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.