What women want

No no no, not the Mel Gibson movie (does anybody even remember that one?). I think that if someone were to ask me what I as a woman want, I think it would be simple (aside from ice cream, puppies, and a hot tub in my living room of course). I’d like “professional women” to stop telling me what I want. I don’t mean women who are professionals – I mean those who make a profession out of being a woman.

I suppose this article does try to tell us what we want, but I think it hits closer than anything else:

Many in the media and academy think working women are one way, and that stay-at-home wives and mothers are another way. This overlooks the fact that many women who work outside the home would like to work less or not at all. That is, they are working because they feel they have to, not because they want to.

. . .

Wilcox bases his analysis on the 2000 National Survey of Marriage and Family Life, which, he explains, “indicates that, among married mothers with children in the home under 18, only 18 percent of married mothers would prefer to work full-time; by contrast, 46 percent would prefer to work part-time, and 36 percent would prefer to stay at home.”

Which brings us to what women want:

Will this authentic view of womanhood usurp the old political archetypes of what women want? The conversation has begun to rise above self-identified feminists’ assertions as to women’s desires. May it continue and bear fruit. And, whoever wins or loses, this is a whole new playing field in politics, one that more accurately reflects who American women actually are and, yes, what they really want. The American woman wants to annihilate this idea that career is everything. She wants a life. She wants life. And she wants help in being adaptive, not pressure to be something she’s not.

I’m think even a hardcore professional career woman would have a tough time arguing with that.

Read the whole article here.

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