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
