Author: Despite NOW, Many Women Opting for Stay-at-Home Parenting
by Mary Rettig
June 5, 2006
(AgapePress) - - Author and stay-at-home mom Suzanne Venker says the leaders of the National Organization for Women, or NOW, are out of touch with real women of today. Elizabeth Vargas, co-anchor of ABC's "World News Tonight," recently announced she is leaving the program because of her pregnancy and her desire to spend more time with her other child. However, NOW president Kim Gandy finds the situation suspicious and is positing the possibility of network discrimination against Vargas.
Gandy wrote an article on the NOW website decrying Vargas' departure and suggesting that the ABC anchorwoman was dumped, not unlike the ABC show "Commander in Chief," for presenting viewers with a strong female image.
The head of NOW says it seems unlikely that Vargas, "having survived and thrived through her first pregnancy ... would logically give up the top job in TV a few months out, anticipating she couldn't handle it." And since the newswoman's decision to leave her prime "World News Tonight" position to spend time with her children seems illogical to Gandy, the women's organization president says she smells a rat.
But Suzanne Venker, author of 7 Myths of Working Mothers (Spence Publishing, 2004), thinks that response has a rather suspicious odor all its own. She says NOW is an organization whose leaders are bent on playing the discrimination card even where none exists.
"And every time a woman today makes any choice that is not what they would want her to make," Venker adds, "that is, to stay in the workforce full time, regardless of your situation with your children -- then there must be a 'rat' defined, because, [as NOW sees it,] you couldn't possibly have chosen this."
Gandy and NOW seem to think every woman who wants a family can and should be a career-oriented mom who hands her children off to daycare, the author says. But today, she asserts, it is a growing trend that more women are realizing they cannot do it all, maintaining a fabulous career while managing a home and raising perfect children.
"If the world functioned differently, and if we had our system set up in such a way that allowed women to succeed at both of these pursuits, both motherhood and career simultaneously, then women wouldn't have to make these choices," Venker says.
"But, of course," the stay-at-home parent continues, "women are voluntarily making the 'choice' -- to use the term we use today -- to opt out in order to be with their children." And that fact is going to upset the feminists of NOW and groups like it, she adds, "because that defies their entire agenda."
Gandy and the National Organization for Women need to catch up with the times, Venker insists. She says more women are recognizing motherhood as the full-time job it is rather than something they can do on the side, and those who choose to be stay-at-home moms should be supported and commended for their decision.
Mary Rettig, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
