In response to Betty Friedan’s death, Joan Walsh has written an interesting piece for Salon, “Feminism After Friedan,” in which she examines how Friedan became marginalized by left-wing feminists like Linda Hirshman, who completely ignore a woman’s familial obligations and desires, claiming that attention to home and child is anti-feminist: “Given the combination of love and responsibility most women feel when they become mothers, scolding them for choosing to take time off a demanding career track to care for their children, if they have the option, seems like a ticket to even greater irrelevance and marginalization for feminism,” Walsh writes.

This article is far more interesting to me now than it would have been a year and a half ago, before I had my son. Before becoming a mother, I found the choice that some women make to stay home with their children to be nothing short of idiotic; I didn’t understand how any woman could take herself seriously when she was not earning an income and engaging in some sort of intellectual life. While I’m still baffled by women who have children and stop working soon after college, without spending any real time working toward some sort of satisfying career, parenthood has forced me to radically revise my thinking about work and motherhood. I took eight months off work to spend as much time with Oscar in those crucial, formative months as possible, and I’m glad I did. Part of it was that I simply didn’t want to miss out on his development, which was truly amazing to watch. Part of it was the knowledge that, while I’ve been teaching and writing for ten years, and will likely continue to teach and write for decades, the window on my son’s infancy was very, very small. We knew we wanted to have only one child–if I wanted to experience motherhood fully, I would have to put other things aside.

That is not to say that I came to a grinding halt. I returned to writing and publishing almost immediately after he was born–in fact, on my third day home from the hospital, I had to send an article in to an editor. But I did not return to working in the sense of going outside of the home, teaching, with regular hours and a regular paycheck. My writing was very slow during the first year, especially the first three or four months, when my son was nursing every couple of hours and I was getting almsot no sleep. I wrote volumes less than I normally would have in that period of time–but I did, at least, feel that I was keeping my mind engaged to some extent. I went back to teaching when Oscar was eight months old, which I continue to do. But instead of teaching my normal three classes a semester, I teach one. This is plenty of work for me, considering that I have a new novel due in less than a year.

My point, I suppose, is that one can find a satisfying balance between work and motherhood. I’m far happier with my current work arrangement–despite the fact that it’s an arrangement that will never result in tenure or any serious financial rewards–than I would be teaching a heavier load and having someone else take care of my son 40 hours a week. I enjoy being with him, and I think he enjoys being with me too. He’s extremely confident, sociable, and verbal, which I like to think is at least partially due to the fact that I’ve spent so much time playing with him, reading to him, dancing with him, taking walks with him. I recognize that I’m lucky, that this is a kind of leisure many women don’t have. My husband works hard to make sure that I’m able to give as much attention as possible to our son, and I think my husband and I both believe that he’s the one who’s missing out. He’d rather spend more time with our son and less time at the office–his sacrifice is far greater than mine.

Any feminism worth its salt should allow a space to acknowledge the fact that career is not the only rewarding or intellecutal pursuit, and that putting career above everything else results in an unbalanced life, an existence in which some crucial human elements are missing.