Women College Graduates Plan on Being Stay at Home Moms

2008-03-22 22:53:04 (GMT) (WiredPRNews.com - Education, Featured Stories)

(WiredPRNews.com) — March 21, 2008- How many women who are now graduating from college and ivy league schools plan on being stay at home moms versus having high powered careers like their mothers? The reality and growing trend is that many are saying they will give up a career to stay at home to raise children.While its difficult to quantify, the shift emerges repeatedly in interviews with Ivy League students, including 138 freshman and senior females at Yale who replied to e-mail questions sent to members of two residential colleges over the last school year, as illustrated in a N.Y. Times article.

The respondents illustrated that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely. About half of those women said they planned to work part time, and about half wanted to stop work for at least a few years.

Two of the women interviewed said they expected their husbands to stay home with the children while they pursued their careers. Two others said either they or their husbands would stay home, depending on whose career was furthest along. So why the change in attitudes? Well, the respondents often had mothers who worked full time and they saw the difference in kids who had moms who were at home.

According to Cynthia E. Russett, a professor of American history who has taught at Yale since 1967. “The women today are, in effect, turning realistic.”"At the height of the women’s movement and shortly thereafter, women were much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine full-time work with child rearing.”

So why obtain a college degree you ask? The young women said that pursuing a rigorous college education was worth the time and money because it would help position them to work in meaningful part-time jobs when their children are young or to attain good jobs when their children leave home.

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