Breadwinner vs Homemaker

Caught a panel discussion on gender rolls the other day; a comment not remarked upon during the discussion got me cogitating.  It involved the “waste of talent” when a wife foregoes a professional career in favor of being “just a housewife”, raising the kids.

To be sure, if one is to have any division of labor in a two-parent household, an obvious one is between that of homemaker and that of breadwinner (though, clearly a good deal of overlap between the two, in most families).  Our modern consumerist society, needing ever more income to acquire ever more stuff, values the latter over the former. But is that just?

From several viewpoints – Darwinian survival, religious imperative, societal continuity – the point of existence is in properly bringing up the young, so that they can produce and properly bring up the following generation. Thus the vital role is the homemaker; the breadwinner fills a subsidiary, supportive role only. Add to that the not uncommon observation of the difficulty of making the home  (properly raising the kids), and one might better say that trading the homemaker role for a professional one is, in fact, a greater and more consequential waste of talent.

To some extent, we note that in remembering the departed.  David Brooks (I believe) usefully distinguisher between resume virtues and eulogy virtues.  On an (ephemeral) resume, we list accomplishments, jobs held, degrees and so on.  On a eulogy (meant for the ages), we more proximately enumerate the “warm fuzzies” – how kind, giving, understanding, virtuous, and indefatigable the departed was.  Sounds rather like the distinction between the required virtues of the breadwinner and the homemaker.