The ongoing and exhausting debate between working moms and stay-at-home moms lends fuel to the fires that keep the patriarchy running smoothly.
One woman’s since-deleted TikTok, and all the responses that followed, captured the complexity and anger that women often have for other women who make choices different than their own.
The woman insisted that married women should ‘get a job, your husband’s money isn’t yours just because you popped out some kids.’
Women across the internet clapped back at her comment, which is conceivably why she took the original post down. Yet going public with your private opinions online is something that lasts forever. Women from all sides of the spectrum — wives, moms who work, moms who don’t — stitched the post and shared their thoughts.
“I may not be a lawyer, but I do believe in most states, joint marital property is a thing and assets become joined,” content creator Lisa P said in response to the original video. “That’s why there’s a contract.”
“However, leaving legal jargon behind, because as I said, I am no lawyer, I am really really sorry your husband made you believe this,” she continued. “Raising little humans is work, and the job a stay-at-home mom does equates to about a yearly of $260,000.”
Lisa didn’t cite the source from which she drew the estimate of $260,000. According to the Mom Salary Survey conducted by Salary.com in 2021, the median annual salary for stay-at-home moms that year was $184,820.
A more recent study by Beike Biotechnology assessed the value of parental workload by analyzing time spent on eight common household tasks: cooking, cleaning, shopping, laundry, tutoring, transportation, emotional support, and administrative planning. The study averaged how many hours parents spend doing labor in those arenas based on how many children they have.
A parent with two kids spends 19.9 hours cleaning and 23.7 hours cooking every month, along with 22.9 hours of household administration.
The study found that it would cost an average of $1 million to outsource the work done by a stay-at-home parent with two kids, over the course of 20 years in the six American cities they used as sources.
Parents who stay home to raise their kids are protected economically.
Another woman named Steph, who is actually a lawyer, touched on the legal elements that do, in fact, ensure stay-at-home spouses are compensated by their working partners.
“Marriage is a partnership, and you earned that money together,” she stated. “If you have a child with someone, they are financially responsible to help you take care of that child.”
Yet the real point Steph made had nothing to do with legal issues, and more to do with social attitudes.
“Misogyny sucks,” she declared. “But internalized misogyny that comes from other women, it is painful to watch and to listen to.”
The reality of the overarching issue is that every family’s situation is personal to them. They’re going to make decisions that work for them, which might not work for anyone else, yet it’s no one else’s business to patrol what they do.
Policing women’s access to financial equality falls in the same realm as policing what we do with our bodies and criminalizing our access to birth control.
Until everyone has the actual freedom to choose how they want to live without being punished for it, we’re all stuck in a cycle of oppression, no matter how free we think we are.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango’s news and entertainment team. She covers social issues, pop culture, and all things to do with the entertainment industry.
