May 11 2008
Working Women: Suck It Up and STFU
Mother’s Day recognizes mothers for their dedication, resourcefulness and persistence. But some working mothers say that on the job, they’re viewed in opposite terms.They say employers see them as less reliable, focused and committed than their co-workers, and weed them out of job interviews or bypass them for promotions.The practice has been labeled maternal profiling, and it is the source of a growing body of discrimination lawsuits being filed against employers.
According to the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law, family-related discrimination cases increased by 400 percent from 1996 to 2005. Some workers sued because they were questioned about their marital status, family plans or child-care provisions during job interviews, then promptly dismissed. Other mothers say they were taken out of contention for jobs that required travel, long hours or physical labor.(Source)
I am so sick of people who make lifestyle choices that place them outside of the mainstream, yet, they are never ready to accept the consequences of those choices. If I am hiring someone for a key position that is integral to the success of my business, a position that requires a person to be extremely focused and able to dedicate 110%, and that applicant tells me that they are three months pregnant, I am supposed to act as if that isn’t a negative? When I know that the position simply has demands that will not allow for prolonged absences, not allow for extended “time off”, I’m supposed to forgo what is in the best interests of my business to accommodate some convoluted notion of discriminatory hiring practices?
And, I’m sorry, but women are so damn predictable when it comes to wanting their cake and eating it too. They want to dress like sluts, yet still demand respect. They want the sexual freedom to rut like dogs, and then they want society to bless them when they kill off the ensuing inconvenient litters. ( After all, babies are punishment in a world governed by Obama’s progressive values.) They want to break through those never ending glass ceilings as long as they don’t have to hurt their pretty, little heads. They want to make the commitment to bring a human life into the world, yet expect a business owner to pretend that such a commitment will not impact their job performance.
Would you apply for a full time job when you already have one and then expect the prospective employer to pretend that your prior commitments will not impinge on the time and dedication that the job position demands? Contrary to the prevailing “wisdom” that parenting is a task that can be slipped in between more pressing concerns, being a mother is a full time job. A woman applies for it while on her back, in bed, and if she came to that particular interview without protection, then she damn well better be prepared to perform in the position that her actions indicated she was willing to accept.
“If motherhood were viewed as the full-time job it is,” Ms. Venker contends, “it would not be considered something we could do on the side, and women would be less inclined to try to balance career and motherhood, only to discover, many stress-filled years later, that it cannot be done.” 1
But the MSM isn’t going to focus on the damaged children and broken families left behind in the wake of working mothers. They are going to continue to perpetuate the fallacy that these women deserve special consideration while they are in the workforce.
Katie Mullins-Hall of Price Hill moved from a temporary worker to a full-time position at a local furniture wholesaler. Her first day on the job, while filling out medical forms, she mentioned she might be pregnant. “They said, ‘Why don’t you go home, and when you find out for sure if you’re pregnant, let us know. We need someone we can count on every day,’” Mullins-Hall said. “I waited a couple of weeks, but back then women didn’t know we could fight it.”
No Katie, back then the bogus claim of discrimination had not yet gained credibility. “We need someone we can count on every day…” And that is unreasonable? Would the same woman hire someone to remodel her house to the tune of a 1/2 million bucks if the contractor showed up 7 months pregnant with a toddler in tow?
Today, women at every professional level can face such discrimination. Carol Gibbs, chief executive officer of the welfare diversion program Accountability and Credibility Together, says mothers who work entry-level jobs are often fired as soon as they start missing work with sick children.
“…mothers who work entry-level jobs are often fired as soon as they start missing work with sick children.” And why shouldn’t they be fired?!? Why the hell should I, as an employer, have to suffer the consequences of hiring anyone whose personal circumstances make them unreliable. Why is it the employer’s problem that a woman can’t figure out birth control? That she is so besotted with magical thinking that she has allowed herself to buy into the super mom myth. Yeah, the super mom can “do it all”, but apparently only if she is propped up by her employer or by tax payers. Yeah, these independent women are something to behold.
… “I’m seeing it in sales - assumptions are made that a woman with small children won’t be able to travel,” she said. “Twenty years ago, men did overtly make those assumptions. Now it’s a little more subtle but it’s there - that mothers just can’t travel, or that they shouldn’t, that ’she’s not a very good mother because she puts her job before her kids.’”
I’m quite sorry, but any woman who puts their “career” before their child is not a great candidate for motherhood.. She may be a “good” mother, however, today’s definition of a “good mother” seems to be reduced to describing those women who juggle their kids’ lives the most adroitly without dropping them completely between the cracks of their ambitions. If a kid is still breathing and bears some semblance to a human being, the progressive mother’s maternal obligations have been satisfied. Incidental is the state of their child’s soul, the direction of their moral compass, or the quality of their character - if any of that is even an issue for the “modern” mother.
Mary Eberstadt, author of Home-Alone America, makes some very interesting observations when pondering why the venal claptrap that passes for lyrics in contemporary music has resonance with today’s youth. “What is it about today’s music, violent and disgusting though it may be, that resonates with so many American kids?
As it turns out, such an exercise yields a fascinating and little understood fact about today’s adolescent scene. If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment.
The odd truth about contemporary teenage music — the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before — is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers.
Papa Roach, Everclear, Blink-182, Good Charlotte, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Eminem — these and other singers and bands, all of them award-winning top-40 performers who either are or were among the most popular icons in America, have their own generational answer to what ails the modern teenager.
Surprising though it may be to some, that answer is: dysfunctional childhood. Moreover, and just as interesting, many bands and singers explicitly link the most deplored themes in music today — suicide, misogyny, and drugs — with that lack of a quasi-normal, intact-home personal past.
To put this perhaps unexpected point more broadly, during the same years in which progressive-minded and politically correct adults have been excoriating Ozzie and Harriet as an artifact of 1950s-style oppression, many millions of American teenagers have enshrined a new generation of music idols whose shared generational signature in song after song is to rage about what not having had a nuclear family has done to them. This is quite a fascinating puzzle of the times. The self-perceived emotional damage scrawled large across contemporary music may not be statistically quantifiable, but it is nonetheless among the most striking of all the unanticipated consequences of our home-alone world. (emphasis mine) (source)
Not that it makes much difference to the femi-nazi, social engineering whores whose cherished goal is the destruction of that nuclear family. No doubt, their utopia consists of women depositing infants into the hands of the state a day after birth. But the Marxist reality that the destruction of the family unit reflects is an entirely different topic.
I have two daughter-in-laws who are both expecting their second child. They are under no illusions that the market place ought to accommodate them. In fact, daughter-in-law ‘O’ illustrates exactly why companies are justifiably reluctant to hire women who are mothers or are expecting.
‘O’ was promoted to a managerial position with a “progressive” company who didn’t stutter a jot when she announced that she was pregnant with her first child one month into her new position. She had a rough pregnancy while trying to take on the new responsibilities that retail management entail. The job suffered and she suffered. She took her maternity leave, promising to return to working full tilt after six weeks. Never happened.
‘O’ is an intelligent woman who unfortunately bought into the “you can do it all” anthem she grew up with. She quickly discovered she was sold a bill of goods.
You see, one thing feminists really hate is that something profound usually occurs to the woman of a newborn. A shift occurs inside that turns preconceived notions of mothering right on their heads. Careers loose their appeal and selfishness gives way to that part of a woman who can never give enough for their child. Yeah, feminism has little use for maternal instincts. But they kick in. Fortunately, my son is adamant that ‘O’ not work and god willing, the “progressives” represented by the Obama-ites won’t force her back into the job market with their elevated fuel prices and economy killing, nanny state ambitions.
And as an aside, I am finding it very interesting that both of my sons, survivors of this “career” woman, are adamant that their wives not work, even if it means that they are facing horrendous schedules and stringent budgets. It also seems to be the general attitude of their immediate peers. I have no way of knowing if this is a trend, but there is a generation coming up that is not in the least bit represented on MTV or reality TV. They are a generation who have eaten the fruit that the harvest from “liberated women” has yielded, and they have found it very bitter.
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Glad to see you back zee. Hope you’re feeling much better.
Another excellent piece zee. Speaking as a somewhat embittered ex-husband and father, I have to say that it appears to me that our social mores and our educational institutions have raised the expectations of women, to a rather abstract level of unattainable desires, divorced from the harsh realities of life. No, I’m not saying men are misunderstood angels, lord knows there are enough self serving monsters out there, an equal number of vain foolish men. But the false narrative put about by the feminists and the Marxists that women were the victims of oppressive patriarchal structures was always a fine veil of mendacious claptrap. Indeed, taken to it’s logical extremes, it will see the women of the Western world fighting for their very existence and freedom (in the most literal sense), against the forces of radical Islam, armed with nothing more than their razor sharped sneers, for the men have been so emasculated, that one wonders just how many, or how few, will have the courage to stand up and fight for their civilization and their women folk.
When I met my wife, her goals were to find a husband, build a home / buy a house, have children and raise a family. As she attained each goal, she became more miserable, and more angry, for with each attainment she appeared further from what she was unable to realize that what it was that she really desired, she was moving further away from with each passing day, which was to be at peace with herself…the ultimate goal of all of us. And so our marriage slowly disintegrated in acrimony and despair. Wealth, prosperity, fine homes, children or consumerism, are not the equity from which we can derive our own inner satisfaction. That most precious of commodities..,. self contentment, comes from a keen insight of the self, often after a long painful process. Even the most bubbly out-going extrovert, more often than not hides a deep sadness and longing for a self contentment that never was nor ever could be, given the current state of our cultural and spiritual disarray, for we are all looking in all the wrong places. The key to inner contentment is to be found within our own hearts, within our own individual spirits. We are empty shallow vessels, easily distracted by trinkets and baubles; often blinded by false ideologies and the vain and empty opinions of others. We need to reflect upon our own souls and so find ourselves. Not an easy task, in a world gone quite, quite mad.
As the headlines of each day give clear warning, radical Islam is feeling expectant and triumphant, with a fresh thirst and a lust to once again assume the most important charge of the faithful… the expansion of Islam within this earthly paradise . Unless we cast aside our foolish pursuits, we will indeed find ourselves in very desperate circumstances with Islam at our throats. This endless navel gazing of the feminists and their allies in academia and the media, does not bode well for our future.
It’s good to have you back Zee. Truly an exceptional post; thank you.
Thank you JAR, still have something lingering in my chest, but at least I have the internet back, which I lost on top it all….
And they have no made it impossible for a woman to revel in being a woman, but have insisted that the pinnacle of womanhood is caricaturing male attributes with their every imperious pose.
I have this foreboding that for too many western men, especially, as you say, the emasculated generations who prance about us now, they will find the position of men in Islamic society all too appealing. And I love your description - “armed with nothing more than their razor sharped sneers”
It is so imperative that one never find their identity or source from another human being. No other human being is capable of supplying you with strength or resilience, and ultimately, no one can not take your soul lest you abdicate it.
I am sorry for your pain, too many of us know it well. Yet the left would like to indict the institution of marriage instead of recognizing human fallibility. In a culture dedicated to self-gratification, it is nearly impossible for couples to imagine sacrifice or self-abnegation for the sake of union and family. And these are the same people who opine about sacrificing to the greater good (gag me).
I learned early on to carve my home out inside myself. My father’s death made me very wary of ever finding my security and peace in another. But it has often occurred to me the journey that we westerners tend to take, the “painful process”, the introspection and passages through various ideological and spiritual pursuits - it seems a luxury that living cradled in the wealth of the west allows for, cocooned as we are, for the most part, from the deprivations and animal existence eked out by so many in the middle east and Africa, North Korea…. How metaphysical does one get when scraping out mere sustenance occupies every moment?
It has already begun it’s inevitable harm and damage. We now reap.
Hey Lucky Larry, hi , and thank you.
Well said Zee, good to see you’re back and firing all guns. Back when i first started work, some fools were going on about the work and personal life and finding balance between all. I know it was BS when i first heard it because i could see the people running from job to family, it’s either one or the other, ain’t no balance and being able to be everywhere at the same time.
Unfortunately too many have to learn the hard way that businesses cannot operate with unreliable workers, just that they will only learn from experience and we can’t give all the people out there real experience so they can learn from it.
Love your example about the contractor turning up for house work, i’d really love to see some progressive idiot choke when the contractor leaves the job half done to start again in 8 months time. I’m sure they won’t be feeling all warm and fuzzy then.
Hey there MK, thank you.
I wish I could find the link, but I remember reading a so called gen-Xer - a career advisor no less, lamenting the rigidity of corporate work. She thought you ought to be able to wear Ipods while at your desk, come and go as you please as long as you got your work done, dress however you desire, and all other kind of accommodations to make the work day a bed of roses.
They adopt this smug attitude towards any who contend that one must work from the bottom up or learn the ropes. This sense of entitlement that is so freaking pervasive explains a great deal of Obama’s appeal - that is what he sells - buy now, pay later. Only with him, the bill is really gonna come due.
It would be highly amusing if they fired said contractor and then were sued for discrimination. Let them prattle on about equal rights then.