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Dutch MP says Stay-At-Home Mothers should be Punished for “Throwing Away” Education

by Hilary White

AMSTERDAM, April 4, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An MP of the Dutch Labour Party has suggested that stay-at-home mothers who used state subsidies for their education should pay the government back since their work at home is “wasted” on child rearing. Sharon Dijksma believes that punitive measures should be taken against women who choose to stay at home with children after graduating from university instead of entering the paid workforce.

“A highly educated woman who chooses to stay home and not to work: that is destruction of capital,” said Dijksma, deputy leader of the Labour Party (PvdA) in 'Forum', a magazine published by employers' group VNO-NCW. “If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at society’s expense, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished.”

Dijksma is reiterating one of the central tenets of socialism which says women can only have value when they are in the paid labour force and that motherhood and childrearing is a form of slavery.

This doctrine was laid out by one of the original Marxist philosophers, Frederick Engels, who asserted that the family was the original source of “oppression.” He said that only when all women entered the workforce and childrearing was institutionalized could the socialist paradise be ushered in. Engels recommended “open marriage,” divorce and sterilization.
 
Studies have shown that much social instability has been suffered in industrialized countries since the imposition of feminist principles that have broken up family life and left children to be raised in institutionalized day care. Since women have been forced into the labour market, marriage has been devalued and divorce rates and the number of the “permanently single” have skyrocketed in most western countries.

The online magazine, Brussels Journal, said that Dijksma wrote on her ‘blog on her proposal to penalize stay-at-home mothers saying that it is only natural that educated women should either work or pay the state back. “If someone chooses not to work, then there should be a substantial repayment,” she said.

The number of women in the Dutch workforce rose from slightly under 3 million in 2001 to nearly 3.2 million in 2005. Between 2001 and 2005, the number of Dutch women in the workforce between 15 and 65 who were in the workforce rose from 55.9 to 58.7 per cent.

Read Brussels Journal commentary:
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/946

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