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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

My college educated wife chose to stay home. Some of her friends and family view this as a deliberately provocative anti-feminist choice, and we're in the midwest. I can only imagine those sentiments would be even more common in SV.

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My wife is also college educated and stays home. I don't see how this is anti-feminist, though. The way I see it, it's a woman choosing to live the way she wants to live. It had never occurred to me that this could be anti-feminist.

Then again, I live in Utah where a sizeable portion of the college-educated women major in Family and Consumer Sciences at BYU. Seriously, though. http://registrar.byu.edu/catalog/2011-2012ucat/departments/F...

My wife graduated in marketing and has worked and is fully able to work as a professional. I kind of view it as noble for her to bear the responsibility of full-time child rearing. It's undoubtedly a more difficult task than my sitting around on a computer all day occasionally going to meetings with catered lunches. ;)

I agree - I understand that a key aspect of feminism is "a woman choosing to live the way she wants to live". That means women, as well as men, staying home with the kids, if that's their choice. They shouldn't be forced into traditional roles, but are perfectly welcome to choose them.

Her friends can suck it. It's your family, you make the decisions, because you live with the consequences.

It's cliche, but: if someone stops being your friend because you leave the job market for personal reasons, they were never your friend.

That may be true, but I'm guessing it's poor consolation when you're a new parent and have no one to talk to. Isolation and loneliness is a common theme in new mothers.

I don't agree this is an anti-feminist choice, but I think people might see it that way because genuinely anti-feminist people like to claim that a woman's place is in the home and that women's brains aren't really suited for tasks that aren't nurturing. So women staying home to take care of the children, on a surface level, supports this traditional anti-feminist argument and this is why it could be seen as anti-feminist.

My college educated wife also chose to stay home! She knew that's what she wanted to do before college.

I think it's hard to disparage when any partner chooses to stay home -- and isn't choice a core tenant of feminism?

See my theory here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9236049

EDIT: Please, and if you want.

I agree, and celebrate the choice, but if you feel more strongly about the oppression imposed by customs, it may feel something like seeing a battered wife returning to her aggressor (except the "aggressor" is society, not the husband).

That said, even if you think the person made a poor choice, criticism and cutting off relations is a terrible response - in either case!

Something more important that working? Blasphemy!

Indeed, staying at home shouldn't be seen as anti-feminist. It should be seen as contra-modern-capitalism.

They think that a woman making a non-traditional[1] choice is anti-feminist? They think that woman should fall in line and do what is expected of her (out of ideology)? How wonderfully ironic.

[1] staying at home might as well be the new non-traditional choice. Feminism is now the old guard.

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