Women Must Work!

From the moment of our conception, we become a product of our environment. What a mother eats affects her unborn child. The lifestyle she leads either positively or negatively affects her child. The amount of stress she is under affects her child. And upon joining our family on the day of our birth, our formation as an individual has begun.

We are surrounded by women who work. Instead of the pack of protective elephants circling their young, tusks outwards to defend them, they have circled with the tusks inwards to impale them if they do not conform to the status quo.

We are incessantly informed that women need to make something of themselves. They need to be able to support themselves. They need to get a good paying job and do all they can to get promotions, more fealty from coworkers (which is really just lip service) and more pay. Always more pay. If you aren’t working, you are a leech on society. You have betrayed yourself and all those of your sex. You are a burden on your husband. If he isn’t resentful now, he most certainly will be in the future. There is no way you can prevent his resentment of you unless you cease your sedentary lifestyle and get a job! You are stealing away your family’s ability to buy a nice house and to have those extra luxuries that make us human. And you are denying your children, present and future, the necessities of life by your unforgivable selfishness! You poor backwards, unkempt, stupid, confused little thing!

I am a stay at home wife. My place is in the home. It is here I can most easily fulfill my vocation as a woman, as a wife and as a mother. I am to be the heart of the home! To provide a safe haven and a refuge for my family. A place where they can receive refreshment, light and peace. A refuge where the Faith is paramount, where culture and civilization are taught and embodied. A refuge in which to become rejuvenated after facing the onslaught of the world outside the home.

I admit that I have listened to the cacophony insisting on my working a ‘job’ from childhood and have been influenced by it more than I care to admit. I struggle greatly knowing that people are disappointed in me and that I am looked down upon. But ultimately, I am not doing this for them. I am doing this for my husband and our family. I am doing this because I feel it is the best way for our household to progress towards fulfilling our respective vocations as man and woman, husband and wife, father and mother. For us, it is the easiest way to live out the truths of the Natural Law and of our Faith.

It is difficult in today’s world where the system has duped us into ‘needing’ two incomes and in which women constantly have their hackles raised at any hint of male superiority and sexism. But why? Why must we give in to this distorted view? Women have the ability, nay the duty, to lead the hearts of men. To inspire in them the desire to work for, provide for, love and even fight for women. We have the power to inspire true chivalry, culture and manliness in men. We should work together to fulfill our respective roles. Men cannot bear children, or suckle them at the breast. Men have not the innate ability to inspire civilization with the virtues of true masculinity, chivalry and gallantry. This is given to them by the presence of women. Women who fulfill their calling. Women who strengthen their men for the toil and hard work they must endure. Women who raise little men and women to carry on the propagation of Faith and culture, beauty and chivalry.

Instead, as G.K. Chesterton put it with his penetrating wit,

“Ten thousand women marched through the streets of London saying: ‘We will not be dictated to’, and then went off to become stenographers.”

Listen to him extol the dignity of women in the home in his work What’s Wrong with the World.

There is only one way to preserve in the world that high levity and that more leisurely outlook which fulfills the old vision of universalism. That is, to permit the existence of a partly protected half of humanity; a half which the harassing industrial demand troubles indeed, but only troubles indirectly. In other words, there must be in every center of humanity one human being upon a larger plan; one who does not “give her best,” but gives her all…But she cannot be expected to endure anything like this universal duty if she is also to endure the direct cruelty of competitive or bureaucratic toil. Woman must be a cook, but not a competitive cook, a schoolmistress, but not a competitive schoolmistress; a house-decorator, but not a competitive house-decorator; a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have not one trade but twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all her second bests…Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of monomaniacs. It was only by partly limiting and protecting the woman that she was enabled to play at five or six professions and so come almost as near to God as the child when he plays at a hundred trades.

Women have forfeited the beauty of home life for slavery and quite honestly, polygamy. A woman working outside the home at a 9-5 job is a slave to the whims and desires of her superiors and employer. She is not free to come and go when she chooses, nor is she able to devote her valuable time to caring for her family and providing them with the sanctuary of home. And she is in a constant battle with those others of her sex who work alongside her at these jobs. Constantly do they vie with each other for the attentions of men in higher positions who can obtain a higher position for them. Constantly do they vie with each other for the attentions of the boss, hoping that he will give them a raise or a promotion. Is this not reminiscent of the multiple wives of one man each vying for the attentions and love of their husband? Each needing to be more beautiful and needed by him?

Listen once more to Mr. Chesterton.

Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they do office work so well; and that is why they ought not to do it.

Oh! How we have fallen! How we have forfeited the place Christianity won for us as Queen of the home and Mistress of our husband’s heart! How we have lost our place as the heart of the home! As she who provides the lifeblood to her household and helps her husband discern how best to lead the family! Nay, we have chosen to thrust a dagger into the heart and have created a hydra, with each head vying for supremacy. Quite contrary to this eloquent sentence in Casti Connubii

For if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love.

I do not condemn women for working and I realize fully that there are times when she is forced to work because her husband is not given a just and living wage to support their family. But this does not need to be the norm. Why can’t we stand up for and fight for our elevated place in the home?

Let us hear from the beautiful and forceful Casti Connubii.

The same false teachers who try to dim the luster of conjugal faith and purity do not scruple to do away with the honorable and trusting obedience which the woman owes to the man. Many of them even go further and assert that such a subjection of one party to the other is unworthy of human dignity, that the rights of husband and wife are equal; wherefore, they boldly proclaim the emancipation of women has been or ought to be effected. This emancipation in their ideas must be threefold, in the ruling of the domestic society, in the administration of family affairs and in the rearing of the children. It must be social, economic, physiological: – physiological, that is to say, the woman is to be freed at her own good pleasure from the burdensome duties properly belonging to a wife as companion and mother (We have already said that this is not an emancipation but a crime); social, inasmuch as the wife being freed from the cares of children and family, should, to the neglect of these, be able to follow her own bent and devote herself to business and even public affairs; finally economic, whereby the woman even without the knowledge and against the wish of her husband may be at liberty to conduct and administer her own affairs, giving her attention chiefly to these rather than to children, husband and family.

This, however, is not the true emancipation of woman, nor that rational and exalted liberty which belongs to the noble office of a Christian woman and wife; it is rather the debasing of the womanly character and the dignity of motherhood, and indeed of the whole family, as a result of which the husband suffers the loss of his wife, the children of their mother, and the home and the whole family of an ever watchful guardian. More than this, this false liberty and unnatural equality with the husband is to the detriment of the woman herself, for if the woman descends from her truly regal throne to which she has been raised within the walls of the home by means of the Gospel, she will soon be reduced to the old state of slavery (if not in appearance, certainly in reality) and become as amongst the pagans the mere instrument of man.