The home is a woman's place, and a man's too

The tired, old comment came up in conversation recently about a woman's place being in the home. It's a comment that has always made me a little uncomfortable. To the casual observer, my wife and I are on the traditional end of the spectrum. Rosemary is a "home-maker," to use the term commonly employed on credit card applications. It's a pejorative title to our broader secular culture, or, alternately, an unquestionable good and a sine qua non to more traditionalist folks. But again, the comment has always made me uncomfortable. The reason? I think both camps fail to see the bigger problem.

The Cranberry Harvest, Nantucket Island, by Eastman Johnson

I am convinced that our society has gotten the whole work-home thing dreadfully wrong since at least the Industrial Revolution. My unfashionable idea is that home life and the family began to disintegrate when men became paid laborers in factory environments wholly separate from their home and the local community. In medieval society, work much more often occurred in and around the home. Living quarters were often above or the back of family-owed workshops. Children played an active role to whatever degree made the most sense given their age. While I don't want to paint any of this as idyllic, the fact is that one's living and one's family were significantly more bound together in previous times than they are today. The result was that men and women alike were necessarily involved in the work and in the more important familial decisions.

Whereas previously women were very close to the major decisions, it became much less so when work, and the men who worked, became wholly separated from women and the home environment. A woman's place may be in the home, but not in a home that is merely the sweeping of floors and the changing of diapers. The Catholic Church teaches that men and women are equal in dignity. Women are not "second-class citizens"; they're not meant to be relegated, so to speak, to rocking the cradle of the next generation of men who will rule the world. Men and women alike yearn for an active role in the making of a family unit, which is the basic building block of the wider society. The problem, therefore, is that we now live in a society where a major component of the home life--work--is something wholly separate from the home.

This is the reason for women who sacrifice their natural desire for a family in order to have a career. Perhaps more under the radar, it is also the reason there are so many men who, though they provide for their families financially, often fail to be involved in the other aspects of managing a household. My argument is that work--shared, economically meaningful work--is the glue that holds a family together. It gives the wife a stake in the family's financial future and therefore a greater sense of ownership. It keeps the husband from being absent from the home and gives him a greater role in the formation of his children. As for the children, it gives them the example of a father at work and caring for his family. And when the children work too, it also gives them a real stake and ownership in the enterprise that is their family. Again, work is the glue that holds a family together.

One of the few remaining bastions where work and home life go hand-and-hand is the small family farm. Philosophically speaking, this is one of the biggest reasons that Rosemary and I made the decision to start farming a few years ago. While our shared work has exposed plenty of rough edges, it has also brought us closer together. We are both deeply invested in the decisions that drive our family's success--the economic decisions, the practical farming decisions, and the decisions regarding the rearing and education of our children. Equally so, I know that my boys feel that they are participants in the creation of this success. Our home, in other words, is not something that we come to at the end of a long day because we're tired, and that we escape from the next day in order to go to work, to school, or to play. Rather, it's everything. It's our center-point and our economic lifeblood.

In conclusion, I have no pretensions to reclaiming some falsely idyllic medieval synthesis of family life and work. But I am convinced that the place of a woman in a home separated from a major part of what makes it a home is demeaning. I wholly understand why, in a society where the home is merely a place to be kept clean, a woman would rather make a career for herself. Yet I am equally convinced that the answer is not "emancipating" women from the home. Rather, the answer is that society find a way to recover the home as a woman's place, and a man's too.