When I was a third-year law student at Harvard, I was taken aback to hear one of my professors, a woman with ostensibly feminist opinions, start complaining about her former classmates who had gotten a law degree and then left the practice of law to become stay-at-home moms. In her view, these women had wasted their legal education. At the time, I had no idea I would leave the practice of law ten years later to become a homeschooling mom myself; I figured I’d practice until retirement, although hopefully also becoming a mother on the way. Still, it rubbed me the wrong way, and I still regret not saying something at the time.
On the other side of the political spectrum, there are many who would agree with my former law professor that educating a woman who may become a homemaker is a bad idea … but for different reasons. Eric Conn, an internet firebrand who promotes “biblical patriarchy,” recently argued that women should not be encouraged to pursue a college degree because they “become wildly independent, which makes them unsuited for a role in which submission is the main ingredient.” Conn claimed that highly educated women often end up debt-ridden unmarriageable “boss babes.” “College is for training workers in the workforce,” he concludes. “Women aren’t called to do that.”
What are we to make of this odd agreement between career-focused liberal feminists and gender-role-obsessed traditionalists that prospective housewives shouldn’t go to college? Does a woman who wants to be a stay-at-home mother have any business pursuing higher education, even a master’s degree or a PhD? Is a woman who ends up staying home to care for her kids wasting her education?
Personally, I found my education invaluable as I transitioned from corporate attorney to a mother at home. I use the skills and knowledge I acquired while training to be a lawyer every day, for my benefit, my family’s benefit, and the benefit of my wider community. And I’m not alone. For this essay, I interviewed approximately twenty women on the themes of higher education and motherhood. Of these women, a significant subset had chosen to leave the workforce or academia to be home with their children. Over and over again, I heard from women who were still deeply benefiting from their extensive formal education while caring for their children and their homes. It was profoundly challenging to try to distill all the stories I heard about the many, diverse ways education is important for moms at home into a single essay. Nevertheless, here are three for the reader’s consideration.
First, motherhood is a very demanding activity, and it helps to have been educated—both pragmatically and philosophically—on how to tackle difficult projects before embarking on raising kids. Second, the modern work of the home calls for the type of skills acquired through higher education; often, these necessary skills include the ability to earn some amount of money to make the family budget balance. Third, mothers are whole people; they are entitled to develop the life of the mind alongside raising their children.
Mothering Is Fast-Paced and Demanding
The most obvious way education can benefit homemaking mothers is that motherhood—just like many professions—is a fast-paced, challenging activity that involves being able to identify priorities, triage, and attempt to “keep calm and carry on.” Social media may sometimes give the sense that homemaking is a slow, placid endeavor, in which a mom at home is carefully cooking a delicious meal, while her children play at her feet, the whole scene bathed in golden light. I wish it were so, but … alas … it usually isn’t. I often say that there are two jobs that prepared me well to be a homeschooling mom of four: being a waitress in a busy bar-and-grill and being a corporate litigator. All three occupations involve dealing with not-always-reasonable people who want something as soon as possible, in the midst of many competing demands on my time.
Even more important than these pragmatic benefits, however, is the way that formal education, including college and graduate school, can help shape your own personal philosophy. This deep well can be drawn on in meeting the challenges of modern mothering. Emma McMillen, who is pursuing a master’s degree while raising a young daughter, told me that she is profoundly grateful to have received an education rooted both in the classical tradition and her faith. Ms. McMillen said she finds her formal education invaluable in raising her daughter. As she pointed out, for those raising children “it seems in some ways almost more important that we’re well-educated, that we are free thinkers [and that] we can be critical thinkers.” Charmingly, Ms. McMillen also told me that in the first year of her daughter’s life, she has thought often about Plato’s injunctions regarding education and the formation of souls.
Ms. McMillen’s experience reflects a deeper truth often spoken about by those who study the humanities. Although these studies do not primarily seek to impart specific job skills, humanistic education is deeply practical because it helps us understand the inevitable difficulties that face every person. Daniel Mendelsohn, a famous modern classicist, has said: “When your father dies, your accounting degree is not going to help you at all to process that experience. Homer will help you.” Mothers, who face the profound challenge of nurturing children from infancy to adulthood, may not always need Homer, but they need to draw on something, and advanced formal education can help. (Fathers too, of course, but that’s another essay).
The Modern Work of the Home
Second, those who claim that mothers do not benefit from advanced degrees often misunderstand what the modern work of the home truly is. In 2026, it is often wickedly complex and technologically sophisticated. Indeed, the archetypal modern homemaking task is not making sourdough; it is dealing with medical billing. It might, for instance, involve interacting with complex regulations as you try to set up an elderly relative with Medicare Part B, or spending lots of time on infuriating phone calls while you try to figure out why you received a $297.68 balance charge for a child’s speech therapy that you thought you had paid in full two and a half years ago (true story in the Greco household).
As Nicole Ruiz, a homemaker who explores the intersection between home and technology at The Third Oikos, has explained, the images of domestic work available online are almost all focused on tangible housework, such as making bread, mopping floors, or folding laundry. This leads to a disconnect between what we imagine homemaking to consist of and the work it actually requires. As Ms. Ruiz has observed: “everyone knows computer work is involved in maintaining a household and raising a family but we keep this almost cartoonishly old school delineation in how we represent domestic vs paid work through images.”
For all those who are misled by social media into believing that the work of the home is a totally separate sphere from modern office life: I regret to inform you that the two overlap in very significant ways. If you have children, a mortgage, and health insurance, you are also probably dealing with calendaring, banks, tax bills, and negotiating with various tradespeople. Thus, the skills developed through higher education and an early career in the office are deeply transferable to the work of the home today.
I often joke that I wish my plumber, who is superb, would offer frequent flyer miles, based on the various terrible things the Greco children have done to our plumbing. He does not, but I am better able to track the money outflows to pay him because of my background as an attorney. Contra my law professor many years ago, even after becoming a homemaker, my legal skills are useful. Indeed, not long ago I used my specific area of legal expertise—health and benefits law—to help an older relative deal with long-term disability insurance, and the complex ways it interacted with Medicare and her employer-provided health insurance.
Additionally, many families do truly need mom to work for pay—at least a little—to balance the family budget, even if mom is also homeschooling or devoting most of her energies to homemaking. I spoke to many women who are taking on some amount of paid work, and who find that having an advanced degree helps in obtaining flexible work with sufficient remuneration to make it worthwhile. I spoke with one lawyer who benefits immensely from being able to do ad hoc work on briefs and in assistance of mediations, while also spending significant time as a very hands-on mother to her children. Her advanced education serves as a kind of safety net, allowing her to scale work up and down based on her family’s needs. Other moms told me that having an advanced degree helps alleviate fears about what might happen if their husbands lose their jobs or become injured or ill. It provides a sense of security to know that mom has a good degree if she needs to try to re-enter the workforce one day.
The recent rise of homeschooling—as illustrated in Dixie Dillon Lane’s new book, Skipping School—is partially powered by mothers who have used their own education to educate their children in turn. Many of the women I spoke with also use their education to help others beyond their own families. They serve their communities by volunteering at their children’s schools, sitting on the local church financial board, and more. These contributions can be formal or informal. A mother named Jessica Doak, who holds an advanced degree in bioethics, told me that she often ends up talking about sensitive issues, such as end-of-life care and neonatal palliative care, with other moms. Per Ms. Doak, “many issues within the bioethical sphere are very personal issues that people might not encounter every day, but when they encounter them, they will be very relevant.” What an incredible gift: to be a mom who is able to support other moms in thinking through some of the most difficult questions a person can face in life.
Mothers Are Whole People
Ultimately, what the “biblical patriarchy” proponents, focused on mothers as “helpmeets,” miss is that mothers are truly whole people, who need time and space to develop their own thoughts, opinions, and ideas. They are not instrumental beings, only good for what they do for their husband and children. Many mothers (particularly but not exclusively homeschooling mothers) have drawn inspiration to remember this truth from an essay titled “Mother Culture,” first published in the 1892/1893 issue of Parents Review Volume, a journal dedicated to the work of educator Charlotte Mason. The author writes:
What we need is a habit of taking our minds out of what one is tempted to call “the domestic rag-bag” of perplexities, and giving it a good airing in something which keeps it “growing.” A brisk walk will help. But, if we would do our best for our children, grow we must; and on our power of growth surely depends, not only our future happiness, but our future usefulness.
The author laments that many mothers “not only starve their minds, but they do it deliberately, and with a sense of self-sacrifice which seems to supply ample justification.” Many nineteenth-century mothers were taught that they should be solely focused on their families. The author continues: “There are, moreover, unfortunately, only too many people who think that sort of thing so lovely that public opinion appears to justify it.” Similarly, public opinion in 2026—powered by social media—may also appear to justify Mom forswearing her own intellectual or creative pursuits to focus on shepherding children through an incredibly extensive program of extracurricular activities and throwing elaborate birthday parties. This wrongheaded attempt at self-sacrifice is as misguided today as it was in 1892.
Formal education can help mothers as they seek to grow in happiness and usefulness. Over and over again, I spoke with mothers who felt that their formal education led them to a love of lifelong learning that was immensely valuable for its own sake, even if it didn’t directly benefit their families. Yet they did generally believe their families benefited, if for no other reason than that a happy mom makes for a happy family. I spoke with other mothers who were pursuing higher education simultaneously with raising children, who talked about the joy of having something “just for myself” or time away from the obligations of family and home to focus on an academic interest.
Indeed, for some of the women I talked to, their college education and beyond was not merely something “nice to have” but something invaluable. One mom of several kids, who had spent time in the military and earned a master’s degree before becoming a full-time mom, told me that in order to be a good mom, “I have to first be a whole person.” She said that she hopes to homeschool, and her education has enabled her to avoid a “very limited worldview” in which she wouldn’t be aware of “all the biases that I have.” We all have different blind spots created by our childhood experiences, including the families we grew up in and the geographic areas we’ve lived in, which can leave us with a fragmented perception of the wider world. For this mother, formal education was a critical part of becoming a “whole person,” and the project of being a “whole person” was necessary for being a good mom.
In short, educating mothers is never a waste. To be sure, many mothers throughout history and in the modern era have done a beautiful job of the work of the home without advanced education. The mom who had left the military pointed this out to me: it is not required to be formally educated to receive an excellent education. One absolutely can read great books and engage in The Great Conversation without an advanced degree. Yet, it certainly helps to have the assistance of structure and mentors in doing so. I myself was inspired by Ms. McMillen to tackle some of Plato’s ideas about philosophy and education, but I found almost immediately that I would need significant scaffolding to get there.
It’s past time to reject the claim that there is no reason to educate a housewife, whether it comes from the right or left. In 1910, G.K. Chesterton famously said of mothers and homemakers: “I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.” Why would we leave the modern homemaker with a “great task” deliberately unequipped to carry it out? A homemaking mother is doing something vitally important, and if she wants to, she should be able to use the tools of formal education to carry out her essential, life-giving work.
