Thanks to jude49 for illustrating Dave’s point:

“But Mormon women face a variety of paths, more choices, and seemingly have to justify those choices to themselves and often to others. That seems a bit unfair.”

I didn’t have a paid job during several of my pregnancies because I was so ill that I could not fulfill my responsibilities at the workplace, nor even as a homemaker. My “job” during those seasons was lying on the couch moaning and puking for months on end. That was not something that my husband could do for us.

I appreciate the church’s teachings on motherhood, which seem very supportive of women who choose to become mothers. And yes, they should always have the choice either/any way and NEVER be judged by others, since nobody else has the stewardship to know what the Lord has in mind for her.

My non-LDS friends who found themselves at home for a season because it was the best thing for their particular family at a given point in time felt zero support and lots of judgement from their neighbors and friends. They were astonished at the confidence I felt in knowing I was doing the right thing at the time.

It bothers me greatly that women–maybe particularly LDS women–are not allowed to make choices about how to use their time, energy, and talents without others assuming that they are doing it wrong. I’m also having a hard time imagining the same kind of response to a male who had multiple outlets for his energy and capacity; we tend to admire them instead.

Still, a recent experience suggests an even more recent shift: my quite mainstream niece, just home from a mission, said she’d like to go to medical school but she wants to be a mom so she’s going to be a physician’s assistant instead! So not a motherhood vs. education choice, or even motherhood vs. career choice, but a motherhood vs. top-shelf-career choice. Of course this is all anecdotal, but that’s how bigger studies are born, that could track this more precisely. Plus this and other examples I’ve heard come not from not-quite-middle-of-the-mainstream female students, who could be found in the 70s as well as now (I’ve had numerous such students go on to top-shelf careers too), but right in the middle of the mainstream. My imprecise impression is that most female students still regularly feel torn about careers in ways that males rarely have to (gee, dentistry, law, or computers?), and that more than ever are going ahead and figuring out ways to pursue what they want, and feeling like they’re at least making more of a personal choice, instead of feeling like the choice has been made for them.

Happily, I think that many of us are working this out successfully. From my perspective as an American woman in my early 30s, it seems like Church culture is becoming much more supportive of women who choose to pursue both a career and motherhood…or at least it is here in the Midwest!

This points up the tension and unfairness that I noted in the post: for Mormon men, education, career, fatherhood, and children all kind of hang together nicely, whereas for Mormon women the expectation is (or at least was) that education/career and motherhood/children were separate choices or at least tough to combine. In the Church, it seems there is subtle pressure against education/career for women; in the professional world, there is subtle (or overt) pressure against motherhood/children. America is not Scandinavia.