Do All Mormon Women Stay Home After Having Children?

I really enjoyed what Janelle wrote about Mormon Women staying home after having children.  Take a look.

Where have all the good men & women gone?

Jennie over at LAF/Beautiful Womanhood linked to Where Have All the Good (Wo)Men Gone?, which was a response to Where Have the Good Men Gone? in the Wall Street Journal.

Jennifer Fulwiler (Where Have all the Good Wo(Men) Gone?) explains the debate between the sexes regarding who caused whom to have such ill behavior and shirk traditional male/female roles: 

I’ve seen debates like this before, and they usually degenerate into chicken-and-egg arguments about which gender’s bad behavior sparked the bad behavior of the other. Each side has some valid points, but I think that the entire debate is centered on the wrong question. I suspect that it was not the behavior of one gender that ignited this current animosity between the sexes; rather, I think it started when we, together as a society, started redefining marriage and sexual morality.

When sex meant marriage, people got married earlier. When sex and marriage meant children, young men worked harder at younger ages to prepare to provide for a family. If a young man wasted his early 20s on inane pursuits, there were real consequences: he’d be viewed as irresponsible and a bad provider, and thus his opportunities for marriage (and therefore intimacy with a woman) would be drastically limited. Young women held men to higher standards. For them, a boyfriend wasn’t just someone to “hook up” with (to use Klausner’s parlance), but the potential future father of their children — and they expected him to act accordingly. And young women were motivated to shape up their behavior as well: a woman who didn’t show any interest in the self-sacrifice and maturity required for
marriage would have a hard time getting dates.

God knew what he was doing when he designed marriage. This system takes the worst tendencies of men and women and orders them so that serving one another in love benefits both ourselves and others. I fear that these “Where have all the good (wo)men gone?” debates will continue to be fruitless until we take a hard look at what we as a society have done to the millennia-old institution for uniting the sexes.