Feminist Columnist in Australia Suggests It Should Be Illegal to Be a Stay-At-Home Mom

Yes — she is seriously suggesting this.


A columnist for the Daily Telegraph wrote a piece actually suggesting that Australia make it illegal to be a stay-at-home parent once your kids are old enough to go to school.




“Rather than wail about the supposed liberation in a woman’s right to choose to shun paid employment, we should make it a legal requirement that all parents of children of school-age or older are gainfully employed,” Sarrah Le Marquand writes in a column titled “It should be illegal to be a stay-at-home mum.”



“Only when the female half of the population is expected to hold down a job and earn money to pay the bills in the same way that men are routinely expected to do will we see things change for the better for either gender,” she writes.



“Only when the tiresome and completely unfounded claim that ‘feminism is about choice’ is dead and buried (it’s not about choice, it’s about equality) will we consign restrictive gender stereotypes to history,” she writes.



According to Marquand, allowing women to stay home and raise their kids is bad for the economy (and is worsened by what she calls a “double standard” regarding welfare benefits in favor of stay-at-home moms resulting from “the the unfair tax concessions enjoyed by one-income households”). Mothers being able to stay home is “not doing anyone any favours,” she says. ”Not children, not fathers, not bosses — and certainly not women.”