What a great question! Random thoughts:
Remember the psalm (loosely quoted) “happy the man whose wife is like a fruitful vine in the recesses of his home, his children like olive plants around his table”? The Almighty seems to endorse the concept of wife at home/husband in workplace.
Except that - not everyone marries. There are people called to the single life. A society that does not provide equal opportunity for women in the workplace forces women into marriages based solely on economic reasons. That just doesn’t seem right.
And, traditional roles grew out of our experience in largely agrarian societies - where all the work was “at home” and everybody worked toward the common good, but found themselves in roles truly dictated by their biology. If you saw the PBS show about families reliving the pioneer life, you know that the women soon found themselves relegated to the traditional housekeeping roles because they lacked the raw muscle power to do the heavy lifting. Anyone who saw the final episode saw the relief with which the women greeted the washing machine and dishwasher. Old-fashioned housework was largely a life of drudgery, pure and simple.
Not that this issue is pure and simple, and it hasn’t been all good for women in the workplace. In “What’s Wrong with the World” GK Chesterton wrote about the rise of feminism and the influx of women into the workforce. He made some stunningly accurate predictions.
First, he said that women would do very well in the workplace. He admired women as the ultimate generalists, who could turn their hands to anything and do it well. (On the other hand, GK regarded men as specialists, who “can do one thing well… if they are made to.” Gotta love GK!
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Second, he said that women would go to work and compete well… but then would come home and try to do everything at home as well as if she weren’t working because, “you can free woman from the home, but you can’t free her from her conscience.”
GK called it right - about 70 years before women’s magazines started moaning about the stress of trying to “have it all.”
Three principles seem to emerge from this:
- Traditional roles are by and large going to work for most of the population - there’s something in the human heart that resonates to Mom making the home, Dad as breadwinner.
- Life is messy. Not everyone is going to fit into the first principle situation - widows with children, single people without kids, folks who just made a mistake and have to get on with their lives the best way they know how. The psalm says “happy the man” - it doesn’t say “and belittle or berate those who aren’t lucky enough to have this.”
- Whatever your individual situation, recognize that couples have a joint responsibility to provide for their family. In agrarian societies, each partner had their role, but no one got a free ride. In today’s world, the dependence on intellect and education make other labor divisions possible. Each couple has a duty to consider the options and make their best choice, knowing they will answer to God for not only their decision, but also for their motivations in making it.
A final principle - these discussions are good, useful, and don’t happen enough. We aren’t used (anymore) to throwing our individual decisions against a common moral screen to see if they pass.
But be on guard against the temptation to judge others who aren’t in the “first principle situation” and don’t use that happy, best situation to discriminate against women in the workplace. Because there’s another psalm that recognizes women’s contribution to the material provision for the home that (loosely) says, “let the work of her hands praise her at the city’s gates.” Granted, it was written with the more traditional tasks of weaving and spinning and bread-making in mind… but how many men are still plowing fields and pruning vines and bringing in the harvest?
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