pulled the strings behind the scenes.¹

The Roman tradition of work carried on through the Middle Ages and followed women as they settled the American west. Pioneer women managed their homes, cooked food, sewed clothes, and because there wasn’t always someone around to protect them, they had to learn to safeguard their isolated homesteads.

Women have never been excluded from economic life as feminists would like you to believe. They just haven’t played the same role as men. There was always work to be done at home and women were more than happy to perform that work. For many, it was preferable to laboring in the fields, toiling in a factory, or managing an inn filled with lecherous men.

The advent of mass consumerism changed everything. Women who previously found contentment in domestic life suddenly wanted to be liberated from it.

World War II changed how women earned money. The rise of mass consumer culture made spending money a new priority for them. Women saw a new need to earn money of their own.

Women’s relationship with work fundamentally changed during World War II. While the men were off fighting on the battlefields in Europe and Japan, women were left at home to run the factories supporting the war effort. For many, this was not only their first time working outside of the home but their first time earning a living of their own.

Without families to care for, young women could do with their income as they pleased. It wasn’t just about the freedom to earn money, it was also about the freedom to spend it.

After the war, men returned home and started new families. This led to the creation of suburbs. As this was happening, the country was undergoing a significant cultural transformation. Mass produced consumer goods were becoming more affordable and the ascendance of the Golden Age of Television created new idealistic lives consumers aspired to live up to.

During this time the myth of the suburban American housewife was born. Womanhood was portrayed in advertising and personified in new TV sitcoms. Women began buying things to achieve social expectations of what they were told modern womanhood was supposed to be like.

It’s no accident that women felt isolated and unfulfilled as domestic housewives. When consumerism takes away your ability to do things for yourself, it robs you of meaning and purpose. Buying a loaf of Wonder Bread will never be as fulfilling as baking a fresh loaf yourself.

The confluence of mass consumerism with the shift in culture led feminists like Betty Friedan to conclude that domestic life oppressed women – not the unrealistic lives of women portrayed in the media. The solution was to liberate women from the home through education and work.

But instead of finding freedom, women found themselves in a new trap – the rat race.

Women are now a core part of the workforce. But are they better off? Not really.

The economy unraveled in the 1970s. Not too long after Nixon took America off the gold standard, wages began to decouple from productivity. More women began entering the workforce. In 1950, 34% of women worked outside the home. By 1970, this figure jumped to 43%.²

In a happy coincidence for feminists, women seized the call for political equality just as the economy necessitated more of their participation in it. Unfortunately, this may have done more harm than good.

When women left the home to find freedom in Corporate America, they inadvertently increased the supply of labor in the market. As the labor supply went up wages fell. Just like factory owners in the 19th and 20th centuries, corporate executives saw women as a cost-saving opportunity.

Employers suddenly had a plethora of workers to choose from. As a result, wages fell for everyone including men.³ With less purchasing power and a rising cost of living, many families found they couldn’t support themselves on one income alone. Women had to work.

This brings us to where we are today. The vast majority of women now work outside of the home. It’s no longer an economic necessity but also a social expectation. Stay at home moms aren’t exactly looked upon favorably in today’s society.

While feminists worked hard to liberate women from the home, few have stopped to ask if women are actually better off because of their efforts. Are dual-income households where both parents work better? Are women financially better than their grandmothers?

The evidence suggests they’re not.

Women who work 9to5 jobs aren’t making enough money to cover major expenses like childcare. If there isn’t a sufficient financial return from women’s labor in Corporate America, what’s the point of having a 9to5 job in the first place?

Financial independence comes with a price. Betty Friedan and her colleagues seemed to have forgotten that bit of information when they pushed women to liberate themselves from the home.

The very thing that was supposed to liberate women from the home – a 9to5 job – has left women without the very resource they need to realize their independence – money. You only need to look at the state of childcare to understand the absurdity of the financial situation women have found themselves in.

Women who decide to start families while maintaining their 9to5 careers will need to pay someone else to raise their children for them. Anyone who has kids knows how expensive childcare is.

A father recently went viral after posting a video on TikTok about the exorbitant cost of childcare. In the video, he stated that the monthly cost of daycare for a toddler and newborn would run him and his wife $4,495 per month.

@gregtay25YOU ALL SHOULD BE HAVING MORE KIDS! Why would you not? #america #parenting #daycare #jacksonville #florida #montessori #fyp #family

Tiktok failed to load.

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The cost of childcare is quickly outpacing women’s earnings in Corporate America. According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary for women in the United States is $1,096 per week or $56,992 per year. After taxes, a woman earning this much here in Texas would have a take home income of $47,777 or $3,981.46.

Women aren’t bringing home enough bacon to justify paying someone else to raise their kids. As

Michael Woudenberg

writes in Rat Race Feminism the economic value of women leaving the workforce to raise their own children is greater than paying someone else to raise their children for them:

A few years ago, I ran the numbers on how much Lisa would have to make to equal $15 an hour in take-home pay. The first issue is that anything she earns, on top of my salary, is taxed at the 25% tax bracket. Then, factoring the costs of childcare, after-school care, the additional cost of convenience vs. budget groceries, the additional wear and tear on vehicles, etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseum… Well, to cut to the chase, she’d have to make almost $90,000 a year to come home with $15/hr. Put another way, for our family, her staying home is worth over $60,000 a year on the modest side.

How many modern women have actually sat down and crunched the numbers? I suspect not many. And even if you factor in a two-income household, the numbers don’t get better.

The median household income is $80,610 or about $64,868 after taxes. I asked ChatGPT to give me a rough estimate of the cost of living for a family here in Austin. Here’s what it gave me:

Families aren’t breaking even. Whatever income women are earning is going straight to childcare and other living expenses. And kids aren’t better off because of mom’s career. Women have invested so much effort building careers that just aren’t paying off.

This begs an important question: if the cost of childcare negates the economic value of a woman’s salary, what’s the point of working outside of the home in the first place?

If there’s no financial gain from working outside the home, wouldn’t women be better off raising their kids and managing their households themselves?

Maybe it really is time for women to do the math and consider this reality. Maybe 9to5 life just isn’t what it’s been made out to be.

Final takeaway.

If career feminism has revealed anything it’s that reality isn’t always aligned with our expectations of what reality should be.

Feminists taught young women that their grandmothers were oppressed. They argued that going to college and pursuing careers would improve their quality of life.

Instead, it did the exact opposite. Career feminism has left women uneducated and saddled with student loan debt. Their careers have left them unable to afford the cost of starting a family.

If women actually liked their jobs maybe it would be worth it. But most don’t. To cope with the soullessness of Corporate America, career women are more medicated than generations past.

Maybe it’s time for women to actually consider the possibility that Corporate America just isn’t worth it.

The problem isn’t women participating in economic life or working outside of the home. The problem is how work outside the home is structured.

Corporate America removes women from the home. In doing so, it puts a financial and emotional burden on women who try to have a career while raising their children.

Up until now, the solution has been to demand more from men in the home. That isn’t working. Instead, women need to consider that the structure of work isn’t conducive to family life. You can have a career or you can have a family but you can’t have both successfully.

Women need to prioritize what’s important to them. If it’s a career then by all means pursue a career. But if it’s not, women need to take the initiative to design a new career ladder for themselves.

Instead of working for someone else on their terms and on their schedule, women have the power to work for themselves. Thanks to the internet, anyone can earn an income doing just about anything. If you’re good at what you do you can wind up earning more than what you earned in Corporate America – not less.

The cost of living has gotten out of control. It’s been out of control for decades. It’s not going to change anytime soon. But not starting a family isn’t the solution. Your resume won’t be there to mourn you when you’re gone but your children will.

As the economy changes, society and culture will change with it. Women now have an opportunity to return to the home on their own terms. The question is will they seize the opportunity to leave the prison that feminism put them in?

1. Read up on Agrippa the Younger to understand just how much influence and power women could yield.

2. https://statusofwomendata.org/earnings-and-the-gender-wage-gap/womens-labor-force-participation/#:~:text=As%20of%202014%2C%20nearly%20six,in%201970%20(Fullerton%201999).

3. Women entering the workforce aren’t the only reason for stagnant wages but they are a major contributor. Other reasons include redistribution of productivity gains to executive compensation packages, shareholders, and the creation of bullshit jobs.

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