Feminists always ask it as some sort of a "gotcha'' question. Who is going to be nurses and primary school teachers if all the women quit working???
Luckily here in Europe we don't have to reinvent the wheel. We just have to look back at the not-so-distant past (20th century) and what do we see?
First, the question itself (like everything about modern feminism) is very dishonest. All women don't have to quit working. It's enough if married women quit, the way it used to be in various countries, even stipulated by law. Not "mothers". Not "after the birth of 2nd child". Not "while the kids are in (primary) school." Married women, period. Because you can't serve 2 masters and the like.
And second, especially for the Catholic countries, it's a very easy answer. Nuns. That's who used to be nurses, school teachers and even doctors. Nuns used to run nursing home facilities. In Germany you still have hospitals with nuns working there. Here it used to be like this till somewhere in the 1960s, and there are TV shows from this period which depict it.
There are still people alive who remember how the society used to be. In fact, most laws protecting the traditional family in my country weren't abolished in the 1950s, but rather in the beginning of the 2000s, after the transition to the Euro. It's thanks to to the EU and we all know (or should know) who is really behind this organisation.
Nuns give an oath to serve the folk and are ideal for this type of jobs which demand real sacrifice sometimes (like night shifts in hospital or waking by the bed of a dying person). Make Christianity and religious vocation cool again and your problem is solved:)
I would prefer male schoolteachers, anyway. In my country we have terrible problems, because most of the teachers are female and unable to control the kids.
ReplyDeleteAlso, if married women do not work outside home, need for nurses is much smaller, since they can take care of their parents when they start needing care. Kids are usually rather big when grandparents start getting sick and dying. If you have your children in reasonable age, that is, not in your 40's.
I have never heard of that answer to the who would work as teachers and nurses! I didn't realize that was who. Thank you for sharing this with us. I appreciate the thoughts.
ReplyDeleteBlanka, that's a valid point, and, of course, children don't really have to start school as early as they do now, 6 would be a good age. BTW, nuns used to be quit strict, from what I heard:)
ReplyDeleteI also agree about taking care of your aging parents, but there are some cases when it's really difficult without help and we need some hospital nurses, too. Also, in the times past women used to keep having children till their mid-40s at least, but it was before the Pill. I sometimes think that all these babysitting Grannies really should have just taken another child instead of living vicariously through their daughters.
Christi, you are welcome! You still see it in old movies, for instance, this one depicts French nuns running a hospital:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Grande_Vadrouille
I fully agree... (I may have already shared this story but repeating yourself when aging is the name of the game, yes?) My grandmother was a midwife in a rural area from the beginning of the 1920's to the late 1950's. She came as a young woman, dedicated and fresh from the midwife school in the south(''civilization''). She wasn't going to stay after she saw the people and the place but... After a few years a certain young man started to pay too much attention and she ''ran'' away to the nearest town (it took about 6 hours by the horse back then) in order to establish a maternity ward. I like to think that she knew she could not marry and be a midwife... Anyway, after a while a certain young man showed up at the ward with some jewelry and, as a man of few words, said ''please do choose!''. And she chose. She continued as a midwife. They had always a dairy maid (until my mother showed up as a daughter-in-law) and sometimes she had her own baby ''at work'' with her. At some point when they had 3 children (They had total of 6) she came home from a house (all the deliveries happened in the home of the pregnant woman) she has helped with the delivery. As she was changing her midwife outfit to another dress the children knew she wore only for certain communal activity outside the house, the children gathered around her legs crying ''Mother don't put that dress on, mother would you please be a mother...'' This story is being told in the family as something funny, or cute. I find it to be really tragic.
ReplyDeleteThanks, that was an interesting story. For some reason, Finland always had more working women than other European countries. I did some research in the past and already in the 1950s like 50% or even more of all the women worked. For the comparison, in my country only 30% of all the women worked as late as the end of the 1980s.
ReplyDeleteAbout midwives. I remember watching a TV program about a famous midwife. She delivered more than 1000 children. When she was still young, she found out she had a medical condition and could never carry a child. So she chose to stay single and help other women/mothers. I though this was very touching. If we go really way back in history, to Medieval period I think midwives were mostly older widows without small children at home.