Should it be illegal for women to choose to be stay-at-home moms? If that sounds like an absolutely outlandish question—and it should—just keep in mind that it is a question now being asked in public in the nation of Australia. Behind this is the larger pattern of social and moral change within a society. It follows a predictable pattern. Something is proposed as a moral or social change that sounds absolutely unthinkable, then it becomes thinkable. It was implausible, but it gains in plausibility. Once it gains in plausibility, it becomes policy, and behind that policy is a form of political legal and social coercion. That kind of pattern is what should have our attention as we consider the controversy that has recently emerged in Australia, and of course it will not stay there.

Behind all of this is a report recently released by an organization that usually doesn’t garner a great deal of controversy. That’s the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD. That international organization is actually a legacy of the United States and the Marshall Plan. That was the plan whereby the United States brought economic assistance to much of war-torn Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. It was an effort to reach out and to rebuild, economically speaking, Germany and its allies as well as much of the rest of Europe. In the aftermath of World War II, that was necessary. But the OECD has continued in more recent decades, especially since 1960, as an organization that unites nations in the development of international trade and economic development.

The OECD recently released a report having to do with the relative employment rates and advanced economies. And in particular, the worldview of the OECD is that every single able-bodied adult should be a wage earner in the workforce. And that includes, of course, those who would otherwise be stay-at-home moms. This controversy emerged in Australia, but given the issues, it could’ve emerged in many other nations as well, including the United States. It came with a recent headline,

“Moms are economy’s greatest untapped resource, and we need to fix that.”

The reporter in this case was Liz Burke and as she wrote,

“Australia, we have a problem, and we’re not going to get away with it.”

“Away with it” had to do with Australia’s ranking in this particular study as relatively low in terms of the workforce engagement and, in particular, the large number of adults, in particular in this case, women who are stay-at-home moms who are not engaged in the wage-earning workforce. As she wrote,

“The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found the employment rate of women aged 25-54 years was in the lower third of OECD countries at 72.5 per cent. Australia’s employment rate of single mothers, 50.8 per cent was among the lowest in the developed world, with only Ireland and Turkey doing worse.”

Now before we go on, just consider that usage of words here “doing worse,” which indicates that doing better would mean fewer women staying at home with their children. She went on to report,

“Stay-at-home mothers were singled out as the ‘greatest untapped potential’ for Australia’s workforce and were creating ‘potentially large losses to the economy’, as were moms who worked part time.

“The provocative report,” she says, follows the fact that a major labor politician, Kate Ellis, “exited from politics, with the longtime politician citing difficulties reflected in the research.”

Now, again, this is the word “difficulties,” but notice how the politician herself described the situation.

“This had been a really hard decision for me ... in the end it is a decision that I have made for only one simple reason.

“Whilst my son could travel with me as a baby, during the next term of parliament he will start school and have to stay in Adelaide. The simple truth is that I just cannot bear the thought of spending at least 20 weeks of every year away from him and the rest of my family.”

Now notice her decision it is presumed here is a problem, and a problem not just for the society in general, but very specifically for Australia’s economy. Just in a footnote to the larger story, the response to this particular politician deciding to stay home with her family was responded to with one columnist writing this:

“The parliament is still structured the way it was back in 1901 when the Australian states federated. That is, the parliament was designed for men and by men. Men who assumed parenting was the job of someone else. Modern public life remains utterly inconsistent with the realities of new motherhood and our country is the poorer for it.”

There’s no mention here of exactly what proposal this columnist made for making the Australian Parliament less by men and for men, it seems that nature more than anything else is the real enemy here. But that report was followed by an even more provocative proposal. In this case Sarrah Le Marquand wrote,

“It should be illegal to be a stay-at-home mom.”

Marquand, writing at The Daily Telegraph there in Australia, says that if there is any issue that is sure to gain controversy, it is going to be the topic of stay-at-home moms. She said,

“More specifically, the release of any data or analysis that dares recommend Australian women should get out of the living room/kitchen/nursery and back into the workforce.”

Marquand makes the argument that Australia’s economy depends upon an expanding workforce and stay-at-home moms are the largest identifiable problem in terms of full employment in that nation. Therefore, she goes on to make this analysis,

“So it’s not as simple as suggesting that the OECD’s rallying call to utilize the potential of stay-at-home mums is an insult to mothers — on the contrary, it is the desperately needed voice of reason that Australians cannot afford to ignore.”

Then the following paragraph,

“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.”

That is a very straightforward statement. She is stating that it should be a legal requirement that all parents, both mothers and fathers of children of school age or older must be employed. It would be a legal requirement; it would thus be illegal for a woman to choose to be a stay-at-home mom. Marquand simply dismisses the argument that women should be free to make this choice for themselves in terms of whether or not it’s liberating that a woman could decide to stay home. She described instead “the supposed liberation in a woman’s right to choose to shun paid employment.”

Now, again, you’ll notice the default is a woman being a wage earner in the workforce. The exception, the exception she wants to eliminate even as a possibility, is a woman who decides not to be in the wage earning workforce, but rather to invest her energies and her calling in her home, particularly in the raising of children.

We have seen several twists and turns in the development of the feminist argument and ideology, but here you have an author who calls for “a serious rethink of this kid-glove approach to women of child-bearing and child-rearing age. Holding us less accountable when it comes to our employment responsibilities is not doing anyone any favors. Not children, not fathers, not bosses — and certainly not women.”

But then she says,

“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 continued,

“Only when it becomes the norm for all families to have both parents in paid employment, and sharing the stress of the work-home juggle, will we finally have a serious conversation about how to achieve a more balanced modern workplace.”

One of the most influential feminist ideologues of the second half of the 20th century was Simone de Beauvoir. She was the unmarried partner of existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. And it was de Beauvoir who argued back in 1976,

“No woman should be authorized to stay home to raise her children. Women should not have that choice, because if there is such a choice too many women will make that one.”

That’s one of the most amazing and indeed spectacularly revealing statements ever made by an ideologue. In this case, she said women should not be free to make this choice, because if they have the freedom to make this choice, too many women will make it, that is the choice to stay at home with their children. In the view of the feminist ideologues, that would be an absolute disaster. Women choosing to stay home with their children would be the repudiation of the very ideology that supposedly was to liberate women to make their own choices in the first place.

The current controversy in Australia has to do with this report from the OECD and it is indeed the topic of a great deal of conversation. It’s a very serious issue, according to the OECD, that so many women are at home with their children rather than being deployed in the wage earning workforce. And we need to note that in terms of the unfolding moral revolution around us, this is a significant new turn, this is an economic argument that is now coming behind the moral argument.

That moral argument was made quite famously in the second half of the last century by figures such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. It was Betty Friedan who wrote about the woman in the home as being in a domestic concentration camp in so far she served as wife and mother to children. Friedan and her allies, also known of course for being advocates for legalized abortion in the name of feminism, argued that women should not be trapped in the role of being stay-at-home moms. But now you’ll notice that the argument has taken an entirely new turn. Now it’s not that women should not be trapped into staying home with their children, but rather they should not be free to make the choice to stay at home with their children.

As we look at this from across the Pacific Ocean, one of the things we need to note is that even if this controversy does not get transported to our shores in exactly these terms, the OECD report points to a new kind of argument we’re going to face, and that is the argument that women who are staying at home to raise their children are actually a drain on the workforce, a drain on the economy, an untapped asset for which there is moral responsibility. That’s something we need to note, because we can expect that this very same report is going to land in this country with some of the very same conclusions. One of the interesting things about Australia is that it, like Canada, amongst the dominion nations of the former British Empire had followed the British and European example in secularization more than has the United States, at least to date. Australia is a far more secular society. Even though there is a Christian tradition there and even though there’s a vital evangelical tradition, Australia never had the kind of generalized culture-shaping influence of Christianity that was the case in most of the United States throughout most of our history.

Here in the United States, the fact that this kind of story has not yet emerged with any kind of serious policy proposal almost surely has to do with the lingering influence of the Christian worldview. There is still a moral instinct, a reflex in this country amongst many people to respect the decision made by many moms to stay at home with their children.