Balance between women working and having a family?

[Kitcat1968]

All I have to offer to this topic is my experience. My husband fell off a horse two years into our marriage (40 years ago) and became a quadriplegic. I suddenly was forced, against how I was raised, to become a working gal. I spent the next three decades being the sole breadwinner and raising our three children.

It is not an easy balance, but it is possible. God truly tests our will and our patience, but I am a better woman for it.

 

[Portrait]

The ideal is for a woman to stay at home with her children. Unfortunately this is not always possible. JPII also wrote that societies have an obligation to try to structure the social order in such a way that women can indeed stay at home.

Most women that are married actually can do this. We have just fooled ourselves into believing families need 5 cell phones, 2 televisions, annual vacations, video games, 2 nice cars, etc.

Dear SocialReign,

Cordial greetings and a very warm welcome to the world of CAF. Do trust that you will find your time here informative and spiritually enriching. Splendid post and bang on target, especially that last paragraph.

Owing to the huge and destructive impact of spurious feminist ideology, our godless Western culture has all but abandoned the biblical model of family life of a bread-winning husband and home-making wife and mother. It admits of no doubt that this family pattern, rooted in Sacred Scripture (see Titus 2: 4,5) and endorsed by Holy Mother Church, gave stability not only to the family but also to the wider society. The repudiation of the this arrangement has undeniably reaped a bitter harvest in terms of family breakdown and legions of emotionally damaged and unruly children. Only by the gradual diminuition of Christian principles could our current plight have become possible. The vital work of motherhood and child-rearing is now shamefully farmed out to nursery schools/nannies because the woman wishes to be a wage-earner with her husband. Moreover, when children are older they frequently come home from school to an empty home (‘latch-key children’), which can sadly lead to other problems. At any rate, mothers are no longer available as full-time guides and carers who are always on hand to counsel and console and to share in the daily ups and downs of young life in sympathy and understanding. This is a monumental tragedy of the first rank and a clear dereliction of duty on the part of the mother.

It is often said by way of reply, dear friend, that many married women must work for economic reasons and that their families could not survive on the husband’s wages alone. This hackneyed argument is always trotted out in discussions of this sort and is intended to be the knock-out that silences those who put the case for a return to traditional family life. Of course some families are suffering severe financial hardship and are experiencing great difficulty in paying essential bills and meeting their mortgage repayments/rent. However, men and women in the Western world now feel impoverished if they do not have a comfortable lifestyle, free from any want. They have failed to distinguish between needs and wants, which is why many young adults are so jolly dissatisfied with their lot nowadays. The older generation would save carefully even for the purchase of white goods, such as a fridge or washing-machine. Today these things are deemed to be ‘basics’ and one has a ‘right’ to them in the modern world. Why, even a television set and computer is no longer considered a luxury, even amongst the poorest of the poor. Real poverty is having to live on Social Security payments because of ill-health and having to choose whether to eat or heat in the cold winter season. Thus many spouses who would grumble about having to exist on a husband’s ‘meagre wage’ should think about the those who are really are on the margins of society, but who still have to survive notwithstanding. Sadly, some spouses (including not a few professing Catholics) have convinced themselves that they require two incomes to have a ‘decent’ life for them and their children. However, is it not the case that they are just unwilling to accept a lower standard of living, were they to rely upon the husband’s wage alone? How many of them can say with St. Paul, “having food and raiment let us be therewith content” (I Tim. 6: 8)? If God provides for us the necessary supports of life, then surely we ought to be happy and contented, even if we do not possess a television set, computer, car or a well-furnished home. Some very deep soul-searching is needed in these times of unbridled greed in the West; do we put family life first or material prosperity and comfort?

Finally, dear friend, the more that secular feminism persuades women of the superior status and rewards of work outside of the home, the more that married women will seek it and this must necessarily have a jolly huge impact on men’s job opportunities. How sad today that in many households you have both spouses working, whilst in others the poor husband cannot even find a job to support his family. Moreover, it is undeniable that both spouses going out to work has contributed to inflation and dearth of affordable housing. After all, house prices inevitably reflect joint incomes these days, which makes it well-nigh impossible for poor one-wage families to purchase a home, meaning that they must pay exorbitant rents to private landlords. Thus many are suffering because of the departure from the biblical and Catholic paradigm of married women staying at home and the husband being the sole bread-winner.

What immense damage anti-Catholic feminism has caused in the West since its emergence in the Sixties. Its corrupting influence has been far and wide and family life has not, alas, escaped unscathed.

God bless.

Warmest good wishes,

Portrait

In Christos

 

[Portrait]

In my opinion, our society is worse off when women are all at paid jobs. This is because:

(a) more women in the workplace depresses the value of male labor;

(b) it defeats the likelihood of ever establishing a just living wage, in which one person’s work allows that person to afford the full cost of a family.

(c) it puts everybody on the “corporate treadmill.”

(d) it prevents the operation of the Home Safety Net; this used to be a pretty handy thing during downtimes. It operated this way: with one wage-earner bringing in the cash, the family retained the potential of having another wage earner bring in cash, should the first wage earner be fired. IF both are working, just one firing/dismissal means the family is put into dire straits.

(e) it substantially eviscerates local society; neigbhorhoods during the daytime look as if they’d been struck by neutron bombs. Who volunteers to help make schools, etc., better? We lose an enormous positive force for good in communities.

(f) the role of parents gets diminished because there is less presence;

(g) family size diminishes.

(h) growth of yet more individualism; potentially more divorce due to this, and due to workplace temptations to both persons.

(i) worse childhoods; children left to watch TV or play games at home rather than be in a neighborhood setting or developing via interaction with a parent.

I really believe we’re eating our potatoes here: our society is taking a short-term gain from more female employment, but at a much greater long-term cost.

I discard the notion that it’s a “waste” of education for a woman to run the communities, neighborhoods, households. Education is good in itself. The people who chant about education in the way the OP mentions are simply talking about technical training.

PS: it must be noted that women’s reported levels of personal happiness have plummeted in the past few decades. And that a separate study has confirmed that female happiness—contrary to the hoary old feminist mythmaking—was actually awfully damn high in the 1950s.

(Note, of course, the aberration of the 1950s: enormous pent-up consumer demand, and virtual elimination of foreign industrial competition thus making the American economy quite vibrant. . . and of course, vast numbers of people wishing to HAVE a home life after so many years of doing without due to the war).

Dear Captain America,

Cordial greetings and a very good day. Splendid observations.

As Catholics it is imperative that we counter the very un-Catholic and aggressive disparagement of women being “keepers at home” and mothers. There is no work that is potentially more important than home building and motherhood. The hand that rocks the cradle still rules the world and the tragic break-up of home life is one of the great sicknesses of Western society. Please God may it not be unto death.

Moreover, dear friend, married women claiming a high career profile for themselves have eroded their husband’s sense of responsibility as breadwinner, but hardly anyone cares anymore because this tends to be shared now as a matter of ‘equality’. It is very sad that the constant barrage of feminist propaganda has made women feel unfulfilled unless they are competing with men in the world of work. This is actually demeaning to women because it is a tacit denial of the true ‘nature’ of womanhood. Seem to remember Cherrie Blair (wife of Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister) criticising what she termed “yummy mummies” who marry wealthy men and put their energies into rearing children rather than concentrating upon their careers. What an insult to home makers and mothers and so deeply saddening coming from a professing Catholic.

Whilst, dear friend, we cannot argue that it is intrinsically evil for a woman to work and have a family in every single circumstance, it is certainly not desirable or in the best interests of the children. As the good old *Catechism of the Council of Trent *states: “The wife should love to remain at home, unless compelled by necessity to go out, and she should never presume to leave without her husband’s consent”. Thus, for example, if a husband has a long term mental/physical health problem that precludes him from working, then there may be a necessity for the wife to go out and earn a living. However, this is totally different from a married woman choosing a career path so as not to feel incomplete or unfulfilled as a wife and mother. This is just so unbefitting of a Catholic women who professes the holy religion of Christ and betrays a very unspiritual mindset.

God bless.

Warmest good wishes,

Portrait

In Christos

 

[Portrait]

Dearly beloved friends,

Cordial greetings.

The issue is not so much a legalistic matter of whether a married women is committing a sin by working outside of the home, more an issue of the task assigned to her for the good of society and the best interests of family life, including the rearing of well-adjusted children. The traditional Catholic Catechisms (in their teaching on the Fourth Commandment) uphold that the vocation of a married women is best fulfilled within the home, not beyond its borders. Now contemporary Catholics may choose not to attach any great weight to these catechisms, but they cannot deny that that they only reflected the constant teaching of Holy Mother Church throughout the ages. The normal Catholic paradigm has always been for a married women to remain at home and provide for the formation of her children, in addition to supporting her bread-winning husband (cf. Titus 2: 4,5). Moreover, this good and wholesome teaching has also been reinforced in Sacred Tradition by the Pope’s when the woman’s emancipation movement began to raise its ugly head and gather momentum in the 20th. century. It is almost as if by divine providence that they anticipated the full-blown radical feminism that was to be foisted upon us in the Sixties - the sad legacy of which we are having to contend with today even, I am sorry to say, within the bosom of Holy Mother Church. Many modern Catholics, especially the youth, have been caught up with the secular drift of the age and seek to square Church teaching with heterodox feminist ideology.

Already in 1917, Pope Benedict XVI warned that a revolution was making particular effort to snatch women from the home and into the world of work:

“With the decline in religion, cultured women have lost their sense of shame along with their piety. Many, in order to take up occupations ill-befitting their sex, took to imitating men. Others abandoned the duty of housewife, for which they were fashioned, to cast themselves recklessly into current life” (Letter Natalis trecentesime , 1917, added emphasis mine).

This could have been written for own age and he being dead yet speaketh. Pope Benedict’s words continue to be immensely relevant, perhaps even more so than when they were first written.

Pope Pius XI referred to the movement to liberate women from domestic home life and the vital task of rearing children:

“It is 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 their mother, and the home and the whole family of an ever watchful guardian” (Encyclical, Casti Connubii, 1930).

Pope Pius XI frequently addressed what he termed “the temptations of our day” for women to be lured by a “false independence” away from the family hearth and “the task assigned her for the good of society, by nature and by marriage”.

He insists, moreover, that to take a woman away from the family is to extinguish the flame in the hearth of the home:

“The atmosphere of the home cools, the family circle ceases to exist and the centre of daily life will be found elsewhere for her husband, for the wife herself and for her children” (Allocution to newly-weds 1943 in The Woman and Modern World, pp 79-81).

The Pope was only too well aware that some women - both then and now - will rebelliously protest against this life of self-sacrifice and thus wisely responds: “Do you really believe, however, that there is any true solid happiness here below not one through sacrifice and self-denial? For the wife and mother, it is those daily sacrifices for husband and children - in an office given her by nature - that will ensure the life of all to develop and flourish, and win her sanctification” (allocution to newly-weds 1942, added emphasis mine).

The above citations, dear friends, on the role of the wife and mother require no elaboration from me, for their meaning is perfectly clear. Incontrovertably, the Popes are jolly rigorous in declaring that a mother should remain at home. Therefore, any person genuinely seeking orientation need only apply those perpetually sound teachings. They have not become obsolete and neither have they gone mouldy with the passage of time. On the contrary, they are even more applicable in our confused and unhappy times and it would yield very beneficial effects, as regards modern family life, if the wise counsel of these Popes were heeded.

God bless and goodbye.

Warmest good wishes,

Portrait

In Christos

 

[Portrait]

Dearly beloved friends,

Can I kindly ask that you suffer this my final post in this thread. In my previous post I omitted to mention Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which clearly favours the position that a married woman wil be a “keeper at home” and care exclusively for her husband and children:

“Women, again, are not suited for certain occupations; a woman is by nature suited for home-work, and it is that which is best adapted at once to preserve her modesty and promote the good bringing up of children and the well-being of the family”.

It should be noted, dear friends, that Pope Leo does not establish his authoritative teaching on any social circumstances or customs which do indeed change, but rather upon the nature of women, which never changes from one generation to the next. Moreover, whilst it is manifestly obvious to housewives themselves, many others, especially today, overlook the fact that being a housewife* is* work. Indeed, in Pope Leo’s remarks the Church acknowledges it as such, thus when subsequent Popes speak of ‘working women’ we ought to see that as not excluding being a homemaker and mother. This is, as I said previously, is a vital work and should not be regarded in any way as inferior or unworthy of true womanhood.

God bless and may I take this opportunity to wish you all a jolly splendid and relaxing weekend, whatever are your plans.

Warmest good wishes,

Portrait:tiphat:

In Christos