On Women Working Outside of the Home

I want to note here briefly, by way of acknowledgment, that for some of you the very question I pose in this title is ludicrous on its face, if not downright offensive. And, the title was intentionally provocative. But the fact that a great many of us consider this question definitively answered  by the various movements of the past 150 years does not mean it has been done so. To those people I can only say that we operate under a different paradigm with a different set of assumptions about many things, among them gender and the nature of work. But to defend my contrarian/traditionalist position, I find it odd that the feminist movement, so long a darling of the left and a friend to progressive notions in all matters, is so beholden to the greatest ignorance of the modern right: that of the triumph of capitalism and the notion that true meaning in society is to be derived by one's position within the capitalistic ladder of success and by one's contribution to the machine. So many modern feminist notions treat work outside of the home as somehow more dignifying than that within the home. I reject this notion for women and men alike.   

When we moved to Salina in November my wife took a couple of interviews at the hospital here in town. We were hoping for a part time position, but there were none available and given her nursing badassery she was offered a full-time position in the labor and delivery unit almost immediately. We are conservative and complementarian in our view of gender roles so the decision of whether or not to accept was not straightforward. It was a great job, her ideal hospital job, but it would mean a lot of time away from our son. And our son is more important to my wife than career fulfillment.

She was also slightly scared of taking the job; afraid, not of the time away from Owen or the strain it might put on our marriage, but afraid of other people’s opinion of her if she took the job. Afraid that our conservative, complementarian friends would somehow think she was denying the will of God for mothers by working outside of the home.

As we thought and prayed about what to do, it occurred to me that Clara was better at nursing than I am at anything and she could do a lot of good for a lot of women in a very vulnerable and frightening time of their life by taking the job. There are certain occupations that are better suited to women (essentialism watch), and my guess is that as the church we want good Christian women working in those positions. She took the job and has loved it, though we are hoping that after child #2 makes her July arrival that the hospital will switch her to part time.

I tell this story because a lot of my focus tends to be on the negative ways in which secular culture can pollute our ideas of marriage and family and I felt it right to acknowledge the ways in which Christian culture can do the same thing. Now, lest I be misunderstood, I am not saying that a stay-at-home mom is going against God’s will all of the time and working moms are always doing what God wills for them. What I will say is that we have to be careful how broad of a brush we paint with when it comes to considerations like this. A church whose doctrine includes stay-at-home mothering as an indispensable piece of virtuous Christian living can be just as totalitarian as a radical feminism that preaches liberation from the bonds of motherhood and marriage. Furthermore, to act as if today's version of stay-at-home motherhood is in line with some sort of historical norm for Christianity is a betrayal of a severe lack of historical understanding.

Let me provide a brief historical comparison between a “stay-at-home” mom of the early twentieth century and a stay-at-home mom of the early twenty-first. A stay-at-home mom 100 years ago would have had an enormous amount of time consuming responsibility around the house. Staying at home didn’t mean making sure little Asher had his A, B, Cs and 30 Bible verses memorized by the time he was two; it meant working your fingers to the bone washing laundry for eight hours at a time, working in the garden, cooking a meal that took longer than 30 minutes to prepare, making most of your own clothing, churning butter, etc. Today’s stay-at-home moms might spice up the dinner menu with something cool they saw on Pinterest and the really cool ones will have a small vegetable garden that would feed their family for one solid week if push came to shove, but we are hardly in the same position today when we think of time constraints.

Now, you could argue that part of God’s grace to our generation is that our technological advances have allowed us greater freedom to spend with our kids. And I would agree wholeheartedly with that statement, seeing especially that it applies to both parents. But, we cannot pretend as if this very narrow sliver of time we live in represents some historical norm for motherhood. Good Christian mothers who were not members of the aristocracy did not have the time to devote to full-time mothering that today’s mothers have (and the aristocrats farmed out much of parenting to governesses and tutors anyway).

Which cuts to the economic considerations at play here. Only a fraction of people on this planet can afford to manage their home with a single breadwinner. And, increasingly, only a fraction of households in our country are filled with enough adults to have one stay at home and one go and win the bread. So when we became absolutist about this, we deny the material realities of so many around us. Can you tell a single mother that she ought to be a stay-at-home mom? Is that part of the gospel?

What matters, as with so much in the Christian life, is your heart behind your action. There are people who homeschool because they are talented at it, equipped to do it, and have a heart for home education. There are people who homeschool because everyone else in their church does and they don’t want to feel ostracized for sending their kids to public or private school. There are moms who work out of the home because they have a calling to a certain occupation and are no less loving, affectionate, or present for their kids. There are moms who work outside of the home because they feel home to be a cloistered nightmare and need to escape. Which makes it impossible to judge. I certainly wouldn’t want to be the one handing down judgment on such things.

My anecdotal experience leaves me feeling blessed that Clara has a job that she loves and I get special time with Owen when she is gone. No other dad that I am friends with gets the kind of time with their kids that I do. And I think it is fantastic. When Clara is around I am more inclined to be lazy when it comes to raising him, more inclined to steal a few minutes to read or mess around on the internet. But when she is gone it is he and I and it is daddy and Owen time. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. 

Race and IQ

There was a bit of a fracas a couple of weeks ago when a scholar for the Heritage Foundation, a Harvard PhD named Jason Richwine, was fired resigned from his post when the subject of his doctoral dissertation—the effect of low-IQ immigration on the U.S. economy—became the target of a PC witch hunt. Richwine had just published a related report with the Heritage imprimatur about the high cost of lax immigration policy. Unable to refute the numbers he projected, Richwine’s opponents went into his past and found that he said some very non-diversity supporting things and therefore the sociological data he had amassed must be false. Because we all know that people who believe things counter to the progressive agenda are not just bad people but probably terrible at their jobs as well.

As can be easily gleaned from the opening paragraph, I am sympathetic to the plight of Richwine. I think he got a pretty unfair shake and it is lamentable that people do not really care whether or not what he wrote was true or false, only that it denied a modern shibboleth: the facemelting awesomeness of diversity. As someone who often gleefully denies modern shibboleths, I find myself inclined to agree with Richwine and his supporters.

But as I was running this morning and thinking about what Richwine had researched and the way studies of race and IQ are handled, I realized that my support for such studies ought not to exist. In fact, it probably emanates from a pretty nasty place in my heart. Here is what I mean:

Let’s grant for a moment that the people who publish reports about the intellectual inferiority of certain minority groups are correct in their data-gathering and analysis (and this is granting a lot, see here, here, and here). Say that IQ is innate and not culturally conditioned. Say that we can definitively prove that one race is intellectually superior to another. What then? What have we proven? What do we hope to do with this information? In other words, for whom other than a racist is this good news? How do we enact policy based on this? Do we want to enact policy based on this if it were true? What kind of policies would those be? As I confronted these questions, I realized that implicitly my support for and defense of these studies was colored by racism, by my desire to view my own self as dominant. How incredibly ugly.

As a Christian, this is the question I face: if each of us, individually, is made in the image of God, what does IQ matter? Since Darwin and the rise of capitalist economics (funny how intertwined those things are) we have been obsessed with determining the fittest so that we may be sure they, usually we, survive. Whether our methods are sociological, like eugenics and abortion, or economic, like cutthroat business practices and outsourcing, we seem hellbent on breeding out the weaker from amongst the thronging masses. (As I wrote this I was reminded of Chesterton’s great quip which I only paraphrase: “When we say survival of the fittest all that we really mean are those that survived.”) And nothing could be further from Christian truth and practice, which tells us that we all have the same Father and are therefore all brothers.

Another issue this raises for me is that of the limit of knowledge. I wonder if in our desire to know all things we tread on ground best left undisturbed. There is a recurring scene in the conversation between Adam and Raphael in Paradise Lost where Raphael warns Adam of overstepping the boundaries God has erected in his zeal for knowledge.

Of knowledge within bounds; beyond abstain [ 120 ]

To ask, nor let thine own inventions hope

Things not reveal'd, which th' invisible King,

Onely Omniscient hath supprest in Night,

To none communicable in Earth or Heaven.  (7.120-124)

be lowlie wise:

Think onely what concernes thee and thy being;

Dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there [ 175 ]

Live, in what state, condition or degree,

Contented that thus farr hath been reveal'd

Not of Earth onely but of highest Heav'n. (8.173-178)

Raphael is warning Adam, because it is a very human tendency to want to know more than we really ought to know. Knowledge of some things is best left untouched. In our current zeal to explain everything by a combination of chemical imbalance, societal conditioning, and evolutionary prerogative I think we can overreach the proper bounds of human knowledge. And that knowledge can lead to dehumanization.

On questions like that of race and IQ, a question burdened with no upside, I defer not to truth or falsehood but to decorum, trusting that in some matters the truth will not set us free.

Sinclair Lewis and the Limits of Satire

The opening scenes of Dickens’ classic Oliver Twist are deliciously satirical. The poor urchin begins his life in a hellish orphanage, presided over by sadists espousing their heightened degree of Christian virtue in caring for such wicked youth. This is where his famous request for more gruel is made to the astonishment of his orphan compeers and the horror of his benevolent overlords. Unable to break such an indomitable demand for sustenance, the orphanage director apprentices Oliver out to a chimney sweeper who takes even less care for his wellbeing. It is funny, political, cutting, but then the novel turns towards more conventional storytelling: Oliver falls in with Fagin, a ringleader of child thieves, comes to live with an elderly benefactor, and finds out that he is really highborn. Also, a man falls off the edge of a roof and hangs himself after killing a whore. Not sure how they handle that one in the musical for kids. 

My point being, in case it wasn’t readily discernible, is that satire is great but you can’t push it too far. At some point conventional storytelling ought to be given its place in the proceedings. Otherwise, you wind up with a novel like Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, a book clocking in at slightly fewer than 500 pages of pure satire. This is not to say that Gantry isn’t a good novel, an entertaining novel, and at times a spot-on critique of religious hypocrisy; my complaint is merely to say that it is exhausting. It is the book equivalent of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, except it is 100 days and the people don’t get their shit together in the end (yet even for all of that I would still rather read Gantry than rewatch How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days). It is like binge-watching Mad Men or only reading The Onion for your news.  

Gantry is the tale of the title character and his adventures from Philistine captain of a small Baptist college’s football team, to his emotional (and short-lived) conversion to fundamentalist Christianity, to his seminary days and expulsion therefrom, to his first pastorate and his deflowering of the deacon’s daughter, to his life on the road as a farm implement salesman, to his opening gig for a rockstar female evangelist, to his switch from Baptistical to Methodistical preaching at the behest of  a savvy Methodist bishop and his rise from small town church to big town megastardom, to his crusade against all vice as he maintains a series of affairs with women of his flock, to his honorary degrees from institutions looking for money, to his eventual position as leader of a society for morals and pastorship of a large Methodist church in urban New York. If that was a breathfull to read, it gives you some idea of the scope of the novel as well as the character of the protagonist. 

Elmer is a charlatan, pure and simple. He is not likeable or admirable or redeemable in any way. He is a terrible father, a cheating husband, and a minister who doesn’t believe in God. He is ambitious, which in some sort of Randian world I suppose would make him a hero. He uses his booming voice and physical presence to force weaker men into submission and cause weak-minded women to fall under his spell. He is everything you could ever want in a hypocritical preacher and Lewis spares no time thinking of ways to make Gantry anything other than simple and mean. On this score he succeeds brilliantly.  

Which could be fine—often an unchanging main character around whom other characters experience revelations and deep change can make for a good story, but none of the other characters have added dimensionality. Elmer’s fellow priests are either like Elmer—ambitious, morally suspect, and theologically obtuse—or humble and thoughtful closeted atheists afraid to leave the church for lack of other skills, continuing the charade halfheartedly for the benefit of their congregation’s weak-minded opiate-of-the-masses consumers. The women in the book are completely powerless and ridiculously gullible. And that is the entire book. 

  

There is no moral reckoning for Elmer, the story ending with him narrowly avoiding being exposed for his relationship with his secretary and he ends triumphant. Which, again, is fine. I like a sad ending to a sad tale, but the tale is paper thin. You can tell that Lewis spent time visiting Baptist churches and revivals in order to write the book, but you can also tell that he never really let himself experience these events. He was like one of the first anthropologists, smitten by how outlandish the conduct of people who believe different things than him appeared and reporting back to the likeminded about how they really are superior to those knuckle-draggers.  

And this is the problem with satire: all too often it loses the humanity of the people it would castigate in its clever barbs. Christianity may condemn vice but it calls people to repentance and to a life of love. Satire only slings arrows, only has room for the already convinced, only seeks to tear down. This can be effective and has its place, but if you’re going to write a 500 page novel it would seem to that it ought to be populated with more than caricatures. This quality of the novel allows it to be easily dismissed by those who ought to hear its message. In other words, the moral depravity of England’s orphan system was conveyed to me in a far greater degree by the later life of Oliver Twist (which is really about the eighth best book by Dickens), than the state of religious hypocrisy was by Lewis’s unhinged screed.  

When you abandon any sense of charity towards your characters, even the bad ones, you begin to treat them as subhuman. This makes one wonder what you think about real people in life who hold the same beliefs as those characters. 

The Problem of Irony

Irony is sort of the default position for a lot of people my age. The artsy television shows and movies are all cloaked in a steady layer of ironic distance. Mostly this is a symptom of the times. We are afraid or reticent to commit to wholehearted belief in anything for fear that it will crumble around us. And I don't think irony is a political response in the same way it was in the modernist era. I feel like today ironic detachment is just as prevalent in conservative-minded folks like myself. And in moderation I am quite sure that irony can be a fine response to a fallen world--better, at least, than depression or mania. 

But I feel hampered by my irony as well. Almost embarrassed to commit to something for fear of being found too zealous. This, of course, drives the hipster crowd to always seek new things and new experiences so that they stand out (together) from whatever crowd they don't like. But it drives me to be withdrawn.  

Last night I was walking with Clara and Owen and I was telling my wife about this running training book I have been reading. I have finally committed to getting back into shape and so I bought a book Amazon by a nutrionist and trainer that I think is solid and I committed to doing whatever he says in the book. And it has been exciting and fun to get back into shape. I was telling Clara about the life changes I have been making specifically in my diet and how great it is for a morning run to once again be my default position, when all of a sudden this little voice in the back of my head piped up that wasn't it a little silly to be so excited about three weeks of eating healthy and working out? "You sound like a couch potato who just completed their first 5k." 

And another thought responded, "what an ugly attitude that is." And I realized that the need to detach constantly, to subtly berate others through wordplay, is incredibly ugly. Not to mention unfulfilling. The happiest, most fruitful times of my life have not been the times when I have been smug and ironic and critical, but the times when I have been devoted to a cause. Now of course you can be smug and devoted to a cause or critical and devoted to a cause, but too often irony so frees us from anything binding that we (I) can become completely detached from anything concrete. My domestic life frees me from a lot of that, but it is still the battle I wage in my mind. 

Which is to say, I want to be different. I want to believe again, and live again in belief. Irony is a great response to a world governed by Chaos and destined for Misery, but that is not the world I as it is. The world as it is is a work of art, crafted by a sovereign Creator. And the end of this world is Love. And my response to this work of art is to live in it abundantly, not to sneer at it from the gallery.