Would You Respect A “Stay-At-Home Wife”?

After my husband and I married 11 years ago, I was home for about a year and a half before our first child was born.  I taught a couple of university classes, but that didn't keep me very busy, so I had plenty of time to go to the gym, and do whatever else I did during those idyllic pre-kid days.

But we were trying to get pregnant from the beginning.  I'm not sure how my husband would have felt if I wanted to stay home and NOT have kids.

Apparently, such stay-at-home wives represent a growing group. 

Many highly educated women are choosing, when their financial situation allows it, to stay home for different reasons:  to pursue advanced degrees, to explore creative outlets, to do charity work, to manage health issues, or just to focus on traditional homemaking activities, such as baking, sewing, gardening, etc.

Do these women, by depending on their husbands' incomes without taking on the (allegedly) higher purpose of caring for children, reject everything feminism has worked so hard to achieve?  Maybe.  Daniel Buccino, a social worker and psychotherapist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, calls such women the ultimate "status symbols," since their lifestyle alerts the rest of the world that the husband makes enough money for the both of them.  And the men involved in these arrangements are often happy because, instead of sharing chores equally, their stay-at-home wives manage the domestic front themselves.

Look, I would never judge another woman's choices.  But I have to say, it would probably give me pause if one of my daughters came to me in twenty years and told me that all she wanted was to spend her days cooking, cleaning and basically taking care of her husband.