The Nobility of Being a Homemaker in a Career-Obsessed World.
In recent weeks, there erupted a bit of a storm around the question of married women working outside of the home.
There was one man in particular, who shall remain nameless — well known in the Catholic Youtube world — who claimed Church teaching makes it clear that it is sinful for a women who is married (with or without children) to work outside of the home.
You can imagine the barage of fighting that ensued after such a statement — with so many Catholic women working in different capacities, in and outside of their home, paid or unpaid.
Honestly, I find statements like that to be highly inflammatory (and frankly, ignorant) and truly not fruitful in any real sort of way.
I mean, let’s have the discussion in a respectful way and let’s look at the full context of Church documents dealing with this topic.
Let’s even be open to changing some of the attitudes we’ve adopted along the way — because, Lord knows, the world is pretty darn set on evaluating our worth with superficial standards that don’t hold a candle to real substance.
Let’s also acknowledge that recent Church documents have much to say about the value of women in the workplace — so the question of the Church’s position on women working outside of the home seems to be more complicated than just a blanket statement across the board.
Furthermore, with the rise of modern technology and farming methods, the many hours of the day that had previously been spent on laboring and handling the affairs of the home (including gathering water and food)have greatly lessened.
Which is why I think a healthy dive into the question of married women (with or without kids) in the workplace could be a very fruitful one.
As a Catholic woman who has worked in a family business from the earliest days of my marriage, I’ve had the blessing of a flexibility that allowed for work and the needs of our kids to not come in conflict with each other very often.
I honestly don’t know the reality of the struggles and feelings that have come at that 6 week mark, when many a working mother is required to get back to work and leave her child in somebody else’s hands.
I also think it quite horrific that many a young couple has begun their marriage with so much college debt that it requires incredible sacrifice to make staying home with kids even a possibility.
There is no denying that the best case scenario for mother and baby is to be together for as long as possible — science backs that up.
We also know that the father’s role in the life of his kids is crucially important, especially as the years go on, and ensuring his regular presence at home should be a priority when considering his career choices as well.
I’ve seen amazingly creative husbands and wives — working together — overcoming the challenges of their particular situations and making it a priority to invest their time in what truly matters: their spouse and kids.
Which is why I dislike it when Christians find it necessary to make inflammatory statements that really aren’t encouraging women or men to embrace their particular vocation and live it to the best of their abilities.
No matter your place in or out of the workplace, can we all agree that the most important job we can have is to be a mother or father to our children and a wife or husband to our spouse?
Because we have to admit, that on our deathbed, we aren’t going to give a flying flip about the superficial realities of money in the bank, worldly praise or how many followers we had in our social media accounts.
We are going to care about little else but the way we responded to God and the most important relationships of our life. That’s it.
After all, what good is it to gain the entire world, if we have to lose our family in the process?
You may be wondering what any of that has to do with being a homemaker — which was the original point of this post — well, I believe there is an important connection here.
Part of the feminine genius is the ability to make the places we dwell feel like a home.
Who better than a woman to do that? Her very body can become a dwelling place for another human being — and she is so good at it making a home for another human being that those little babies often don’t want to leave.
Talk about hospitality.
It is no coincidence that a woman takes that very real part of her identity and translates that to her home.
It’s not just in the way she arranges the furniture or the colors she paints the walls — it goes so much deeper than that.
It’s in the way that she welcomes people into her home, especially her own husband and children — trying to make each member of her family feel loved and important.
Women, especially, have a gift for creating events that center around the home — events that leave her guests with a lasting feeling of being loved, welcomed and appreciated.
It’s also in the way a woman educates her children in the home — an education that includes books, yes, but also the formation of the entire person.
It’s in the way that a woman allows God to dwell within her, to work through her and to love even those people who aren’t very lovable in the eyes of the world.
Ask a woman if there is such a thing as “unconditional love” and she just might look at you as if you have two heads — of course there is unconditional love — it’s one of the most beautiful marks of the heart of a woman.
Perhaps you think I go too far — that I’ve conjured up in my mind this ideal that could never be a reality. Who is this fearsome woman of which I speak?
Honestly, on my best days, I fall way short of this ideal, but that doesn’t mean I should give up trying to live it in my life. It’s the choices we make that will determine if we will grow more like that ideal or not.
But this is the heart of woman of which I speak. It’s the heart that all women have been given — and yet it this same heart in which the battle to live out this ideal often looms large.
We live in a world that doesn’t value this loving heart as it should, and so often, a woman begins to change her heart, as best she can — to deny it, even, if she can’t change it.
There is so much pressure to deny this part of ourselves and to adopt the world’s idea of what a woman should be.
The struggle is real, people! Be it a glorified harlot, an intellectual making the circuit or a CEO of a Fortune 500 — whatever it is, it surely couldn’t be a woman who chooses to stay home and make her house a home, could it?
No, to spend her days trying to make her house a welcoming place where laughter and deep conversations abound, arguments are had but reconciliation always follows, children are educated, and people feel loved for who they are — that kind of life is for women who couldn’t make it in the real world.
Or so they say, but who the heck are “they” anyway?
I think it’s high time we forget what the world says. It’s time to be our big, bad beautiful homemaking selves, leaving the world around us a little better because we are in it — heck, leaving it a lot better place because we are in it!
Forget the naysayers. Forget the people trying to find their identity in what they do rather than in who they are.
Be the girl who finds your identity in the God who made you very, very good and who gave you unique gifts and talents that you were meant to give back to the people closest to you, first, and then the rest of the world.
This is not to say you can’t work outside of the home — women have so much to contribute to making the world a better place — but it is to say that there are seasons in our lives and some of our most beautiful seasons might be very hidden from the world at large.
Pray hard, ask God to lead you and then live out your feminine Genius in only the way you can live it out in the world.
Change your little part of the world and you will change the world in the process.
You go, girl! I believe in you!
“Be who you were meant to be and you will set the world ablaze”
Catherine of Siena
Sharing over at Kelly’s
10 Comments
Eileen
You go girl! There is a time for everything (many things) under the heavens, but only at the RIGHT TIME!
Your chldren will be gone before you know it. Make the most of it while you can. Why would you allow some stranger to form them in values different than your own? When I taught school to 4th and 5th graders, I realized I was “mothering” my children to encourage them to think and work hard and to be their best selves. When I had children of my own I said, “Why should I go off and “mother” other people’s children and not my own, especially while someone else is “mothering” my children? I thank God that I put them FIRST! I will never regret that decision. Do not compromise on this…the “world” does not have your back, only God and His Holy Spirit guide you to all truth.
Moira
Preach! 🙂
Sadly, you are right, the world doesn’t have our back — but we are blessed to have many people who have gone before us to encourage us to live our lives going against the stream. As Chesterton once said, “Only a dead thing goes with the stream. Only a living thing swims against it”… Ha, ha. Love that quote.
Donna A
Bravo,
I love this! I love the feeling, the intelligence, and the power these words provoke, in a good way. . .reminding us of what is truly important, what will matter in the last chapters of our female lives, and I am closing on 60. . .a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and a professional. Our homes, our hearts, in harmony is what matters!!
Thank you for reminding me and all of us!
Moira
Thank you, Donna! I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. God bless!
Moira
Cynthia
We are a lost society and full of sin, because we have left the biblical instruction behind.
The Bible can tell you how to live and how not to live.. it’s very specific about women’s roles
In society. Women are to be busy at home. Women were not instructed to work outside the home. I live what the Bible says, and shun the worlds ways.
Moira
Hello Cynthia,
Thank you for that perspective. Though I do think the most important call in our live is our vocation, I also don’t think it’s a black and white determination…as we have Saints who worked outside of the home…Gianna Molla Beretta…perhaps you think that disqualifies her, I don’t know? Anyway, it is a beautiful thing to make a house a home and I salute your dedication. God bless!
Sue
I’m 67 and have always regretted not being a “Homemaker”. However, it wasn’t my choice to go out to work. My husband walked out on me and my two children when they were just 3 and 5. This forced me into embracing a career that I neither wanted nor frankly enjoyed. My own mother had been a ” Homemaker” and her favourite mantra was “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world”.
I never enjoyed anything so much in my life as being at home with my kids. Sadly for some of us it’s not about choice but about necessity.
Moira
Hello Sue!
First of all, I’m so sorry to hear about your husband walking out on you, but I have to say, you are such a hero to me for the way you have embraced a very difficult situation. God bless you and thank you for your comment!
Alexandra
I agree with you for the most part on this topic. I love seeing women live their vocation as spouses and mothers fully, and get to be mothers and homemakers if God so calls them to be or spouses who take care of their husbands and homes soley. I do think with modern technologies there is a wider range of options, and also station in life may allow for a different perspective on this than traditionally held.
In my own situation, I work full-time at home for a large corporation, and I love what I do. I love my work, job, and the people I get to help every day. It’s honestly been hard to think about leaving the workforce, and I’ve opted to not at this point in my life since I will be in the home. I feel that I’ll still be able to provide my children with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’ll be able to play with them if I have a few minutes or half an hour through the day that’s free of meetings. I’ll be able to check in on them and the nanny as I want. I’ll be in the home if anything goes wrong. I’ll be able to set lesson plans and be very involved in what is taught to my children (I plan on them being homeschooled). I’ve opted to hire help and provide employment to young women who are in my community, because when I was younger I did this. I was a teacher for a year for a large corporate school, and, afterwards, I was a tutor/nanny for about a year for a family, and I loved getting to be paid to take care of children and help a family.
I know this is a newer approach maybe even a ‘modern’ response. The way I see it is that women have always worked in some capacity. I do believe the womens primary focus should be the domestic life. The way I see it a lot of our modern technologies and mass production have taken away a large part of what ‘homemaking’ as a skill and art had been. I don’t hear or see many women engaging in the home economy i.e. making their own bread daily, producing linens/cloths from natural materials, sewing/mending clothes, washing clothes with lye, making soaps/candles, keeping a farm or garden, etc. Since, we are no longer engaging in these skill/craft of home making and have so much more time on our hands I really do feel that frees us up to do other kinds of work if we so choose.
Moira
Thank you for this perspective! I agree technology has really changed the way people see “work” both outside of the home and in traditional methods of “keeping a home”. It’s really mind-boggling when you imagine the large swaths of time that simply cleaning/laundering/baking/sewing/farming took up in a day for most of human history. For most, those things are no longer a full day affair — especially when you have older kids who can be involved in the upkeep of the home — though I do remember days when I had all littles sometimes just barely keeping everybody fed and not much else. Ha, ha!
Add to that the fact that so many are working from home or have jobs on the side that they can do from home or in dedicated time slots in their week and it really does open up discussion for the many ways different families are managing to maintain a home, educate their kids, incorporate leisure and just spend time as a family enjoying each other and growing in mutual love and respect.
I always have been blessed by great “help” in the form of nieces, young women who needed summer work, etc… and I think it’s a great way to lessen the feelings of “never getting a break” and losing sight of just how beautiful these kids are!
Definitely, best word of advice for anyone starting off or feeling things need to change is to pray, pray, pray and ask God to lead that particular family to the best way of cultivating an environment of love and respect and one that passes on the faith to our kids and helps us to grow in the faith, too.
God bless you and your family! It’s a beautiful life!