What should a young woman do?

- A Balanced Perspective on the unnecessary career vs family debate -

Everyone has opinions about what women should or shouldn’t do with their lives. I have mine, but this isn’t the point of this essay. The point of this essay is to explain in very clear terms, the answer to a question that has been oversimplified and reduced to absurdity until the debate itself sounds like monkeys banging pots and pans, with as much appeal to the average person’s life.

A recent resurgence in interest in the “traditional way of life” has created a mimetic desire for women in the english-speaking world to assert once again that woman should stay home and look after the family and leave the money-making to the man. They assert that a girl is neither biologically nor psychologically “made” for a career outside the home, for a 9-5 job, and that raising children is more important than making spreadsheets or power-points.

For very good reason, this has confused and derailed many young women and men. It is particularly frustrating because the only people critiquing the idea are feminists, and they are coming to other, worse, and equally wrong conclusions. The feminist rebuttal asserts that men and women are interchangeable beings and that as such women should be encouraged to pursue the same interests, ambitions and life-paths as men. This is also wrong and has led to a lot of misery for the entire millennial generation, from which gen-Z is swinging the pendulum the other way.

Both these bad ideas have a kernel of truth in them, but a kernel of truth is not enough to make one good idea. 

It seems that two options are presented to young women: either go to university and end up as a “Career Girlboss Woman” who will not get married and die alone listening to Taylor Swift, or getting married at 40 and going through Frankenstein procedures to have a baby. OR, she will lie down on the sidewalk until some rich and handsome man somehow trips over her and decides to marry her and support her financially his whole life with no problems, while she raises their nine children, never doing anything other than childcare and domestic chores forever. All of these options are not only unrealistic, they are divorced from reality altogether! Yes there are people we may know who end up in one of these paths, but these cannot be the guidelines by which we tell young women to orient their lives because none of these paths account for the complexity and changes of life. 

What should a young woman do?

Art “alterego” by @evaellerart