If you are going to school at home, you either hire a tutor or do a cyberschool. But 100% of homeschooling parents would never parse out thir work as parenting/teaching. Even to the most extreme in their religious teachings, educating their kids is part of their mission as god-fearing parents.

So right there and there you need to be aware of how you are using language that shows a misunderstanding of the legal term homeschooling that is used to describe a larger and more complex social phenomena.

Now, on to this quote : Where I would get worried over this as a feminist would be in a situation where most mothers would be expected to do that.

See, I don't know if you and I live in the same country, but in the one I live, breeding is the social cue for staying at home. We live in a society that no matter how much money a woman makes she is expected to breed and tend the homefires. Since I am a reality-based blogger I just don't expect less from most people.

I mean, LOOK AT THE EFFING NARRATIVE AROUND OPRAH!

1. Since she doesn't want children
2. and won't get married,
3. SHE MUST BE A LESBIAN!

Oh puhleeeeeaze.

My rant has nothing to do with what the invisible "they" expects. This has all to do with the way feminists speak about stay-at-home mothers and WORST OF ALL homeschooling mothers.

Hasn't it occurred to anybody that these women and men who choose to educate their children are highly competent people that know a thing or two about education? Hasn't it occurred to anybody that these women and men understand what is best for their children and are willing to go the extra mile to make sure their kids have it?

But more importantly, what if we did have in this country universal health care? You know what, MILLIONS OF WORKING MOTHERS WOULD LEAVE THE WORK FORCE.

There are waaaaay too many unhappy women in shitty, menial and unfulfilling jobs that have to be in them because if not their families wouldn't have any medical benefits. And it's these women, the same women who are the first ones to be let go from the orgiastic restructuring of jobs in this country. And these are the same women who we kick in the teeth when they choose not to return to the job market when the cost of working in a shitty job becomes HIGHER than the cost of not working in a shitty job at all.

But more damning is how most people speak of parenting, education and domestic work as things outside of them that are so menial, so beneath them, they have no value at all.

This emptying of value to a labor that should be part of a mother's (or parents') life work is what allows for the patriarchy to take over in the guise of a anti-woman medical establishment that says we The Doctor knows more about your body that yourself. This is the same emptying of value and meaning that allows for The School to take over your children's bodies and minds and 'fill them' with the knowledge that a no-value nobody like you, the parent, could never ever possibly fulfill. This is the same emptying of value and meaning that allows The Law to say they know better than you when to have a child, how to have it and why to have it. And notice that that emptying is so complete that the child becomes an "It".

Marx spoke of this emptying of value as alienation, and I think it's time for some feminists in the blogosphere to give the old Bertell Ollman book a twirl : Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society.