Mother's have always worked. The very idea of a "stay at home mother" is a relatively new (past hundred years or so) idea. In the original hunter-gatherer tribes, women would have had to spend the day gathering food. While the child was small and breastfeeding they would have taken the infant with them, but once weaned (normally around 6 months of age) they would have been left with older children and the elderly. Ditto when we turned into an agricultural based society. Every able bodied adult would have been needed to work the fields and take care of the livestock from dawn till dusk.
Even amongst the wealthy women didn't take care of their own children, they would have been left with wet nurses and the women would have gone to court, or traveled with their husbands, etc. It would not be uncommon to only see your children a couple of times a year.
Really, it was only with industrialization, that men could earn enough money to feed the family without the help of the wife (and really that only applied to the newly created Middle Class) poor women still would have had to work and wealthy women still would have relied on nannies.
So really, just being a mother and devoting a 100% of our time to raising a child, is not the natural thing.
Mother's have always worked. The very idea of a "stay at home mother" is a relatively new (past hundred years or so) idea. In the original hunter-gatherer tribes, women would have had to spend the day gathering food. While the child was small and breastfeeding they would have taken the infant with them, but once weaned (normally around 6 months of age) they would have been left with older children and the elderly. Ditto when we turned into an agricultural based society. Every able bodied adult would have been needed to work the fields and take care of the livestock from dawn till dusk.
Even amongst the wealthy women didn't take care of their own children, they would have been left with wet nurses and the women would have gone to court, or traveled with their husbands, etc. It would not be uncommon to only see your children a couple of times a year.
Really, it was only with industrialization, that men could earn enough money to feed the family without the help of the wife (and really that only applied to the newly created Middle Class) poor women still would have had to work and wealthy women still would have relied on nannies.
So really, just being a mother and devoting a 100% of our time to raising a child, is not the natural thing.