In addition to the idea that men should relegate the care of children to women, John Locke believed that men had paternal rights over their children. In seventeenth-century England, Locke spelled out that women should only be responsible for their children by default, meaning if they divorce their husbands, or the father dies or abandons them.

John Stuart Mill, with his ideas of utilitarianism in the following century, thought that the greater good was best served by women being wives and mothers. Women would be a threat if they were not educationally and economically at a disadvantage. The glass ceiling exists so that women will stay home and raise their children. Mill can be thanked for the theory that prevents equal work for equal pay. Women who receive less money for the same work as men are more likely to remain at home.

Under closer examination, the G.I. bill came into existence as a way to educate men after their years of military service. What does a woman receive if she decides to stay home to raise her children? There is not pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for her. Government does not give her money to educate herself so she can freshen her skills in order to be competitive in the workplace.

Women who stay at home to raise children are stigmatized. With so many women in the work force, women who remain home out of concern for the welfare of their children are seen as frowsy housewives. Even the term, stay-at-home mother is stigmatic. If it were not, women who remained home to be with their children would be at-home mothers. The phrase stay-at-home implies mothers docilely accept the ball and chain of home and hearth and have poor social skills because they never get out of the house.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman pointed out that women are pushed into marriage by economics. If women want a comfortable life style with rights and privileges, they must marry and place themselves in a subordinate role. All of the family sitting down for dinner together which is touted by the media as a way to maintain family ties would be viewed by Gilman as a way to enslave women with the chore of endless cooking, yet another ball and chain. She advocated communal dining halls to relieve women of the responsibility. George Orwell took up the idea in his book, 1984. The British film version of the novel shows workers eating in communal dining halls.

The term, “mommy wars,” was used in the eighties to identify the antipathy between the many mothers struggling to be “wonder women,” successfully raising children, rising in their careers, keeping the home immaculate and their husbands interested and the mothers who chose to remain at home while raising their families. Until the government compensates women for staying at home and raising their children, a woman’s decision to be a homemaker will continue to raise the contempt of working women and serve as endless fodder for conflicting views by women about what constitutes “fighting in the trenches.”