Gone Are The Days of The Stay At Home Housewife

By the age of 40, about 21 to 27 percent of women who graduated college in the 1980s have both a family and a career, according to Claudia Goldin. Goldin divides women of the 20th century into five “cohorts” in her book entitled The Long Road to the Fast Track: Career and Family. Each cohort shows the rise of women in professional careers and how women handled careers and families simultaneously. Today the number tackling both is higher than ever before. Women can and should raise a family and a career.

Due to the number of women that began to try to have a career and family, the 1980s are known as the “decade of greed.” I believe it should be known as the “decade of prosperity and grow.” Women finally began stepping up and showing they were just as strong as men when it came to handling multiple tasks. For this reason, women also became less dependent on their husbands and finally achieved a life for themselves.

Dana Browning-Ott is happily married with two young children. Browning-Ott owns a dance studio in Toccoa, GA that requires her to work three days a week teaching classes from around 3:00 to 8:00 pm. She believes it is good for children, especially daughters, to see their mother working for herself. She says that although work interferes with her family life a little, for the most part she is happy having a career that allows her to spend a lot of time with her children. “If more women would prepare themselves for the future, more would be able to have both a career and a family” Browning-Ott says.

Autumn Whitworth, a teacher at Woodville Elementary in Habersham, GA, agrees with Browning-Ott in that the reason she chose her profession was because it allowed her to work and still be a huge part of her children’s lives. Whitworth says “I’m independent because my mother was not.” Whitworth said she never wanted to put herself in a position where she could not support her family and her husband respects that.

Although I do not have a family myself yet, I plan to continue my career when I do. I know there are ways to have a career and still be a huge influence on your children. The statistics in Goldin’s book are clear that more and more women are becoming independent and I want to be one of those women. Gone are the days of the stay at home housewife.