TradCatKnight: Feminist: Moms Should Be Legally Required to Work, Barred From Staying at Home?

 

 

Writing for the Daily Telegraph, Sarrah Le Marquand cites a recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report that suggested stay-home moms caused “potentially large losses to the economy” in Australia by opting out of the workforce.

Le Marquand uses those potential economic losses to argue that depriving mothers of parenting choices is actually in the national interest. Moms who stay home are essentially mooching off the system, she argues, citing “the unfair tax concessions enjoyed by one-income households.”
“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 school-age or older are gainfully employed,” Le Marquand writes.
Le Marquand, the editor of the Sunday magazine Stellar, is known for offering feminist hot takes on topics from The Batchelor to the U.S. presidential elections. In a tagline for another recent column, she described being repeatedly manterrupted on TV, boasting that she debated two male pundits and “managed to emerge unscathed and without feeling the need for counseling — even without the protection of a petition behind her.”
In a counter-intuitive twist on her latest piece, Le Marquand that although she wants a stay-home mom ban, she supports extending paid maternity leave and admits that parents play a “vital and irreplaceable” role in early childhood. But that flexibility should end when a kid goes to kindergarten, she suggests.