(sorry posted this in wrong column)

As a member of the chattering class (and so are you, by the way), I have to tell you that I don't care whether other women choose to stay home or not. I grew up in a typical family where dad worked, mom didn't. My brother's family was different - he stayed home and raised the kids while his wife did her surgical residency and training.

And whose family turned out better? I have to say that my niece and nephew are confident, honest, and well-educated, and a lot more emotionally balanced than I was at that same age. Although their family had its tensions, they were nothing like what happened at home in our "typical" and "healthy" family structure.

There's a couple of myths at work here. The liberal myth is that women who don't work will become drug-addicted, bored housewives, uneducated and incompetent, dependent on a domineering male who wields the power of the purse, and the power of the fist. The conservative myth is that if women would just stay home and stick to breeding that all our societal troubles would subside.

Two reasons I can think of for a woman to work are 1) She needs the money and 2) Her family needs the money. It's called s-u-r-v-i-v-a-l. For most of us, supporting ourselves is not an option. It is something we will have to do until we drop dead.

And since we're going to be supporting ourselves and possibly other family members, we might as well have a career so we can earn more and also contribute more to society than we could at some low-wage job selling french fries at Mickey D's. It's all too easy for even trained professionals to become obsolete in a few short years, especially in software engineering.

It's not just liberal/conservative thinking at work. There are also factors of race and class. Both liberals and conservatives who can afford it have housekeepers, who are more often female and at least around here they're Hispanics with large, stable families and conservative values. Hispanic moms aren't frowned upon for working because it's assumed that they need to - whereas in a white couple it's assumed somehow that the man has sufficient earning power to support a non-working wife and kids, too.

Different values apply to the black community as well. These female Princeton grads are not the black women I see here in Oakland or San Francisco. And everyone knows black women are the matriarchs and have to work, because all the black men are in jail! That's an over-generalization, yes, but there is a grain of truth to it. Everyone expects black women to work, even the black women themselves. There's some study going around showing that there's a bias against white mothers who work, and an equally strong bias against black mothers who don't!