A Brief Vindication Of The Homemaker
Conservative Philosophy 7/27/2026
Not too long ago I heard a commentator online bluntly declare that any young woman who says that their “dream job” is to be a stay at home mother is simply lazy and devoid of any genuine ambition. They went on to argue that the underlying activity in question is not actually a job but a role. Raising one’s own children is a role that most human beings perform at some point in their lives as a consequence of conceiving them. Therefore all that this young woman is actually saying is that she wishes to live a life in which she does not have to exert herself at an actual job.
Now the necessary assumption here is that child rearing is more or less a token chore that is indifferent to the way that it is performed. This critique is similar to the famous quote by the influential 1970’s Feminist Germaine Greer in which she states that “bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same brought up or not.” Greer is literally saying: they will reach adulthood no matter what we do, we have more important things to tend to. And what are those more important things? They are endeavors which serve to fulfill and to affirm us as individuals.
The objective of both Greer and the commentator I have mentioned is to deny the trade off that takes place when both parents must work in order to financially sustain the family. And the purpose of that denial is to justify the decision to have both parents work when no such trade off is even necessary, in order to gratify themselves. To acknowledge that the stay at home mother is doing something deeply important is to recognize that one is allowing one’s own children to go without that thing, in a situation in which one has the option to do otherwise. For this reason the calling of the homemaker must become superfluous.
Before we proceed there are some distinctions that we need to draw; we will work backwards toward the most general concept in this discussion. The term homemaker (just mentioned above) refers to a calling. It is a person who has decided to invest all of their imagination, energy and resourcefulness as a human being into optimizing the development of their own children (instead of into defending Pizza Hut’s trademark rights).
The homemaker is committed to creating the ideal home environment for those children. I know of homemakers who are well educated, and who even use that education in the cultivation of their children’s potential (some formally educated, a few informally). Others may instead be rich in moral or practical wisdom which they devotedly impart into their children. But every serious homemaker is an individual who has decided to wholeheartedly commit all of her gifts and talents to producing the best version of her children that she can during the most critical and formative period of their lives.
Now while the term “homemaker” refers to a calling, the phrase“stay at home mother”merely refers toaphysicalreality. The commentator that I mentioned at the opening is not entirely incorrect. There are some women who simply have no drive to invest themselves heavily into anything (i.e. women who are “lazy”). Such women may indeed seek status as stay at home mothers as nothing more than an opportunity to be shiftless and indifferent, but this does not define the state. Every stay at home mother is not a homemaker, but every homemaker is a stay at home mother.
Finally, we come to the most general concept here, that of a parent. A parent is one who conceives and/or assumes primary responsibility for a child. It is a role. Most parenting in this day and age is performed with as much sincere attentiveness as can be fit into spare time away from a full time occupation in the marketplace. And of course there will always be in any time period the [abusively] negligent parent who performs the role with indifference.
Therefore the opportunity to grow up in the household of a loving and devoted homemaker is a precious one, and we should be happy for children who enjoy that privilege. It should also be mentioned that it is not merely a privilege limited to families who are extremely well off money wise. One can find households with a solitary blue collar bread winner alongside a financially thrifty wife and mother, in areas of the country with a lower cost of living.
For them the commitment is worth it; the intangible things that they are able to provide for their children in that environment are more valuable in their minds than any additional material item they could offer them. And somewhere in the world I suspect there is some deeply troubled and neglected child of some wealthy household who senses inwardly that this is the case as well.
Instead of celebrating this office however, certain ideologues are compelled to belittle it. But the one thing that cannot be said of the calling of a genuinely devoted homemaker is that it is devoid of aspiration. What feat can any person accomplish that is greater than the cultivation of other human souls? And is this not itself the final objective of every other truly worthwhile job or calling?
We cannot accept the idea that children only require passive supervision to flourish once we understand the truth that children are constantly learning, whether that learning is good or bad. And a parent can elicit things from a child in a way that no other person can. This is why the calling in question is uniquely identified with the role of the parent. No nanny or professional childcare provider can carry it out. It is far from superfluous.
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