It is like bashing your head against the wall, because these women come out of the woodwork often enough for it to matter

It often seem that for every step forward we take ten thousand steps back. The latest book published in the ever lasting debate between stay-at-home vs working mothers is this step back to the 1950's voice of an american woman named Megan Basham. Her book, Beside every successful man - A woman's guide to having it all, not only argues that 80% of all women want to work fewer hours after their children are born, but that men and women's brains are biologically different in their way of thinking. "Women are collaborators", she said in The Guardian last week. "We have a more communal concept of success, and a lot of that applies to our relationships."

She also states that traditional marriage, ie, the one's where the wife stays at home, are less likely to end in divorce than those where both partners work full-time. In order to fullfill herself and to boost the family's economy a woman should stand beside her man, support him in his carreer-moves, help him write CV's and make sure that he has a nice, realxing home to come back to after a long day at work.
Needless to say, Basham's type of "choice feminism" has met a lot of harsh criticism.

Basham completely ignores the fact that housewifery has very little to do with about choice but is often simply a plain case of throwing in the towel. I am all for personal choice but I resent the statement that our society as a whole would be a better place if women stayed at home - let's just call a spade a spade, and not try and sex this thing up: women stay at home because most families who would like their children to have some kind of parental interaction during otherwise long stressful working weeks have no other choice since there simply are no compromises in terms of flexible working hours and affordable child-care.
After years of hard work in college and universities did we really have no other ambitions than to become our husbands un-paid PA's?
It is insulting to say that this is about biological differences (it is also a very weak argument to keep in those cases where the husband gets bored with his PA at home and starts sleeping around with the secretary at work.)
This is about it being 2009 and women are still being second class citizen's, and dressing it up as anything else is pointless. Let's have a proper debate on how many women actually stay at home through choice, and what we could do to actually to strike up a balance between home and real, paid work