Letter: Mothers are forced back to work by social pressures

AM I the only mother who feels patronised by your newspaper's assumption that any professional woman who chooses to stay at home with her children is neurotic, limited, and probably finds soap-powder advertisements too intellectually daring?

Every article you publish on motherhood seems to imply that the only legitimate aspiration of an intelligent mother must be to get back to her 'career' as soon as possible. I find this suffocating orthodoxy as intolerable as the 'a woman's place is in the home' view which it has replaced.

Beverley D'Silva's piece was about the conflict between the urge to remain with one's children and the desire to pursue a career. The desire to be with one's children was presented as a kind of neurotic impulse - a 'throwback' as she put it. The idea that there might be an element of social conditioning in the compulsion to return to work was never raised.

Anne Sykes

Moreton, Wirral