A mother shares Melissa Wallace's concerns and longs, with her, for a solution.

As I read the article by Melissa Wallace, "Where Have All the Mothers Gone?" (vol. 4, no. 1), I felt I was reading a biography of my own life. She aptly described the 24 years I spent solely as a mother and wife while rearing our four daughters.

I married the man of my dreams at the age of 19, just in time to attend a business college for a year and type his doctoral thesis. We then accepted an invitation for him to teach at Southern College, where he became chairman of the one-man physics and math department and the only Ph.D. on campus, all at the tender age of 26. As a faculty wife, I received practically free tuition, and so I completed my college work with a major in home economics and a minor in religion. A few months later we had our first daughter, and I began, by choice, that wonderful career of motherhood of which Mrs. Wallace wrote so glowingly.

Much more fortunate than so many mothers today, I was able to stay home with my girls. They never knew what the inside of a day-care center looked like. I was their first teacher. We grew gardens together, we sewed together and cooked favorite dishes; we walked in the woods together and had long lazy days in the summer sun by the lake; in the winter we had happy suppers by the fireplace; we went to church together and prayed together in family worship.

But I recognize that my choice is simply not available to many women in the Adventist church. That is why I was deeply disappointed as I read the article. The author mentioned only one reason why mothers leave home. "Some of them," she said, have left "merely to find themselves fulfilled."

I would like to propose three other reasons why mothers take their children to baby sitters and leave the home for the work force, namely: (1) church emphasis, (2) peer pressure, and (3) economic exigencies.

Church Emphasis

How many times at the recent General Conference in Indianapolis were women who had stayed home and reared their children honored or even mentioned? How often in the advertisements in such papers as the Review, Life and Health, or Insight, do you see the traditional family where the mother is simply a "homemaker"? With what kind of enthusiasm or understanding is a young Adventist woman received if she announces that her goal in life is to marry, stay home and rear a family? The statement might receive a little better reception if she says she is going to finish college first. But even her desire for education may meet with prejudice.

I once heard a Seventh-day Adventist male physician make the statement that he thought the number of women accepted into the Loma Linda Medical School should be limited because, after finishing, so many of them just stayed home to care for their children. He felt their places in medical school could have been more wisely filled by men who would not waste the degree.

In the primarily Mennonite neighborhood where I grew up in California, I never knew of a divorce, nor could anyone tell me of a single divorce or of anyone's leaving the church in order to obtain a divorce. This particular branch of the Mennonite faith (membership 15-20 thousand) is an agrarian society with quite large families. For the most part, they take their children out of school at age 16 and train them for life in the practical areas. The young women in this denomination get work outside the home until they marry, but when they marry and begin their families, they then stay home indefinitely. And when a woman is expecting a child the entire church is happy for and with her, even if it is the fourth or fifth child. Motherhood is revered in a special way that achieves the goals of the church concerning the home. They give no mixed signals.

Peer Pressure

How many times have you been in a group of Seventh-day Adventists who don't all know each other, and the getting acquainted goes something like this:

The peer pressure to acquire material things is also very great. It was very real in our family. Because we lived on one salary, we drove older model cars—just about the oldest cars in the community, it seemed to our daughters. The youngest daughter used to beg me rather than her Dad to pick her up at school so she wouldn't have to endure the teasing if I came by in the newer of our aging cars.

From its pulpits and its magazines, our church promotes healthful living, educational excellence, proper Sabbath observance, the Lord's coming and other doctrines, but rarely does it promote simple living.

Economic Pressure

I may be more aware than many of the economic pressures facing our mothers of young children because I have lived for the past 36 years in an Adventist educational community. A woman called me at the church office this week to ask for a student aid application form. Embarrassed, she explained that she had never asked for aid before to pay church school tuition, but she would soon be dropping out of work for six months because she was pregnant. She didn't want to take her children out of church school.

I have seen women, putting their husbands through college, weep when leaving their children at the day-care center. A friend told me not long ago that she wished she had sent her daughter to public school. This daughter had often begged her to quit work so they would have more time together, but the family simply could not pay church school tuition with one salary. I pray that someday soon our church will make some changes in that area.

In travels with my husband outside the Adventist educational community, I have become aware of other facets of the economic picture that compel our women to work: the fear that if they are widowed or divorced, they will be reduced to poverty unless they already have a career in place; the fear that without adequate reserves for their old age, they will spend their final years institutionalized in a nursing home; and the fear they might be wiped out financially by catastrophic health care costs.