Professional success and personal fulfillment: it's not the same |
Featured / | articles |
|
Her name is Eva Herman and she was one of the most famous journalists on German television. Perfect in her youth, she gave up a family to be able to carry on her profession.
Today she is the spokesperson for a vigorous European movement that vindicates motherhood. A few weeks ago she offered an interview to the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia (April 2, 2008) and in it showed the instrumentalization of feminism as a means of exploitation of women that make them less them.
The answers give rise to a few reflections on this same issue whose consequences (mothers who are advanced ages, women who renounce motherhood on the pretext of work and success, families disunited, children who do not live with their parents, mothers unmarried, etc.) They are perceptible and accuse a proper and clear treatment.
Can you be a mother and a professional?
Possibly one of the dilemmas with which the professional woman is most often is to exercise her career or throw it in a broken sack. From the beginning, it is emphasized all the time, effort, and money invested in the studies, like fixing from the beginning that one can only follow the two possibilities and making appear at a disadvantage to the maternity.
Eva Herman highlights in one of her responses this eagerness on the part of employers, some feminists, and leftist fundamentalism, by "trying to convince ourselves that they do us a great favor by getting rid of the easements of the home".
And elsewhere she says, "I realized too late of the capitalist scam and system proge. For 25 years I wanted to be the best: I was a TV presenter and at 38 years, almost out of time, I finally decided to have a child. How I regret not having dedicated myself more to the home and to the children I could have!".
A subtle exploitation
Many women, especially the youngest, who is on the hunt for the success and fame, they do not perceive the yoke to which they are subjected when they accept to renounce what is part of their nature, of their gifts, to their femininity.
Contrary to the funny, erroneous and cartoon image of a mother reduced to little more than a family slave, few have been able to perceive the beauty of exercising as such and the exploitation that of them make those who deprive them of the invaluable gift of the maternity within the only family possible between male and female.
By offering them good wages, while they are young, and blinded already by money, already by the good momentary position, they leave aside the thinking of the children, in a marriage commitment: in the key of responsibility.
Not without reason, Eva pointed out: "My mother only dedicated herself to her children and we cared for her to the end. Who will give affection in her old age to the woman who gives everything for the company? Do you think your employer is going to see you at the asylum? "
The beauty of motherhood at the right time
Indeed, many women do not openly renounce motherhood and all that it implies (obviously we place motherhood within the family framework where that beauty is authentically demonstrated).
Most of the time it's just "postpone" to a better moment. But What's the best time? Eva Herman recalls that having children after a certain age is forcing the natural evolution of affective bonds: violating nature with artificial methods and punishing children for having parents with inadequate ages.
"Why Force Nature? Why not have children when the body is ready? Just in exchange for burning in a job that will only make entrepreneurs rich? What will our son, Mother's career, or more health be thankful for having been given birth at the right age? "says Eva.
The femininity designates the human capacity to live for the other and thanks to the other. Certainly, the current policies favor very little an adequate valuation of the gifts of the woman, more particularly of the beauty that it implies to be a mother. It is forgetting that if the world wants to be truly a common home of peace it must help those who in turn will help achieve that goal.
It is, therefore, necessary to ponder the work carried out by women in the family and even to seek law initiatives that protect and remunerated those who have freely chosen to devote the whole of their time to domestic work without being socially stigmatized.
The working woman also deserves suitable schedules that do not make her feel compelled to choose between family and professional life. The mother should be able to devote herself, if she wishes, to both work and child care.
As Eva Herman responded to the Avant-Garde interview, it is not another opinion. She said herself, her opinion is based on the Bible because in addition to being written in that holy book, so is it in biology and, therefore, like all women. Eva's experience, and her courage to refer as she has expressed, are of help and guidance to many women who seek light during a society that encourages them not to be themselves.