Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

Some mothers in today's world feel "cumbered" by home duties and are thus attracted by other more "romantic" challenges. Such women could make the same error of perspective that Martha made. The woman, for instance, who deserts the cradle in order to help defend civilization against the barbarians may well later meet, among the barbarians, her own neglected child.

The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.

I think I'm a better mother because of work, because I'm happy. If I wasn't working, I would just be waiting for the kids to come home every day, and living vicariously through their lives.

I'm almost a full-time mom.

My work makes me a better mom. It gives me a little door to step out of my parenting and bring the excitement from my day back home.

Working moms, stay at home moms, they're both extremely hard jobs.

There are 80 million moms in the United States. Forty million stay at home with their children.

I'd just as soon stay home and raise babies.

What I really wanted to do, actually, was stay home and be a mom and have some more kids.

One thing I've been happy as peach pie about - because I'm all about the children and the happiness of a woman because that makes the happiness of the home - is that nannies, day cares and babysitters are all collapsing, which is forcing moms and dads to raise their children at home.

A lot of mothers want to be with their children. They can't afford it for this reason or that reason.

So, the total number of hours spent on the stuff you have to do to take care of a family, working and caring for stuff at home, the total number of hours is actually about the same for mothers and fathers.

As motherhood as a "private enterprise" declines and more mothers rely on the work of lower-paid specialists, the value accorded the work of mothering (not the value of children) has declined for women, making it all the harder for men to take it up.

In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might find they don't both need to. ... What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else - or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon - find themselves more affirmed by society? Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism.

Right now, we say in a traditional home one parent stays home with the children and the other provides the financial support for that family. That is the acceptable and right thing to do. If we begin to expand that, not only do we dilute the resources that are available, we begin to dilute things like health care, retirement, all the things offered to families that help them be a family.

So immense are the claims on a mother, physical claims on her bodily and brain vigor, and moral claims on her heart and thoughts, that she cannot ... meet them all and find any large margin beyond for other cares and work. She serves the community in the very best and highest way it is possible to do, by giving birth to healthy children, whose physical strength has not been defrauded, and to whose moral and mental nature she can give the whole of her thoughts.

They blame the low income women for ruining the country because they are staying home with their children and not going out to work. They blame the middle income women for ruining the country because they go out to work and do not stay home to take care of their children.

I ordinarily do one film a year and the rest of the time I'm at home with the kids. Even when I am working I'm still basically at home and with the kids. I've never left them to go to work.

As more women have gone into the workforce, they find it harder to be a good mother and a good worker. When I go into the office, I always feel guilty. I'm thinking about the children. When I'm at home, I'm thinking about my work. So you're always under tremendous pressure. Women feel very stressed. They feel like they're working harder and harder and harder. And society is not really helping them.

Now, we've made the revolutionary discovery that children have two parents. A decade ago even the kindly Dr. Spock held mothers solely responsible for children.

All mothers are working mothers.

With all the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world!

I am very fulfilled in my home life, and what films do for me is to create an ironclad structure that, in my life as a mom, does not exist. It is a shapeless blob of happy chaos.

It is one thing to be a man's wife - quite another to be the mother of his children. In fact, once you become a mother, being a wife seems like a game you once played or a self-help book you were overly impressed with as a teenager that on second reading is puffy with common ideas. This was one of the many things I had learned since crossing over into the middle place - that sliver of time when childhood and parenthood overlap.

Staying at home with your kids is probably one of the hardest jobs, emotionally, physically and mentally.