How Practical is it for Women to be Submissive to Their Husbands in Modern Society

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Lea101 said:
In an attempt to bring back the focus:

I don’t know about the specifics of submission, but as for life skills, women should be able to learn them and should be able to hold down some sort of job in case something bad happens. You really don’t have to be a woman without a degree. Although as a poor person here, getting a degree and being a sahm is a waste of money for me. I wouldn’t bother pursuing an education if it means I can’t invest in it in the future. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to pay for school just for the sake of a backup plan, go for it
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I used every bit of my degree in the 7 years between college and marriage (and the 1 before I started having children). Thankfully, very few colleges specialize in MZ degrees anymore so you’re likely to at least work for a few years. I paid off my loan, had a great time and really lived.

When I was working I also got to earn my Masters through my company. Even when I was engaged I still completed.

Today I’m a WFHM. I freelance write, I also pick up online work from home. The number of jobs available because I not only have my Bachelor’s but also my Masters is REALLY stunning.

Not only that, I can easily find jobs for $15-$20 an hour, and I’ve seen even better. With no degree, I’d be looking down the barrel at $10 best case scenario. I can work 20 hours a week and earn the same as someone without a degree working 40 hours a week.
 
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No, I’ve never tried wifely submission. Mostly because I’m not married.

If you wanna get technical, it wasn’t God who said that having a Y chromosome automatically puts you in charge - that was Paul. I love Paul, but he was operating out of a vastly different cultural worldview: one which also said that escaped slaves should return to their masters, women shouldn’t speak in church and, more innocuously, that believers should habitually exchange “holy kisses.” The subject of holy kissing appears more frequently in his letters than that of wifely submission, but almost no one does it in the Western world, because kissing has more intimate connotations in our culture than it did in Paul’s. Truth is eternal, but cultural mores fall in and out of style. Padre Pio wouldn’t hear the confessions of women who wore pants, because it didn’t jive with what he was accustomed to. Does that mean pants-wearing women are sinning? Unless you’re a dedicated fundie or rad Trad, the answer is no.
 
Well, it was Paul alone if you’re reading one of those Bibles that’s a NT alone. 🙂 See Genesis 3:16. Yes, this is the section of the curse. But we know that God works all things for our good – even the Fall and its consequences.

I found the idea of submission to be offensive until I saw how it worked itself out in my life. As I’ve said, neither my husband nor myself subscribe to some of the extreme interpretations on this thread. We’re partners. He’s the tie-breaker.

The bottom line is that a woman is either going to submit to God and therefore her husband, or she’s going to hold something back from God. Period. I have 100% found that submission to my husband - sometimes even when I believe him to be completely (though not morally) wrong - and I’m usually right about that! - has absolutely opened me up to a deeper relationship with God. It hasn’t in itself deepened my relationship with God; but it has made a deeper relationship possible. Unfortunately, I don’t understand how that works, so I can’t explain it.

I know it’s very difficult to swallow, and I don’t talk like this in person. Last year I was in a Bible study with about thirty people in the room, mostly women, all a generation older than myself, and I was the only woman there who subscribes to the Biblical teaching on submission. The example I gave the room wasn’t as clean as this one, because I find the bitterness and outrage that attends this subject frightening; instead I gave a (still true) example of another time that wasn’t quite so clear-cut, to give them some wiggle-room. We’re messy creatures. It’s easy to find messy examples.

Anyway, I’m not trying to convince you. I won’t be successful. I’m simply telling you how I - an educated, thoughtful, intelligent, married Catholic woman - regard and live out submission to my husband.
 
MrsAngelala said:
The bottom line is that a woman is either going to submit to God and therefore her husband, or she’s going to hold something back from God. Period. I have 100% found that submission to my husband - sometimes even when I believe him to be completely (though not morally) wrong - and I’m usually right about that! - has absolutely opened me up to a deeper relationship with God. It hasn’t in itself deepened my relationship with God; but it has made a deeper relationship possible. Unfortunately, I don’t understand how that works, so I can’t explain it.
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The problem with this, though, is that it doesn’t necessarily respect the fact that both men and women are capable of rationality and logic, and it’s entirely possible that a situation could come about which requires you to actively oppose your husband. The reason this has worked for your thus far, is presumably because your husband is a reasonable man. But if he was not reasonable…if for example he wanted to leave his career and invest all your money in stocks, without having thought it through, would you then also be required to submit?

The problem is that the Catholic faith teaches us that reason and faith should not be opposed, and that we have dignity because God has given us the gift of reason, if we aren’t going to use that gift then is that not a cop out?
 
Rau said:
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Xanthippe_Voorhees:
Not only that, I can easily find jobs for $15-$20 an hour, and I’ve seen even better.
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2 university degrees and an experienced person can earn $40,000 per year. Labor has certainly lost pricing power!
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I could earn more with a traditional job…and I have. I’m talking about what I can do with an extremely flexible part-time virtual job. You lose $$ when you get flexibility.
 
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Hey, if it works for you, more power to you. I just don’t think it’s God’s will for all married women. Adult men and women, as a whole, are no different in terms of rationality and moral agency, so to assume that one party should have special authority over a spiritual equal based on their genitalia is primeval.

Your line, “The bottom line is that a woman is either going to submit to God and therefore her husband, or she’s going to hold something back from God” makes me very uncomfortable. I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere in one of Debbie Pearl’s books.
 
TheAmazingGrace said:
Your line, “The bottom line is that a woman is either going to submit to God and therefore her husband, or she’s going to hold something back from God” makes me very uncomfortable.
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One of the really interesting things is that the submit-to-husband verses tend to be bundled with children submit to parents, slaves submit to masters, everybody submit to the government. Plus, we’re supposed to be in submission to our own Church authorities (kind of a big deal for Catholics, right?). And before anybody says that children are only supposed to submit until legal adulthood–it doesn’t say that, and that’s not how things worked in the ancient world–in fact in the Roman world, fathers were under some circumstances able to force their happily married adult daughters to divorce husbands and marry somebody of their choosing.

So wifely submission is not the only kind of submission in the Bible, but people tend to pull it out of those passages and concentrate on it to the exclusion of other kinds of submission.

One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is that the presence of all of those different kinds of submission to different authority figures strongly suggests that NT submission does not actually mean total obedience. It logically can’t, because all of those different authorities are never going to be on the same page, even on a good day. They’re all going to want slightly different things. Mom and dad may want you to come to Thanksgiving and Christmas 200 miles away, while MIL and FIL want to take the grandkids skiing while husband wants to stay home. That’s a trivial example, but it does demonstrate that submitting to all authority figures is not even a logical possibility if submission means total obedience. I would suggest that the presence of all of those different “submits” points to it being more a question of a quality of heart, rather than total obedience. As I’ve mentioned before, we’re told many times in the NT to submit to the authorities, and yet the Apostles and early Christians were constantly in hot water with the authorities.
 
Xantippe said:
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TheLittleLady:
But it is possible for every Catholic person, with the Grace of the Sacraments, to have a Godly marriage.
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I’m not so sure.

There is such a thing as mental illness.

Plus, while it takes only one person for virtue, it takes two virtuous, fully functioning people to have a good marriage.
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My parents, God willing, will celebrate 50 Years of marriage this summer. My mother suffers from mental illness, including major depression and Borderline Personality Disorder. For this and a number of other reasons, it is a marriage that should not work, but it does. My mom is not always fully functional. Neither of them is always virtuous. Yet, they have a very good marriage. It has not always been easy, but they have struggled mightily to keep their marriage together. They are bound by God’s grace, a strong sense of commitment, and a deep, mutual sacrificial love. I’ve no doubt that they would qualify for an annulment if they had given up on each other. I’m not saying that mental illness isn’t ever an impediment to marriage, but my parents are living proof that God’s grace can overcome even that.My dad has recently been diagnosed with Stage 4 Pancreatic cancer and so they are unlikely to make it to the 50 year milestone. Even in this final trial, I see each them only thinking of the other.
 
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I am not submissive by nature and sometimes when I say “Whatever you want” to my husband he can tell by my tone that I don’t mean it. Many times he changes his mind because his job in marriage is to love me as Christ loves his Church. That is a harder task. Men are asked to die for their wives. In a good marriage they do every day by putting her first. Neither one of us is perfect at their job even after 46 years of practice. We are both still growing.
 
Very well said and spot on. We live in a culture where radical individualism is celebrated. We all are our own authorities and can do what we want. At least that is what we are led to believe. It is never true. The thousands of laws that cover the most minute details of our lives in the western world testify to the fact that radical individual freedom is a myth. It is a myth whose purpose is to destroy the traditional and a God ordained structure of the world. If it isn’t God’s plan then it is Satan’s. Not my will but thine be done. That is Jesus’ example and instruction.
 
Virtue is in doing things that are hard. It is easy to do things that are easy. Submitting to a husband who is hard to submit to is virtuous.
 
Lea101 said:
When people go on and on about submission…it’s honestly a waste of time if we don’t know how that looks like in a marriage today (ie where are the practical examples?).
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I think it’s internal. Never have I forgotten when I first actually understood Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Prologue”. It simply means you submit your own will, not to the will of the spouse but to the good of the spouse. We can all do that, no matter how modern we think we are. It can be the simplest of things. There is one cookie. Both my wife and I really love that kind of cookie. It’s after dinner and that cookie would be the perfect thing. I give it to my wife and tell her I’m so full I just can’t manage it, even though I know I can and want it badly.

Switched around, that would be a wife being “submissive” to her husband.
 
exnihilo said:
Virtue is in doing things that are hard. It is easy to do things that are easy. Submitting to a husband who is hard to submit to is virtuous.
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Not every hard or uncomfortable thing is virtuous and not every easy thing is un-virtuous.

Hugging your kids is easy and having an abortion is hard.
 
I agree not every uncomfortable thing is virtuous. Hugging your kids when you are furious at them could be hard. Abortion is actually easy for some lost souls.
 
One thing overlooked in these threads is that there is absolutely no precedence or tradition in the Catholic Church, of a practice of wives submitting to their husbands or of submission being laid out as an absolute requirement for marriage.

If you look at any female saints who were married, submission rarely appears. In fact, some female saints were the opposite of submissive.
 
AdamPeter said:
The problem with this, though, is that it doesn’t necessarily respect the fact that both men and women are capable of rationality and logic, and it’s entirely possible that a situation could come about which requires you to actively oppose your husband. The reason this has worked for your thus far, is presumably because your husband is a reasonable man. But if he was not reasonable…if for example he wanted to leave his career and invest all your money in stocks, without having thought it through, would you then also be required to submit?

The problem is that the Catholic faith teaches us that reason and faith should not be opposed, and that we have dignity because God has given us the gift of reason, if we aren’t going to use that gift then is that not a cop out?
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I think issues of prudence (like you describe) are probably the marital norm.

It can be much darker than that, though. I recently learned that there’s a branch of my family (thankfully that I haven’t spent much time with) that has a big intergenerational incest problem. The grandfather in the family molested his daughters and then molested his granddaughters, and this was all enabled by the fact that the grandfather owned a big family business, and the younger generations were largely financially dependent on his good graces. His wife tried to leave with a large family of children in the 1950s, but she had nowhere to go, so she stayed. (I’m not sure if she knew about the molestation, but the patriarch of the family was a mean guy in other ways.) And I recently learned that one of the grandfather’s sons is also plausibly accused of molesting at least one daughter. This isn’t just one crazy accuser with regard to the grandfather, either–the accusations come from multiple sources.

People might say, well that’s very rare, but in this particular family, it was the norm.

A lot of times, people in these discussions say, “Just marry a good guy and everything will be great!” but how was this guy’s wife to know he wasn’t a good guy?
 
exnihilo said:
Very well said and spot on. We live in a culture where radical individualism is celebrated. We all are our own authorities and can do what we want.
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Believing that a husband ought to be able to command total obedience of his wife and have no authorities over him is actually an example of that radical individualism. It’s radical individualism for him, but not for her.

(People who typically go in for this sort of thing do not acknowledge that the husband has to answer to any authority, but he can do whatever the heck he wants to in his family.)
 
Godly marriage is not the wife obeys her husband over every disagreement. I want to go to this movie, he wants that one so I obey - I want to get the kids Legos for Christmas, he wants to buy them Erector Sets so I obey. No, it is working together for the good of each other and the family so that when something serious comes along and a serious decision has to be made, I can trust his judgement. If something happens and I die, I know that he will continue to raise my children in the Faith.
 
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