Motherhood: The Highest Calling
What is the most important job in the world? Is it being the president of the United States? Is it being a scientist working on cold fusion, now considered the “holy grail” of energy innovation? Is it toiling away as a researcher seeking a cure for cancer? Is it being a military general, protecting the homefront from external enemies? While all these jobs matter, a lot, they all pale in comparison to another job: That of the person who gives birth to and helps raise the presidents, scientists, researchers, and generals: mother.
This is because motherhood isn’t just a job, or even just an adventure. It’s a calling.
Sadly, though, it’s a calling that has been called in this modern age many things most unflattering. There was a time when a “stay-at-home mom” was identified differently: a “mom.” But it has long since ceased being an unchallenged norm, and the challenges are now quite abnormal. In 2012, Democratic political strategist Hilary Rosen said that Ann Romney, wife of then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney, had “actually never worked a day in her life.” As Crisis magazine pointed out at the time, too, such sentiments are uncontroversial in Rosen’s milieu. They also have an interesting pedigree. Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, wrote that “the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry.” French feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir even suggested this be accomplished by force. “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children,” she stated in 1976. “... Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”
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