No, she's working at a career-oriented full time job for a Fortune 100 company.
So you're suggesting that we go back to the 19th century so that housewives can feel fulfilled... I'm sure many housewives would prefer to spend their time working at a part time job or taking care of their children rather than dying their own wool. And the modern conveniences are a big help to working parents...
Not a bit of it! But the idea that the home is a prison and a waste of intellectual and creative resources is itself something of a modern phenomenon, and was not necessarily the *intent* of the arrangements. Before industrialization, men worked like dogs at hard manual labor, which was no picnic either.
Staying home and keeping house can also suck big time. I think that vacuuming and cooking pot roast for dinner would be pretty boring. The corporate scene can be pretty annoying sometimes, but it has one redeeming quality... a paycheck.
Working at home can be pretty annoying sometimes, but it has several redeeming qualities. Autonomy, lack of politics, and getting to guide, mold, and interact with your children, instead of watching them being formed into little pastiche lumps of mush without the capacity for reflection or for original thought. Try reading Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. :-)
I'm not arguing against your choice per se, but suggesting that the reasons you are currently giving for it do not hold as much water as you seem to think. A mere relationship with a spouse can sometimes be a full-time job in itself; when you add children into the mix, it can be a career in itself, in terms of demands upon you. But those demands tend to fluctuate over time; and the knowledge of someone waiting for you at home (for hot raw sex, all the way down to flirting while making dinner, to commiserating over that pr*ck in the Atlanta office) tends to make the struggle in the workplace worth it. The presence of a strong family (and therefore well-adjusted people) is one of the necessary ingredients for the social matrix in which successful businesses can grow.
In another vein, you might want to surf over to other threads and read excerpts from Mark Steyn's writings about the demographic suicide of the West...
Cheers!
It's about timing. You can't have children when you are older. I highly recommend having children before 30 because the chances of having miscarriages or fertility problems increases. (I had 3 micarriages before I had my first child at 31.)
If you decide to have children then do it in your late 20s early 30s and stay home with them when they are young. When they go to school, there is plenty of time to work and do your own thing.
Once you decide to have children, then you have to put their needs basically above your own (in most cases).
If you can't do this, then don't have children. Women should be respected if they chose not to have children. I think Condi Rice is a great example of this.
I think my greatest accomplishment is my 3 children. Two of them are gifted and one is special needs. It certainly is not boring. It's much more interesting than when I volunteered to teach in an inner city school, or when I worked writing software for a defense company (really boring).
I'm in my mid-40s now, and I can think about the next phase of my life. My kids don't need me when they are at school. I'm not going back to writing software, but I don't know what to get into. Plus, I have to be home by 3pm so that I can be home when my kids are home.