Feb. 16, Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time.
I stole this quote from Sarah of Little Progress Notes, and even though I have read it before, it stuck in my flesh like a thorn, sharp, sweet, and chastising, as it did the very first time I read it. Someone close to me was very upset by this quote at the time, and I couldn't understand why. Not intellectually. Intellectually, I could understand how someone, a woman, who aimed for a profession or the perfection of a trade would balk that Chesterton thinks she oughtn't. But my heart cannot fathom it.
When I read this quote, it's like if someone handed me a translation guide to the language of my soul. People talk about wanting to be stay-at-home moms, and the majority of that talk revolves around the raising and education of children--which is, obviously, the most important aspect of homemaking if you're blessed to have them. But there's more to it than that, and I see the fruits of the domestic woman in those who are not able to have children. They're free to perfect their skills and passions. They're broadly educated, not necessarily formally.
My own mother is extremely well-informed about current world events; her relatives in high political places talk down to her "narrow" point-of-view and are abruptly put in their place by a southern housewife. I have a friend university-bound after seventeen years of graduating high school; she speaks with more lucidity and grace than most of my college professors. My godmother has helped her husband raise the children from his first marriage, run three successful businesses, and start a grassroots ministry addressing the sorely ignored crisis of human sex trafficking. My favorite women bloggers are, by a landslide majority, homemakers; more than gifted writers, they are photographers, crafters, architects, chemists, seamstresses, artists, philosophers, poets, botanists, activists, farmers, chauffeurs, and cooks. They're quite literally everything to someone (their families). And it just wouldn't be possible for them to be that astonishingly versatile in a career.
It's very telling that after a century of liberation, women are choosing to go back to the professions (oppression?) of their great-great-grandmothers. Instead of being taught in an unbroken chain of mother-to-daughter lore, they're having to re-learn many of those skills that made suppressed Woman so dangerously skillful. I suppose the feminist movement was necessary because it helped us understand. For now we have the double benefit of having the freedom to choose and choosing not to be "free."
As for myself, being a Catholic, I have no problem being told what I ought to do and what is good for me. But then, I believe that the so-called restraints of the patriarchy are not man-made at all, but transcend the world.
I don't think that a woman can't be focused on a single aim to forge a career. Or that some women are best suited to that lifestyle. I just know that in my first-hand experience with competent, thoughtful women, and for me personally, that would be sad. It would be a kind of compromise.
I have so much to offer, so much that I'm passionate about. God has generously equipped me. I don't care that my ability to make a dwelling a comfortable home, or the home a place of spiritual peace and healthful stimulation, will go unappreciated by society. And I grow weary of rationalizing my "career" preferences to that same society. Like if I don't chose something concrete to achieve and then run it down like a fox, I'm irresponsible or somehow mis-made. I feel, when I tell the world that I wish not to work formally for a living, a reaction akin to sexism. If I can chose a lifestyle, God willing--and not without knowledge and acceptance of the sacrifices, as well as the blessings--in which I need not be distracted by the minutiae of the outside world, then that is what I want. Because this is not a useless, fruitless aim.
Chesterton's logic gives me permission to embrace the scattered person I am; and he gives me comfort by telling me my efforts are not vain, nor shameful. The domestic woman is unimpressed by the limp equality offered by a world that seeks excellence at the expense of freedom, that considers seclusion oppression and liberality narrow. Our role model for Womanhood is a virgin and a mother--a handmaid and a queen. And the domestic woman is the original Renaissance Man.
Thanks to Sarah of Amongst Lovely Things for hosting Weekends with Chesterton.
What I take away from the feminist movement is the freedom to forge the right paths for ourselves, without the restraints of cultural limitations. My mother is the strongest feminist I know and she was a stay at home mom. For her, motherhood is a calling and something she knew she'd be long before she ever was. And she is gosh darn good at it. Motherhood is not my calling. Mine is to be a minister, which in my case means a career. I confess I find this battle between homemakers and career women a bit unrelateable. Why is one better than the other? Why is one more spiritual? Our ideals of womanhood are rooted in cultural expectations while God transcends culture. Who we are should be what God calls us to be - no more and no less. For you it is a homemaker, a great mom, and a terrific wife. For me it is a career minister. Each of us must listen to God's call and fallow accordingly. As sisters, we should encourage and support one another on that path. Narrow is believing that there is only one way to be a woman in this world.
ReplyDeleteAmen, Betsy! Your mother has the highest of my respect, giving you, as she has, so much grace and confidence. I also have it from reliable sources that she is Pretty Great. c;
DeleteIs this, do you find, a common belief of career women? I get the impression (perhaps a false one) that women who work think homemakers a bit naive and ignorant.
Also, how do you feel about the woman who has children and doesn't need to work to provide for her family? Does that change her responsibility to stay at home or not to stay at home?
DeleteMy mom is pretty gosh darn awesome :). I don't think I can generalize what career women think of homemaking women. Everyone is so unique and works for different reasons. My mom still had a career while she was at home with us because she both liked to work and we needed her to. Some of the women I work with only do it because their households require it financially while some do so because they genuinely love to work. I can tell you that I'd make a terrible homemaker. I'd pretty much hate every second of it. I think that this divide in career vs homemaking is this false comparison that one is better than the other. I think it's naive of homemaking women to think that theirs is the ideal and that it's perfectly possible for every woman to achieve. Why shouldn't a husband stay at home? When we narrowly define womanhood as this particular ideal, we likewise narrowly define manhood. I know several men who not only would love to be the stay at home spouse but would be much better suited to it than their wives. This whole notion of defining such gender specific roles, I personally think, is a little demeaning. We are so quick to put people in boxes that we can easily label that we forgo the awesome creativity of our beautiful Creator, who doesn't make one thing, but makes all things. We should all be free to pursue who we are designed to be - regardless of cultural expectations and free of societal norms. My feelings are that we often mistake our cultural practices and believes as spiritual ones. I'm a child of several cultures and as such I've learned the dangers is trying to view spiritual truth through the lens of one culture - the hues will always be different. To define gender by Greco-Roman standards is not the same as Jewish, which isn't the same as Chickasaw, nor anything closely resembling Kenyan. To me, that's all this boils down to. So, let's be who we're designed to be and work together to bring more of God's love into this world.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteLove.
ReplyDeleteI can understand balking at the "should" in the original quote. It reads like a man prescribing life for a woman, again and always, world without end, amen. But the concept itself--I have always needed, in that deep sense, to be broad. I could never even pick between writing and music; I could never have narrowed myself to a single title or a single position, not even Mother, which, in and of itself, is the farthest thing from narrow.
As for my workforce days, even the jobs I've loved most have been a means to an end, not an end in themselves--except when they allowed me to bring my music, my writing, my nurturing into play.
Thanks for sharing... Love your last sentence! :D
I knew you would understand, and you have a very unique perspective to offer. You choose to be a housewife when some people I actually know would say to themselves, "She doesn't have children . . . why doesn't she work?" As if making a comfortable home and putting to use the gifts God gave you to make the world beautiful isn't enough of a pursuit!
Delete"It's very telling that after a century of liberation, women are choosing to go back to the professions (oppression?) of their great-great-grandmothers."
ReplyDeleteUntil the growth of the middle class, which would predate our great-great-grandmothers, stay-at-homeism would have been the preserve of the privileged.
Women have, historically, always been more than homemakers. They have been labourers, factory workers, parktaken in cottage industry (vital sources of income, NOT a "hobby"), cleaners, indentured servants, etc, etc.
My great-great-grandmother became a servant in her early teens. My grandmother, born into the halcyon stay-at-home era, still trained and worked as a secretary.
My mother was a stay at home mother for much of her life. It was for economic, rather than ideological reasons. Childcare costs outweighed her salary as a nurse, and we were fortunate enough that my father's salary covered the mortgage.
The "modern" phenomenon of two working parents is not modern at all. The only new aspect is that the division of labour is less pronounced (although there are still culturally embedded ideas of what constitutes a male or female role).
Stay-at-homeism was, for most sectors of society, a cultural blip on the vast human continuum.
It's also notable that in Chesterton's time, the hobbies available to most women (again, excluding the privileged) would have been financially proscribed, and even those available to the privileged would have been tightly socially proscribed. Think about Austen's sketches of what women could do in polite society: sing, dance, sketch, play the pianoforte, write poetry. Woo.
That's not to denigrate the value of what women, given the time and available energy, did. They set up charity boards, worked with underprivileged women and men, engaged in politics (in a limited way), produced strikingly beautiful literary and physical works of art - (but isn't it funny how, up until recently, female artists have been the exception, critically and commercially, despite Chesterton's assertion that women were "terribly fruitful"?).
But even the embedded meaning of Chesterton's language is, as he tries to elevate the role, deeply patronising. Women 'play'. They fruitfully produce, but they don't meaningfully produce. His writing infantalises them/us.
(Isn't it also telling that Chesterton, a writer - one of those people who inhabit as many lives as a child, tells women they are privileged to be able to play? Every time you pick up a pen, you play.)
Women, and men, whether they work or not, are always many things. A mother is many things, whether she chooses to work, needs to work, chooses to stay at home or has to stay at home.
I applaud your decision to take control of your life and choose to spend it as you do. But I'd equally applaud the single mother who works her hardest to provide (I know, by the way, that you are not in any way trying to demean that role).
I'm lucky that in my job, I get to indulge a lot on your list. I'm a photographer, crafter, recent (if clumsy) seamstress, artist, philosopher, poet, activist, grower (not farmer), chauffeur and cook, etc, etc, etc. Part of that is connected to my career, a lot of it isn't.
I love your thoughts here! Philosophical conversations with like-minded people tend not to be as challenging. You've done me a great favor. c:
DeleteI gave myself a long walk this morning and allowed myself to think through your response. Because what you've said here is almost unequivocally, unarguably . . . right. Still something in me says resists. I asked myself, "Why is that?" Am I so far gone in the conditioning of my societal and religious upbringing that I'd champion something objectively false? Which, if one didn't know about me, is a sword-in-the-heart; I love Truth, with a capital T, almost more than I love my own life.
I think our difference of opinion is actually in how we view the world. I think and live according to the belief that gender is a real thing, independent of culture and society. That it exists outside of those things. When you apply that belief to gender politics, everything shifts. More on that throughout.
Until the growth of the middle class, which would predate our great-great-grandmothers, stay-at-homeism would have been the preserve of the privileged.
When I read and wrote on this, I was thinking even farther back, to the Middle Ages, when the common men and women worked side by side planting and harvesting in the fields; which must be why hunting (archery) didn't even occur to me to make my list. So stay-at-homeism was a privilege of the rich. Though it existed in the minor details, such as the spinning and sewing; and as such, stay-at-homeism came out of a practical necessity: the women grew the babies. And after they grew them, they made the food for them. Even in our enlightened age, with so much technology and knowledge available to us, experts are desperate to renew interest in breastfeeding; so much so, that the government actually "rewards" breastfeeding mothers by giving them more food benefits on the WIC program.
Women have, historically, always been more than homemakers. They have been labourers, factory workers, parktaken in cottage industry (vital sources of income, NOT a "hobby"), cleaners, indentured servants, etc, etc.
So (would it be fair to say?) in the mediaeval model, before the advent of trades and towns, men and women worked common work for a common goal: that of keeping their households running. Put less glamorously, surviving. The only existing differences in their tasks originated from a biological fact.
Many modern feminisms find that biological fact a burden and work hard, with tools and chemicals and surgeries, to “level the playing field,” so to speak. I am of the school of thought that doesn’t seek to be liberated from biology but embraces it (third-wave feminism?). I see it as an objective Good. So it’s natural for me to see as a positive any cultural division arising from that biology. (I ought to note here that I find nurse-maids a vanity of the upper classes. Just because they could afford to have the biological functions shuffled off to another woman, doesn’t mean they ought to have. I’d much rather see a society in which people have dignified work that allows mothers to raise their children rather than pay someone else to do it.)
This is not to say that gender is free from the possibility of abuse. Bad people in the Catholic Church and other institutions can use gender reality as the jumping board for convoluted reasoning, eventually coming to conclusions that are questionable at best, outright false at worse. Even good people could and did (I’m thinking of Saint Augustine in particular).
But even the embedded meaning of Chesterton's language is, as he tries to elevate the role, deeply patronising. Women 'play'. They fruitfully produce, but they don't meaningfully produce. His writing infantalises them/us.
Delete(Isn't it also telling that Chesterton, a writer - one of those people who inhabit as many lives as a child, tells women they are privileged to be able to play? Every time you pick up a pen, you play.)
Are fruitful and meaningful mutually exclusive? I don’t think so. I don’t think Chesterton thought so, either. For Chesterton, fruitfulness compounded meaningfulness. He would have said the most beautiful, meaningful things are things that serve a purpose.
As a broad reader of Chesterton, I’m familiar with his style and personality. And I’ve never, ever found him patronizing. True, that is just my experience, but I think it’s worth something, being as I am a woman with as stake in his influence and a fairly intelligent, or in the least, educated one.
It’s an inherent danger of writing (one that I’m far too aggravated by, for someone who aspires to the writing vocation) that one puts much of the communication into the perception of the reader. There’s a constant risk of misunderstanding. Drawing away an unintended conclusion from a body of writing is good for storytelling but bad for dialogue. Being a journalist, Chesterton had to make his points in a clever, quipped way in a short amount of time and space. He was almost always in danger of sounding the bigot because he skipped the niceties and went straight to the heart of the argument. He treated as fact a real fact—that humanity is organized into categories, and that outside forces did not place them there (I know you disagree, but imagine it from that point-of-view for the sake of argument). So when he says “they, women”—as he might say “they, Jews,” “they, journalists,” “they, Catholics,” “they, Frenchmen,”—it sets off alarm bells for the reader especially sensitive to bigotry. But there’s a difference between bigotry and the acknowledgement of the reality that is category, yes? As far as I know, the only fool-proof way to determine the difference is to determine intention.
If Chesterton is patronizing, then he is guilty of the difficult crime of being self-patronizing. He is baldly open about his own failings; he is profoundly humble. When he made his arguments he made them from a place virtually absent of ego. The more one reads of him, the more this becomes apparent. And if following is a litmus test for the veracity of this claim, Chesterton passes with flying colors. His admirers make up a beauteously versatile group of human beings, across all genders, cultures, religions, and races. But even if that were not the case, his writing as a whole speaks for itself.
From a biographical perspective, it might help to note that his wife, Frances, was prodigiously more competent than him. He was a kind of idiot savant. He makes his argument from an intimate knowledge of profound love and dependence.
I guess my point is that knowing a person can actually change what one understands of his or her writing.
Returning to the problem of “they,” say we were to reverse the situation: a woman writing about men as a group. Would that come off as patronizing? It may or may not. But she would be immune to the accusation of sexism because of the historical privilege of the white, Anglo-Saxon male. I tend to think that the past treatment of a group of people oughtn’t to be the criteria for which we forbid or allow discussion of them (or us, as the case may be).
I applaud your decision to take control of your life and choose to spend it as you do. But I'd equally applaud the single mother who works her hardest to provide (I know, by the way, that you are not in any way trying to demean that role).
DeleteThanks! And I have known both roles, so I know that both are equally trying in different ways. The woman who works outside the home gets to see the results of her labor more readily than the stay-at-home mum. She gets more adult stimulation. She gets an income. But she likely gives up the satisfaction of meaningful work in the sense that cause is removed from effect. She makes money with which to buy things to survive. I believe a more affirming and fulfilling work is one in which her work directly aids survival. And that goes for men as well as women!
I’ll come back later to respond to your second comment.
" He would have said the most beautiful, meaningful things are things that serve a purpose.
DeleteAs a broad reader of Chesterton, I’m familiar with his style and personality. And I’ve never, ever found him patronizing. True, that is just my experience, but I think it’s worth something, being as I am a woman with as stake in his influence and a fairly intelligent, or in the least, educated one.
It’s an inherent danger of writing (one that I’m far too aggravated by, for someone who aspires to the writing vocation) that one puts much of the communication into the perception of the reader. There’s a constant risk of misunderstanding..."
You'll already know that you're talking in terms of reader-response theory here.
I don't see multiple interpretations as a danger. I think it's exciting. I hope people find things in my work that I didn't intend, whatever they are.
I think "would have said" is a more dangerous phrase when it comes to critical interpretation. We can say: "to me, this text suggests" and then everyone else will know that what you are going to say is subjective.
"Would have said", on the other hand, presupposes some form of knowledge or insight that none of us can possibly have. We aren't Chesterton. Even Chesterton might not always have known what he meant by one phrase or another, or his own interpretation may have changed with time.
But in general, I like what you've said above. I was thinking medieval, and even pre-medieval (although evidence of paleolithic hunter-gatherers suggest that division of labour was again unequal. Women supplied 70%+ of the calorific intake of the tribal unit. But then again, they largely scavenged, while the men hunted for (much less readily available) protein sources, which was dangerous and calorie-consuming.
Many scholars have linked a leap in protein consumption with cultural paradigm shifts, heralding the rise of tool-making, the formation of settled communities and the beginning of agrarianism, so hunting has made us what we are now.
Anyway, I'm digressing a lot.
I know, it's a paradox! I hate reader-response theory, but New Criticism doesn't seem possible--nothing exists in a vacuum. Something in between is my ideal. I guess the reason why I'm tempted to see it as a danger is if someone took something I felt extremely passionate and unwavering about and tried to say I was saying the opposite. That irks me, a lot. But making a text too narrow also damages its power and timelessness. Just as long as we're not trying to say something like, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was about post-nuclear warfare. Which is altogether impossible, excepting the direct involvement of a Time Lord.
DeleteYou're right, "would have said" borders on conjecture. I have a persistent yet fuzzy memory of him making that statement in more or less words, but not the time or intellectual stamina to go searching it out at present! (Maybe later . . . keep this in mind if I randomly drop a quote on your Facebook page two years from now.) And knowing him as a founder and champion of distributism, which basically says every person and/or family unit should own viable property (land) and make use of it. Supposing he didn't meant is a compliment, however, I take it as one. I give you that!
I was thinking of the paleolithic era, too, and remember reading that in some modern tribes, women do the hunting. But since that's not the norm, it suggests utility born out of biology--women, pregnant and/or nursing, would keep to the safer, less immediately straining work of foraging.
Hunting--and the domestication of animals--especially when the hunters didn't have to follow around the herds for food anymore! Digress away! c;
There were two parts of your argument (rather than Chesterton's, as I think he was an apologist for embedded sexism) that struck a chord.
ReplyDeleteThe first is this:
"Instead of being taught in an unbroken chain of mother-to-daughter lore, they're having to re-learn many of those skills that made suppressed Woman so dangerously skillful. I suppose the feminist movement was necessary because it helped us understand. For now we have the double benefit of having the freedom to choose and choosing not to be "free.""
We have lost a lot. I'm trying to recover some of it, although I adopt a less gender-divisive list to choose from. I'm interested in archery, hunting, bushcraft, martial arts (none of them would have been allowed to me in Chesterton's model) as well as knitting, poetry, costuming. This I ascribe to mechanisation and industry rather than feminism, because traditional "male skills" (as above) are also dwindling.
This leads me to the other thing that struck me as being true:
"The domestic woman is unimpressed by the limp equality offered by a world that seeks excellence at the expense of freedom, that considers seclusion oppression and liberality narrow."
We truly are returning to the oppression of our great-great grandmothers, but not, perhaps, in the Chesterton mould.
We are now homemakers and workers again, for economic reasons, and women overwhelmingly carry the burden of home-making, regardless of whether they and their partners are both in full time work. This is unequal.
And I do agree that the economic necessity to chase a career path that becomes increasingly specialised or, alternatively, increasingly generic and abstracted from the physical world, is soul-destroying. I have, through necessity, undertaken a lot of jobs that I actively loathed, that I found physically tiring, mentally stultifying, socially stifling and ethically questionable.
We can thank capitalism for that - and again, there is nothing new here. That goes back to feudalism.
For me, the question is all about choice. What offends me about Chesterton is that he is acting as an apologist for a system that held women in a certain position, whether they were happy with it or not.
We are re-entering an economic system that does the same. Women are again forced to work whether they want to or not (and it has to be said, men have likewise been obliged to do this consistently. I'd like to see a society where, if I was the major earner, my partner would not be looked down on for being the home-maker, and, maybe more importantly, would not have internalised through his childhood, the assumption that home-making is the easy option and that work is more noble).
Neither of those scenarios appeal. I'd much prefer a utopia where people can make an informed decision, without the weight of gender expectations, as to whether they want or need to work, or want or need to stay at home.
For me, feminism, at its optimum (and there are as many types of feminism as there are feminists) should pave the way for you to choose either, without censure.
Unfortunately, that's not how people work. There are always people who sneer. They can shut up.
Excellent, excellent, excellent post. Your thoughts are so insightful and I think you've struck right to the heart of what Chesterton means when he talks about women being "truly and almost terribly fruitful"- you've demonstrated that exactly! I just love everything about this.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Sarah!
DeleteMy response (and I Will send Seth over for his man-wisdom as well!) is mixed, and I'm going to sound really harsh for a minute, but there is an actual mixture of good and bad in what I read.
ReplyDeleteI remember reading this in context and despising it. I read it as patronizing: 'women have hobbies', women develop "second bests"..mediocrity. I remember him mentioning her cooking being good, but not excellent, and I thought: My cooking is excellent. I remember him writing that women tell tales to children, but not artistic tales, and I thought: My tales are artistic. I read his words and I think he sees only one type of woman. She is sweet, well-meaning, and banal. She is lukewarm, and God spits her out. She is mediocre, and I am ashamed of her. She is not a real person, not someone with flesh and bones and nightmares and aspirations. She is exactly like the women in his stories..a pretty background image, but not a character. And then I think of the aspects of women-at-home he ignores in his exultation of pretty-hobbies..the women who - in families of his own time - get up to tend the stove night after night (I feel very close to these women right now, you know!) It isn't a hobby, it's a duty..not a game, an obligation. And her children will wake up with frost on their faces if she sees it as merely one of many hobbies. Chesterton's wife probably didn't have this duty, nor the duty to haul water, boil it, and scrub her dishes..she had other women working in her home who did these things, she could spend her days in hobbies..but her privilege isn't common, even now..and you and I and all the women-at-home do more than develop our second-bests..just as our men develop more than merely One Narrow Skill..and it's demeaning, I think, to our men to say they are so narrow while we are broad.
On the happier side, Chesterton calls us to play. I believe in play..not just for women, but for all mankind. We struggle with play in America..the 'Protestant work-ethic' is an evil thing..it eats play out of our lives, and we feel guilty for indulging, for resting, for not caring at all about rising in the eyes of the world...we should all play - not at professions, but at life..to make all work play means to absorb it, be serious and passionate about it, and know that very few things really matter in the wide scope of things..
I love your thoughts on the quote..you make it palatable to me..and I wonder - if I justified my choices in life, if I felt the need to..would I love this quote more? But I've never felt judged by anyone for staying home, and I don't know if that's because I am never judged, or if I just don't notice.. Is that too harsh of a response??? <3 I adore and will happily defend a life at home, and I have a sort of loathing for feminism, but home is not a nurturing place for second bests..it's more a monastery, where each of it's members plays the role that perfects them - develops them at their Best..whatever that may be.
You've a better memory than me. I can't see my liking his assertion that Woman is only a good cook and not an excellent one, a mediocre storyteller, and not an artistic one. I can explain my lapse with two possibilities. Either I agree with GK so much in so many ways that I automatically overlooked it (a distinct possibility); or, something he said afterward shed light on what comes before, and reveals it to be hyperbole (also very possible, as Chesterton used the literary device quite a lot).
DeleteBut he does lack imagination when it comes to women. He's not good at getting inside their heads, as human beings, and it weakens his storytelling. Most of his characters are expressions of himself. (Unrelated, I think this is part of why he is so generously loving toward his enemies: he has an almost sloppy habit of confusing them for being him. This is because he is one of the least self-conscious and egoistic people I've ever "known." It's hard not to remember you're not everyone else when you're so quick to forget yourself--awfully a lot like a saint!)
I took the phrase "she may develop her second-bests" to mean, in developing them, they are second-bests no more, "unlike the child's." They are only hobbies in-as-much as they bring delight and joy; they're fruitful; they're necessary. Unlike when I go to the deli and slice meat for other people; I don't need to be serving other people meat, except that I am given money to do it with which I then buy my own meat. It's redundant, frustrating, and kind of a waste of time (gosh, I sound spoiled!). Why don't we each all slice our own meat, and cut out the silly bit in the middle? No pun intended. Similarly, working at the daycare, a lovely place indeed, has only strengthened my belief that a society in which we must pay other people to raise our children in order to feed those children is an ill society. But, if we must remove labor from the fruits of those labor, better the man do it, if he is able, so that the woman can be near her children, which is only natural seeing as how she bears and nurses. Because Chesterton was a distributist, we know his ideal would be a society in which men and women have twenty fruitful "hobbies," that also happen--oh joy to discover it!--to keep them alive.
"The Rural Family must regain its place at the heart of the social order." -- Pope Benedict XVI
I don't know if Frances had a cook and a maid; I know Gilbert had a secretary, whom they thought of as a daughter. And in the ideal medieval model, when most families are rural, there is still a need for art and entertainment, and those with the gifts to provide it, might put farming in the background and make ends meet by furnishing the population with much-needed beauty.
Right now, my spinning, crocheting, and photography are hobbies because they don't support me. But I'd find more satisfaction in them if I could take those and other hobbies and make them fruitful. I think you understand that exactly, when you aim to make work play.
No, you aren't too harsh, just honest and passionate! Like I said before, I comprehend better Chesterton's failings when you illustrate them because you come closest to speaking my language!
Anthropologically I get nervous when anyone tries to pigeon-hole gender roles or attributes and confuses them with gender realities. Exegetically,,, no, Theologically... hm, no, Catholically (that's not a word, is it?) I get nervous when anyone tries to re-write Proverbs 31. Not that Chesterton actively intends to do either here, but he comes dangerously close. There are deep and abiding differences between the genders, I believe that. But I don't believe they always translate to certain roles with society, or even within families. And Chesterton seems to be asserting that there are certain things men and women can, and cannot, do - and not in a poetic and layered sense but (at least to my reading) very narrowly. I love that he exposes a particular aspect of the "domestic woman" concept with a unique and fresh perspective. I love that he gives the world-at-large a smack down for thinking women in the home are always oppressed. I love that he loves his wife. But I don't love that he thinks this one situation is universally applicable, particularly when he belongs to a Church with St. Joan of Arc prancing around in full view, rather single-mindedly advancing her "one trade".
ReplyDeleteAnd why can't men develop their second bests? I understand that while pursuing a narrow career down the cramped maze surrounded by my fellow monomaniacs I might not have time. But what if I don't belong to a post-Industrial, Western, Capitalist economy? Would I be less of a man if I could pursue (and perfect) a dozen different endeavors and have them be fulfilling both financially and artistically (#gigonomics)?
All that said, I loved your post on this quote; it's always nice to have a little Chesterton to rile things up (and to have some of the non-crazies explain why they like him. It gives me hope for him). But I have to wrap this up, my wife wants the computer...
-The Neglected Husband