Two articles about housewives recently appeared in the same issue of a church paper. One defended the housewife’s right to have an outside job, inasmuch as women ought not to be satisfied merely to “clean, scrub, knit, and bake.” The other told of an experiment in which a group of “average housewives” had considerable success as psychological counselors. The author pleaded with church members to help with the enormous load of counseling that faces pastors today. He said housewives can be particularly effective in identifying with distraught mothers, and with sick and lonely people in their neighborhoods.
The two articles bring the vocation of homemaking into focus. So much has been said about the “liberration” of women, about their right to find fulfillment outside the home, that a homemaker who is happy with her lot may feel guilty about it, or may at least wonder why she doesn’t feel guilty. If she has a college degree, she may be chided about “wasting” it. In the United States today there are approximately 11.5 million working mothers, and the number has been rising.
The choice for the “liberated” woman today ought not to be between household drudgery and an outside job. There is a third alternative: a conception of homemaking much broader than the usual one. This is part of a larger question: How can we all get our tasks in a better perspective?
Homemakers sell their profession short if they think of it only as a series of chores. Cooking and washing and cleaning do need to be done, and of course can be approached creatively: trying new recipes, dressing the family attractively, redecorating, gardening—tasks like these are challenges for women with skill and talent. But let us not spend our lives upholding a you-can-eat-from-my-floors standard of housekeeping. Christ showed displeasure at one woman’s getting carried away with domestic duties. Martha, “distracted by her many tasks,” wanted Jesus to tell Mary to help instead of sitting listening to Him. Jesus’ disapproval of Martha’s priorities was unequivocal. “Martha, Martha,” he said, “you are fretting and fussing about so many things, but one thing is necessary. The part that Mary has chosen is best.”
If the husband cooperates, the truly liberating option for modern mothers lies in a broadened sense of homemaking. It includes first of all her role as parent. Childbearing and child-rearing are among the greatest of human opportunities and responsibilities. From the Christian perspective, bringing up children properly is a challenge worthy of the talents of the most gifted, educated women.
Unfortunately, our bent for affluence often pushes this perspective aside. An example comes to mind of a mother who had been employed outside her home since her son was a few months old. The family had a beautifully furnished house, an expensive car, and most of the other trappings of financial success. Not until the boy was in the sixth grade did the mother become aware that he could not read!
Intensive research in a whole range of disciplines shows that the first six years of a child’s life have a great bearing on his future development. A Harvard study indicates that skill differences can be spotted readily in babies as young as eight months old. The classic observation from Proverbs (22:6), “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it,” is as relevant as ever. A child’s parents—or those to whom his care is entrusted—will be his most important teachers.
Our culture keeps school-age children and fathers away from home for large parts of the day. If the mother too is gone, most of the training of the children is left to hired hands. The Christian mother of small children who is not at home during the day loses much of her opportunity to instruct her children in Christian principles as various situations arise in their daily lives.
One of the saddest cases in our own community involved a teen-ager arrested on a serious charge and turned over to a social worker for counseling. His mother had taken a job as a professional social worker. What this mother was doing for money she had failed to do for love. Now another social worker had to be found to counsel her son.
Let’s look at the home from a wider perspective. The Christian home can be a support post in the larger community, an integral part of a large network of concern helping to hold society together. As society becomes more and more fragmented, opportunities to serve in this way multiply.
Hospitality was required of Old Testament Israelites. In the New Testament it was a qualification for officeholders in the church. Today it is as important as ever. In every community there are lonely people who have no real friends, no one who cares about their welfare. The average North American family moves every few years, leaving relatives and friends behind. A woman who is ready to open her home to those in need of friendship can perform a real service.
And there are many other needs in the community. Hospitals and nursing homes, tutoring and Scouts and Big Sisters and other programs that help children, various projects for alleviating poverty and for combating abuse of the environment—these are only a few of the many avenues available for the exercise of Christian compassion. Normally a woman can set her own hours in this kind of endeavor so that she is free to be home when her family needs her. If a woman is employed full-time outside the home, her opportunities for compassionate service to others are substantially reduced. Can she justify this when needs are so urgent?
There is a tendency today to demean this kind of voluntary service. Instead of trying to be a Good Samaritan, we seem to want increasingly to leave works of compassion to professionals. We still sense that we have a responsibility to other human beings who are in need, but we would rather pay to have that responsibility discharged than do it ourselves. We shift the burden to people who do it as a means of financial support—some conscientiously and some not.
I am reminded of a friend whose field of endeavor is the whole town in which she lives. She is tireless in visiting the sick. If the PTA runs short of pies or casseroles, she can be counted on to bring an extra. When everyone else is too busy to take the neighborhood children swimming, her schedule can be changed. She is the first to appear at a cleaning party at the church. And she is spiritually perceptive; she can sense when a person is in special need of encouragement. Recently a mutual acquaintance reported that this woman was “still holding the community together.” And her husband and eight children “arise up and call her blessed” (Prov. 31:28).
Most crucial of all considerations is that there are people everywhere in our communities who are spiritually distraught and in need of the Gospel. A woman who makes herself available wlll find opportunities all around her to share her faith. Christian women who have tried this have told me they are continually amazed at the variety of ways in which God uses them. After a while they hardly have to look for ways to witness and serve; people in need seem to appear at their doorsteps. And these women are radiantly happy.
There are obviously some situations in which married women and even mothers should work. In some families the wife’s income is an economic necessity, not to make the family affluent but to keep it from poverty. Most young couples now feel that in the first years after marriage, employment for the wife is necessary; this is certainly so if the husband is still a student. Some Christian mothers with grown children have jobs outside the home in which they achieve greater spiritual impact than if they stayed home.
But there are a number of sound reasons why mothers of small children should think long and hard before leaving home for regular employment. First, let us not be fooled into thinking that a job is worthwhile, creative, and fulfilling because one is paid for performing it. Have we become so crass that we can judge the worth of an occupation only in economic terms? It is no more creative to check out groceries or type sales reports than to cook and clean. Even such important professions as nursing and teaching, however, cannot overshadow conscientious homemaking as a high calling.
At the humanitarian level, the wife of an adequately salaried husband ought to weigh the social effects of her holding a job. Often it means that someone else is being kept off the labor force who may need work. In the large American cities, the abundance of married women holding jobs is a major reason for the relatively high unemployment rate and low salaries in minority groups. White mothers in the suburbs take jobs in the cities and push employment opportunities for blacks downward. Then the white mothers hire black mothers from the inner city to come out to the suburbs and look after their children and homes. The black mothers take the jobs because their own husbands don’t make enough. Homes are disrupted in both cases, and the black children may end up having to look out for themselves. When all the figures are in, the suburban parents end up barely breaking even in affluent surroundings that they have little time to enjoy, while the inner-city family continues to suffer a financial pinch (but may actually be happier!).
Not infrequently the mother’s job turns out to be self-defeating as an income source. A survey article by Nadine Brozan of the New York Times pointed out how the new expenses entailed actually can wipe out salary, even for women who earn as much as $20,000 a year. Taxes, baby-sitters, and maids all take a heavy toll. Transportation costs and shopping bills are inflated because of time pressures (taxi fares, more home deliveries, no opportunity to comparison shop). And there is also the temptation toward more luxurious living. Is it worth it?
If a woman is involved all day long in doing something that has no relation to her family, it may be difficult for her to switch roles at the end of the day. She is likely to be preoccupied and tired, to feel more like being served than serving. There are bound to be consequences for husbands and children. There is no territorial imperative cited in Scripture that says a woman’s place is unalterably in the house. But especially today Christian families ought to be thinking how the father, mother, and children can spend more time together rather than less.
Before taking an outside job as a way of finding self-fulfillment, the Christian mother should ponder Christ’s call to discipleship, which means self-denial. “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matt. 16:25). Remaining in the home may for some women be a form of sacrifice that they make out of love not only for their family but also for their Lord.
Women are proving that they are quite capable of doing many of the jobs traditionally considered for men only. Well and good. This should surprise no one. But there is one job for which wives and mothers are uniquely qualified. By making our homes havens for our husbands, our children, and those around in need, we can serve Christ in a way that is ours alone. He liberates us even from ourselves.
Merely, Militantly Christian
Of all the centuries, the twentieth is most like the first: city-ridden, marred by tyranny, decadent, and wracked by those crises that man’s abuse of man and of his native earth engenders. When the eighth decade of the first century opened, Rome’s Viet Nam—the Great Rebellion of the Jews—was almost over, save that one grim fortress on the hot rim of the Dead Sea withstood the siege-engines for three more summers. Jerusalem was a heap of calcined stone at the end of 70. The empire itself was staggering, for 69 had seen four aspirants for power stain Italy with blood.…
The Christians who faced A.D. 70, and the dark years that followed, had a body of doctrine that formed the framework of their thought, made the pattern of their living in a dissolute, urbanized world, and gave substance to their proclamation. No program for political action, their Christianity was the proclamation that within living memory God had said his last word to man in Christ and had set seal and authentication on that demonstration by raising that same Christ from the dead. Let man therefore repent.
Nothing deflected them. They were the Church Militant, ranged against mighty odds, but having one clear objective in view: the Christianizing, through individual conversion, of the great imperial system. They left all the clamant questions of their day to find solution in the wider victory. They were merely Christian. The adverb reminds me of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. “My dear Wormwood,” said the Senior Tempter, “what we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in that state of mind I call ‘Christianity And.’ You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and Faith Healing.… Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian coloring.” The Fashion then absorbs the Reality.
What would have happened in the first century had the Christians set out to preach “Christianity and the Roman Occupation of Palestine”; or had the first Christians of Antioch channeled their activity into protests about the Roman invasion of Britain, which took place in A.D. 43, about the time they were first called Christians; or if Paul, in the year he reached Rome, had set out to organize a protest on imperialism’s shocking treatment of Boadicea of Norfolk, who had just burned London?
The issues of today, into which so many without a preoccupying gospel pour their surplus words and drive, will go the same way: Christianity and the New Morality, Christianity and Viet Nam, Christianity and the New Theology. We have a Gospel to preach, and we needs must preach it in plain and relevant language. To preach Christ in the language of the day is not to demean or diminish him. The Bible can be related to the preoccupations of the decade without destroying its authority, without softening the impact of its uncompromising theism, without dethroning its Christ. The Church Militant must not surrender its sword.—E. M. BLAIKLOCK, emeritus professor of classics, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Mary Bouma is the wife of a Christian Reformed minister in Tri-Cities, Washington, and the mother of four children. She graduated from Calvin College. She was featured in the February, 1969, issue of “Family Circle” as a regional winner in the “Homemaker of the Year” contest.
