Dear Colleague:
How far will discrimination against homemakers and their families go? A
Dutch politician wants to push the envelope by forcing college-educated
homemakers into the workforce.
Steven W. Mosher
President
PRI Weekly Briefing
6 April 2006
Vol. 8 / No. 14
Discrimination Against Traditional Mothers
By Joseph A. D'Agostino
Thus the logic of feminism: A prominent female member of the Dutch
parliament has proposed fining college-educated Dutch women who choose to
be homemakers rather than work. Sharon Dijksma, deputy chairwoman
(chairperson?) of the Dutch Labor Party, provides yet more evidence that
feminism was never about giving women choices but about destroying the
family in order to enhance the power of the state.
"A highly-educated woman who chooses to stay at home and not to work--that
is destruction of capital," Dijksma said, according to the
English-language Brussels Journal (www.brusselsjournal.com)
on March 31.
"If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at society's
expense, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge
unpunished." In the Netherlands, the state pays for college tuition.
Thus, too, the logic of socialism: The people are taxed heavily, then
provided with "free" services, and then, because the government has
deigned to return some of the people's tax money back to them, politicians
and bureaucrats get to run the people's lives. Just as feminism here in
the states has advanced to where feminist leaders openly criticize the
Bush Administration for promoting marriage to single mothers and the
fathers of their children, prominent feminists in Western Europe are now
openly hostile toward homemakers.
Dijksma wants to extract some of the cost of their college education from
the women who love their children more than paid work, and who are
fortunate enough to have husbands who can enable them to stay home. This
despite the continued rise of women's labor force participation in the
Netherlands. "Between 2001 and 2005, the number of Dutch women aged
between 15 and 65 who were out on the labour market rose from 55.9 to
58.7%," reported the Journal. And this despite the cataclysmic drop in
Dutch birthrates.
You would think Dutch leaders would want to encourage child-rearing, and
homemakers are far more likely to have more than one child than full-time
career women. Currently, Dutch women average 1.7 children over their
lives, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. The large Muslim
population of the nation has a disproportionately large number of
children, and given most European Muslims' attitudes toward women's
education, few Muslim wives are likely to be affected by Dijksma's
proposal. Yet Dijksma wants to promote a policy that will drive down the
native Dutch population's birthrate even further.
She might consider that having a relatively small proportion of prolific
homemakers could raise the Dutch birthrate. If 20% of Dutch women had
four children each and the rest averaged 1.5, the Netherlands would be
almost at replacement rate fertility. If the Dutch government made it
easier, rather than harder, for women to stay home and have more children
but only a little more than 1 out of 5 women took advantage of it, the
Netherlands could be saved from the nation's suicidal birthrate.
Our own country has many forms of discrimination against traditional
mothers. Institutionalized discrimination against men (called
"affirmative action for women") harms not only men, but those homemaking
women married to them and their children, who suffer because the husband
and father of the family loses a job or a promotion because of a quota.
It also harms those many women, and their children, who work part-time and
depend on their husbands' careers for their future security. The federal
tax code grants breaks for day care but none for homemakers. Those who
home-school must pay full taxes for public schools anyway.
It's not as if American women didn't want to be homemakers: 77% of working
mothers say they'd rather be home.
Yet feminists, so enamored of choice when it comes to abortion and
homosexuality, aren't trying to help these three-quarters of working
mothers achieve their desires. Quite the opposite. Don't think that
Dijksma's plan comes from a marginal Dutch political faction. "In the
municipal elections earlier this month, the PvdA [Dutch Labor Party]
became the biggest party in the Netherlands thanks to the Muslim vote,"
says the Journal. "The PvdA is generally expected to win the general
elections next year, when the 35-year-old Dijksma, who has been an MP
since she was 23 and is a leading figure in the party, might become a
government minister." The Dutch Labor Party's website carries a favorable
treatment of her proposal. "If you receive the benefit of an expensive
education at the cost of society, you should not be allowed to throw away
that knowledge unpunished," Dijksma says, according to Expatica News.
Needless to say, having an educated women with her children all day is not
a waste of anything.
Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.
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Media Contact: Joseph A. D'Agostino
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