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Taking the Mommy Track to Oblivion?

The New York Times' most forwarded article today is Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood. At its most interesting, the article asks what it means for society when well-trained, smart, and motivated women groomed for positions of leadership and power opt out of the 9-to-5 (or, more realistically, 9-to-6, 7 or 8) workday and take up the full-time work of raising children. The article argues that this is an important question for elite institutions as
The women [these schools] are counting on to lead society are likely to marry
men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be
full-time mothers.
What the article fails to properly acknowledge is that the majority of the "stay at home moms" who come from these high-achieving, privileged backgrounds probably won’t be structuring their days like those of a middle-class 1950s housewife. Instead, most will channel at least some of their hyper-perfectionist, overachieving, multi-tasking energy into community involvement. Is this work not an acceptable definition of leadership?

Implicit in the “social impact of motherhood” question is the noblesse oblige ethos of elite education: social responsibility accompanies privilege. That ethos certainly plays an important part in my life decisions, and I hope that it does in lives of my classmates, too. But I think we’d be wrong to assume that the only way to fulfill this obligation is through high-powered work-for-pay. We shouldn’t devalue the social import of the work of raising good kids or of the volunteer work that makes our schools, charities, churches, and other important organizations run.

I’m 99.9% sure that full-time motherhood is not a choice I’d make for myself, but I don’t think there should be a filter question on Ivy applications to keep out those who would.

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