I recognize most moms like myself prefer to take the ostrich approach to the news and social media hubbub, a tactic I generally endorse. We have too much work on our hands to be fooling with rage bait.
But if perhaps some of the latest commotion has hit your radar, you might be aware that questions regarding headship, women’s roles, and the nineteenth amendment are topics du jour, following CNN’s piece on Doug Wilson.
I heard one commentator on the piece voice concern that a comment like, “Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” indicates a view that a woman’s job is primarily having babies and cooking meals — the typical “barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” view of women that gives feminists nightmares and fuels their tirades.
First, that sentence was clipped and delivered in the piece as if it was the one and only statement about women Wilson had to make, which is not true. Second, people’s responses to the expression are telling.
I honestly have a hard time hearing the statement as derogatory at all. It only sounds like “women are breeders” to you if you think of humans as equivalent to animals. Is our reproduction and motherhood the same as any mammal? You have to think so if you’re a Darwinist.
As Christians, however, we cannot think it the same thing to have a little of puppies and a family of children, immortal souls created in the image of God. To be entrusted with the formation—physical, spiritual, and emotional—of several other image-bearers of God who will live forever in either heaven or hell is no demotion.
Does any career really compare to that? Where are those businesses and profits without people?
The trope feminism has taught us is that thinking of women as mothers, encouraging women to be mothers, or generally elevating and celebrating motherhood is denigrating of women. It’s an oppressive, regressive perspective according to the feminists. Girls ought never to plan on being mothers, but always make some other plan because being dependent on men is the worst. Don’t let your girls voice a desire to get married and have children, but force them into first preparing for a career and letting marriage and babies follow later if they really want to.
Culturally, we encourage our girls to give their prime childbearing years to some job, parties, and travel. Reality check: Our bodies were designed to have babies in our twenties. Which is more meaningful and satisfying twenty years later: staying up all night with friends at a party or being up all night with a sick baby?
In your twenties, you can stay up all night with such better recovery the next day than you can in your mid thirties and early forties. Of course in the moment, the party is more fun than the baby. But twenty years later, you probably don’t remember the party, but the mother will have a companion whose company is a delight and who pays back those sleepless nights with grandchildren.
If we are going to reexamine our assumptions about women—and we should—if we are going to reject and detox from feminism—and we should—then we need to spend some time thinking about and even celebrating the ways women are different from men and why the work that has traditionally been known as “women’s work” is not actually demeaning or oppressive.
Are women “just” for having babies and cooking meals? Of course not.
But who taught you to put that “just” in there? What does it indicate?
I think anyone who talks about “just” having babies or “just” cooking meals has no clue about what either of those activities actually is and means.
I know when I was in my own bad attitude phase of homemaking, I thought of both (along with sweeping and scrubbing toilets and moving laundry) as “just” work I had to do because I got stuck with it.
In fact, at the time while I was trying to solve my homemaking problems in my twenties, I picked up fundamentalist articles purporting to be anti-feminist that simply accepted the feminist definitions of patriarchy and femininity and said “yes, only” instead of “no, never.” The overarching theme I picked up from the articles was that God made man to do big important things, to take dominion, then realized man would never be able to do that unless He also made someone to clean up after man and make his food. That’s basically the way the feminists interpret and define patriarchy, and that (now defunct) group accepted the feminist story, adding, “And we should like it.”
Actually, it’s not the definition of patriarchy or the proper interpretation of Genesis 2 at all.
Let’s think for half a minute about what children and cooking are really all about so we can remove that “just” thinking inculcated so insidiously.
Women are mothers
Feminists have insisted for about 100 years now that we absolutely may not elevate motherhood. They work at stamping it out through birth control and abortion and singleness. They insist that motherhood holds women back and is a tool of oppression by definition. We aren’t supposed to celebrate it or honor it (except *maybe* on Mother’s Day) or talk about how fulfilling it is.
Doing so would make women who can’t (or won’t) have children feel bad, so we’re supposed to keep quiet. A career is better and more valuable to society, feminists believe, so we have to ignore and minimize motherhood because it inhibits and generally replaces careers.
If we’re going to reject feminism—and the current cultural indicators are that we might be doing just that, praise the Lord—the fastest and easiest and most traditional tactic we can take is to not be ashamed of motherhood, but rather give it the place of honor it has always held in the Christian West.
What of the women who have chosen not to have children? Maybe they should be embarrassed. Better for society if they are embarrassed than that the delighted mothers be shamed on their behalf. The truth is that careers are not better for society than motherhood because there are no careers and no society if there are no people. One clearly supersedes the other in necessity, even if we were pure utilitarians.
What does it mean to be a mother?
It means “being everything to someone” as G.K. Chesterton put it. It means being entrusted with the future. It means shaping culture. It means having a stake in eternal souls that sprung from your very body. How can anything compare?
Without children, there is no future. The way the children of today are raised will determine the quality of society twenty and thirty years hence.
Want to change the world? One of the most effective means available is to intentionally raise a handful of children up into grounded, courageous, educated adults. Families are effect multipliers. My husband and I spend 20-30 years investing in our children, and before you know it our 5 becomes 25 (not yet, only two so far).
Those 25 grandkids could easily become 125 great-grandkids, many of whom I could still feasibly know because I spent my twenties having babies and my children appreciate it and share my priorities.
What is a promotion, recognition, or pay increases when compared to being stopped at the grocery store by an acquaintance who says, “Oh, I appreciate your son so much! He is such a good, kind piano teacher to our kids!” Or to walk into the coffee shop where your daughter works and see her relied upon as highly competent as well as a wise-beyond-her-years friend. Or to pick up your high school son from camp and have the counselor run up to let you know that he was an asset to their team, keeping spirits up and morale high even when everyone was getting tired. Or to have your middle school daughter relied upon as a capable, cheerful mother’s helper (even though she’s a youngest, not an oldest!). Not to mention the son and daughter-in-law who made me a grandma at 42, teach their one-year-old self-control, and feel free to ask for last-minute babysitting. It’s all incredible.
The reward of motherhood
No rewards compare to the rewards of the mother seeing the long years, hard work, sleepless nights, and hard conversations pay off. It happens by faith and by God’s grace alone, but it also doesn’t happen because parents “let go and let God.”
Faith and grace and gratitude fuel the difficult decades of work that is the personal investment of developing 3 or 4 or 5 or more souls into mature, faithful adults. You need faith because at many points it looks like it’s not working out, the sin (whether theirs or mine) is too much, or maturity will never come. Faith looks not to the seen, but what is unseen: God’s call and God’s faithfulness.
Do I care now that I didn’t participate in the college party scene, but instead got a degree as quickly as possible, marrying before finishing the degree? Do I care that I haven’t travelled? Do I care that I never had a “real job”? Absolutely not. I “hid” in my home for a dozen years, “without a life,” but those seeds I was planting and watering are now bearing abundant fruit—fruit I did not even foresee or guess at except vaguely.
When you are forty, when you are fifty, the work of motherhood will still be paying off. It will provide fresh satisfactions and joys—as well as heartbreaks—that no career or travel or party life can match.
It’s the truth. No apologies. No embarrassment except the embarrassment of riches.
There is no “just” to staying home, investing in a growing family.
Mothers without children
Yet there are women who either for a season or a lifetime do not have children of their own. So are they just left out of the one crowning joy of womanhood? No. Motherhood is essential to femininity, but it is more than having babies like mere animals.
Motherhood is caretaking, nurturing, pouring yourself out for other people so that they live better, more whole lives. In the process, we do as well. We pour ourselves out and there find ourselves, not lose ourselves as feminists claim.
This mothering instinct is why women can become so essential in offices and businesses of all kinds. We attach, bond, and feed, even up to our whole selves. Let’s acknowledge that the way a woman works and the way a man works even in the same job, same position, is different. We can then better appreciate it and understand it.
Our society needs metaphorical mothers to care for the elderly, for the sick, for the needy. Our churches need metaphorical mothers to notice needs, beautify buildings and tables, feed and care for one another, and pass on practical wisdom from one generation to the next.
Women are mothers. Let them mother. Women don’t need a fulfilling career necessarily; instead, they need a fulfilling place to invest meaningfully in people — and such places abound. While still single, while waiting for children, and after the children are grown and gone, women are most satisfied and effective when they find places to invest in people.
Women are cooks.
Ok, ok, so raising immortal souls is one thing, but what about the “barefoot in the kitchen” part? Is that really what women should be spending their time on? Sure, some like it and can pursue it as a hobby or even a job, but do all women have to be relegated to providing food three times a day for people? Isn’t that a waste?
But what is making food but the quintessential way of nurturing and growing other people? Food feeds people physically, emotionally, and relationally. What we eat shapes who we become because nutrition makes a difference.
How we eat shapes who we become as well. The company we keep during meals, the manners we have while we eat all shape our perceptions of the world and our interactions with others even apart from meals. Socialization doesn’t happen at school. It happens at the family dinner table.
Food and table are basic building block of culture. Women have been entrusted with cultural formation from time immemorial. To them belongs the everyday traditions of food, the expressions of manners, the social networking of sharing meals in the home, and all that beyond the inherent value of simply keeping a house full of people from starvation with her love and oatmeal and casseroles.
Kitchen work is no “just” any more than motherhood is. Indeed, it is a further extension of motherhood in its role of nurturing and feeding. Beyond that, it is where culture itself is grounded. Sticky culture that lasts for generations doesn’t happen in the isolated artist’s studio.
His art, in reality, is an extension of his upbringing — his mother and the way he was fed and socialized. He’s either manifesting it and extending it with his art, rebelling against it, or yearning for that missing essential in his life.
Sticky, generational, traditional culture starts in the everyday kitchen of everyday family life.
Want to change the world? Have children and feed them.
Want to change culture? Want to do culture-building? Make food and have people around your table.
Without people, there is no culture.
Without table traditions, there is no culture.
Culture is in the hands of mothers, which is why we must throw ourselves with enthusiasm into the work, refusing to be embarrassed and shamed out of it by feminists. If we’re not actively doing it ourselves, then at least honor it and shame those who would shame mothers out of their dedication.