How much education does a SAHM need?

[Tex]

Originally Posted by BarbaraGordon

A-A, I'd tread carefully here. Take a dozen thirty-year-old LDS women and ask them how they feel about the freedom (or lack thereof) they were afforded. Ask the ones who dropped out of college to have babies. Ask the ones who got graduate degrees that they never used. Ask the ones like BBB who chose career over family and have to justify that decision every single day.

You're talking about an institution whose law school sent me official material reassuring me that it's okay to get a law degree and then stay home in the end. (This is true, of course, but you'd think that a law school would also want to point out that it's okay to get a law degree and then, you know, practice law!!) I am an outsider, but it is my impression that the cultural forces shaping the LDS young woman's understanding of herself and her role in society are real and powerful. What is perhaps most dangerous is that those forces are rarely so explicit as they were in the leaflet I was mailed.

I think you're overstating the case by quite a bit. I know plenty of women, including several in my immediate family, who are graduates of BYU and who are either partially or fully in professional life. It's been a while since I've chatted with them about what societal or religious pressures they felt, but I'll ask the next time I get a chance.

The LDS culture values motherhood above almost all else. It's considered one of the highest roles to which a woman can aspire. The demands of motherhood and career are very difficult to balance, as any working mother can attest. I think whatever cautions might be extended to women are an outgrowth of that value system, and not reflective of some troglodytic desire to keep women ignorant, barefoot, and pregnant.

These conversations always seem to presuppose that a mother's education is only valuable (or vastly more valuable) in the workplace, and that staying home is some lesser choice that wastes it. I think that's no less destructive a message than the one you think is being sent.