(My wife) would have been a superb architect. She could have made a superior surgeon also, or done beautifully in any number of other fields, but I am grateful that she didn’t. Rearing two children and adding emotional wholeness to the world is an achievement that is incomparably more important than any surgeon’s or artist’s or scientist’s.
I am all for mothers working if they want to… how they live is none of my business and I won’t begrudge them their high standing… what angers me is a housewife’s low standing. …
When a working mother like the Hillary Clinton condescends (as she did in her infamous remarks about not staying home to bake cookies) to women like my grandmothers and my mother and my wife, I am furious and despise her. Not every career woman is snide and condescending, but too often the most prominent ones are. What sets my mother and my wife apart from these arrogant, preening women is not less strength or brains but more character. The axioms of modern feminism are insulting to the very people I have the greatest duty and desire to defend, and is should be obvious to anyone, whether he likes my position or hates it, that it would be gutless and contemptible of me not to fight modern feminism tooth and nail, as hard as I can, however little I may accomplish. And I teach my boys to do the same.
(In the past) you could never tell why housewives did what they did, whether it was devotion or just momentum. But today you know exactly why homemakers do it: out of love…(and) you can see these stubborn women for what they are, the moral backbone of the country. A country with this kind of backbone can’t be such a terrible place and is probably capable of weathering anything, in the end.
David Gelernter, Drawing Life: surviving the Unabomber - (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 114
