Women’s Work I
After receiving a number of kind messages, imploring me to continue this discussion, I have decided to ransack some old essays for more material on the question of women. If I do not respond to every writeback, it is because of lack of time.
It is a feminist truism that women have always worked. Even the most "patriarchal" writers have not denied the significance of a woman's work within the home. But in speaking of a woman's work or a woman's place we have to be very careful about making distinctions. The first and most obvious distinction is between the work done as wife and mother and work done for the primary purpose of making money. Let us, then, turn briefly to the family household.
Families are unions of contrasts, male and female, young and old, parent and child, blood kin and kin through marriage. In crude economic terms families represent a division of labor. From almost the very beginning, men hunted game and pastured their flocks; women took care of the home, preparing the food, making and washing clothes, tending the kitchen garden and the poultry yard. As social complexity made trade possible, housewives might sell their products and even their labor and invest the profits into the family's common store. As indispensable contributors to the household economy, wives and mothers enjoyed both power and respect, but it was typically the household where the most important economic functions were discharged (even in nineteenth century Europe!).[i]
In her domestic sphere woman reigned supreme, respected by her children and by her husband, who in other respects possessed what would come to be known as sovereignty, at least in theory. The reality of human existence is that power relationships within the household, however strictly they might be defined by law, depend on the men and women who are called upon to exercise them. Anthony Trollope’s Bishop Proudie is far from being the only man of authority who turned over the exercise of real power to his wife.
As an economic institution, the household combined both production and consumption functions. Food was grown, stored, and prepared on the home place and items for exchange or sale were produced by family members working at home. Some of the household's economic tasks, obviously, had to be performed outside the home: Men and boys worked the fields or tended the cattle, and in their free time hunted and fished, while women took care of kitchen gardens or even grew grain. Women might have to go abroad into the strange world of the marketplace to sell their surplus food or their handiwork, and in less than ideal circumstances different members of the family might be forced to work for another household as laborers or house-servants, but until recent times the ideal remained the self-sufficient household.
By the time Xenophon the Athenian wrote his dialogue on household management, the Oeconomicus, (in the early 4th century B.C.), Greek city-states were complex social and economic systems that anticipated some of the secular individualism of modern life. Nonetheless, Xenophon, a mercenary soldier and former student of Socrates, viewed the success of individuals as inextricably linked with the efforts of the entire family.
As a student of Socrates, Xenophon had learned to look at first principles, and the purpose of the marriage bond “is first and foremost to perpetuate through procreation the races of living creatures and next, as the outcome of this bond, for human beings at any rate, a provision is made by which they may have sons and daughters to support them in old age.”[ii] Since human beings are not designed to live in the open, they require a house with a roof. Males and females, though they have an equal stake in the success of the household, are designed for different functions: the male, to work outside, and the female, to work indoors where her greater affection for children also calls her.
Far from being a misogynist, Xenophon’s Socrates tells men to treat their wives with respect, talk with them, encourage their intellectual and moral development. Wives should be treated as partners and not as children or slaves. “A wife who is a good partner in the home contributes just as much as her husband to its wellbeing; because the revenues for the most part are produced by the husband's efforts, but the expenditures are controlled mostly by the wife's management. If both perform their duties well, the estate is increased; if they perform badly, it is diminished.[iii]
Xenophon, like the later Aristotle, understood human social life in terms of autonomy. Individuals cannot be autonomous because no individual can gratify all his needs—for food, shelter, procreation, social life-- by himself. So marriage, which results in a family, is the first level of social organization that satisfies basic human needs. This is not to say that the mythical Cyclopes led an idyllic existence, each man tending his own flocks and giving the law to his wife and children. Higher levels of social organization are more satisfying than the autonomous household, but the semi-autonomous household, in which men and women fulfill different functions, remains the basis of human society.
It is within this context that most of women's work has been done, and if women say there are no longer satisfied with this arrangement, we must not be too hasty in assuming that this change of heart is a natural reaction to changing circumstances. Capitalists have been trying to drive women into the workforce since the end of the 18th century, and it was capitalists who first proposed the principle of "equal pay for equal work" and who drew up the first version of the Equal Rights Amendment.
There is some force, however, to the milder feminist argument. It is a long and not entirely relevant story to tell, how industrialization and mechanization reduced a women's role in the 19th century household, eventually to the role of being an affectionate caretaker. The Victorian doctrine of the "separate spheres," of men and women was one response to this aspect of the industrial revolution. But even within the confines of the "separate spheres," women might have concentrated on study or the arts. Instead, what has obviously happened is that woman's primary role, as wife and mother, has been so devalued that women now have to define themselves by what they do in the workforce. Otherwise sensible women are now ashamed to tell the truth, in answer to the impudent American question, "What do you do," by saying simply "I am a wife and mother."
Since the next installment will have to do with women in the workplace, I do not want to take up that question in discussing this piece. Nor will I permit anyone to summarize and thus spin the argument that has been presented.
[i] Scott and Tilly
[ii] Xen Oec Vii …
[iii] Oeconomicus III. 10-15
Entries(RSS)
"It’s a very bleak and uncompromising path, like Buddhism or Jainism."
Mr. Sanjay,
Your quote and story reminds me of the words of the popular song writer and poet, Leonard Cohen, who recently introduced one of his songs to a London audience by saying "after fifteen years of paxel, zoloft, effexor, ridlyn, benzodiazepines, and studying deeply in the great eastern religions; cheerfulness kept breaking through!! And what I, (the little jew who wrote the bible, as he refers to himself) have learned is 'There Ain't No Cure For Love'."
Daniel,
Please excuse me for horning in on your question to Dr. Fleming(I will defer to his better judgement) but although the Jansenist are a little over the top for me, they seem like a pretty harmless lot compared to their mean, hateful, godless enemy that is being consciously promoted and subsidized by our own cultural elites and political class.
I realize that Robert, but I find them to be following a dangerous trend. That is, the treating of Catholicism as an political ideology. The Jansenism is only one part of it. It has grown stronger just the last 10 years or so.
"That is, the treating of Catholicism as a political ideology.'
They are a copy cat variety of the New Church that turns cultural issues such as immigration, human life, and corporal works of mercy into a political ideology. Saving grace and saving the world are two different things. I am pretty confident the Jansenist know the difference but i am not so sure about their detractors. We can't scrub the church clean of sin and I wish folks would quit trying to and quit apologizing for it. Anybody that thinks joining the church today is going to make their life easier, get them a pay raise, or a better life simply hasn't tried Christ in a long, long while. Putting up with Jansenist for an hour ot two a week to receive the Sacraments is nothing compared to the old Carthusian monk who must put up with his brother monk with gastrointestinal disorders on a daily basis for years.
"Putting up with Jansenist for an hour ot two a week to receive the Sacraments.."
Yes, and that is my attitude - namely, concern for myself and my family's spiritual lives above church politics. Sadly it did not leave much room for a robust 'parish' life. Fortunately, it is much more muted at my current FSSP church than it was with the SSPX.
You seem like a good man, Mr. Maxwell. I hope we meet up some day so I can buy you a beer or a Daniel Webster Cigar!! Gods Blessings to you and your good family. Its been a while since I have attended the old bootleg Masses. I have nothing against them except today it is much easier to attend one that is much closer to home.( Gratias Pope Benedict XVI)
To be honest, I have never experienced a real vibrant parish life. When I was born in the late fifties things were already falling apart and had been for a hundred years. Recently we started fish fries, stations of the cross during lent, and 40 days of perpetual adoration.
Other than that, I have always had to travel great distances to be around Catholics I really admired -- like Dr. Fleming up in Rockford, or a few Monks over in France, or a very close friend who has always lived about twelve hours away. These are troubled times for ordinary life, and I have learned not to expect very much. God Bless you.
@Mr. Maxwell: actually I agree with your point about the proletariat, though to that end I deliberately listed the other professions apart from "proletariat"
Regarding, Jansenism, first let's be careful that we talk about what Jansenism is and not what we suppose it to be: it is hardly synonymous with "ascecticism" or "moral strictitude." "Moral rigorism" is the more precise definition, the belief that certitude is necessary for action--the practical consequence is a reduction in the frequency with which one receives the sacraments.
As for politics, Jansenism was associated mainly with the Gallican, Conciliar party--this is most definitely not the case with the SSPX and its followers, or of other traditionalists. But the situation in Europe was never quite that simple: politically speaking, Jansen himself was an Ultramontanist and not a Gallican. (This is why, Robert, Mr. Maxwell is right to be worried in the long run if these people are not checked. How to check them is another problem.)
I know SSPX is almost a curse word on these pages but I really think much of the criticism against its followers probably applies more to America than to the SSPX in general. I have little experience with the society in the U.S.; in Florida I attended a chapel run by a "friend" of the society not fully integrated into the fraternal structure. In France I have not encountered much of this alleged rigorism in the SSPX, far from it.
One thing to understand is that traditionalists in America are far more scattered, as Robert mentions, and have little source of wholesome culture apart from their Sunday Mass. They also tend to be in the midwest or west, far away from the historically Catholic nexes of New York, Boston, Buffalo, Philly et cetera. The priests for their part are overwhelmed (there are not nearly enough) and so on a sociological level you have a problem of blind-leading-the-blind so far as choice of reading material and religious education are concerned--they don't know how far to go and when to stop. In many parts of the U.S. Traditional Catholicism is a real ragtag operation; one has the feeling of assisting inside a Third World provisional mission.
On that note, though, it is interesting that Jansenists were really big on literacy: they made sure to write in French and not in Latin. Why? Because they were talking over the heads of fellow clergy to raise up the rabble! Popular literacy ruins another one. Myself, I go where I know I can trust the priest. A vibrant parish life is a very good thing, but it is secondary to the central point of the Mass.
Thank you Robert, likewise. I have long desired to spend an evening with the many good people involved in the Rockford Institute - from whom I have learned alot, especially Dr Fleming's book the Morality of Everyday Life - but alas, Dr Fleming has yet to have one here in the Rust Belt.
Yes, all good point NGPM. I am not anti-SSPX, I was a chapel goer for several years. I understand the desire to remain somewhat separated from the conciliar Church lest we feel the pressure of the modernism rampant in most parishes and the hierarchy. There seems to be a bit of a disconnect between the largely French SSPX hierarchy and some of the American laity; the American SSPXers have an unfortunate tendency to out-extreme one other in piety or political views. I also note the sedevacantist movement is much weaker in Europe; Ive always thought this was because Europeans feel more compelled to defend the visible Church, where as here in America she has always been spread much more thin outside of urban areas or rural Catholic enclaves such as Quincy, IL or St Marys, KS.
There seems to be a bit of a disconnect between the largely French SSPX hierarchy and some of the American laity
I wholeheartedly agree. Part of the reason is that the SSPX and Catholic traditionalism have their roots in the political-religious controversies that have embroiled France ever since the Reformation and the Wars of Religion, an epoch many Americans simply do not understand.
Another reason is that the Anglo/American episcopate shows itself less obviously liberal than does the French episcopate: the Traditional movement, consequently, attracts nearly all the integralist/Ultramontanist elements in French society, but not all of the Oxfordians; many of the Anglo-ultramontane types remain, even if it they are often frustrated, with their old parishes and even accept the new Mass.
(Incidently, based on personal observations and the remarks of my friends down there, the traditional wing in Italy seems to have many of the same problems as that of America in terms of distribution of clergy and, apparently, mindset of the faithful.)
Yet another reason is simply that the Americans have far fewer priests per capita and are more far-flung than the others. This does not facilitate cultivation of the Catholic City.
As for sedevacantism... I could never say for sure but I'd guess it were just an outgrowth of the problems you've brought up.
I'm not sure how a discussion of women & work became a discussion of Catholic sects. I understand that Mr. Sanjay hit the tripwire when he asked Dr. Fleming about Calvinism, but the thread seems to have wandered off a bit.
Mr Greene, yes I am guilty of diverting, but many of us have that habit. From feminism to illiteracy to Calvinism to Catholicism; Dr Fleming has always said the discussions here are like a dinner party, and good luck keeping anyone on the same topic for long at one of those.
I apologize if my (frequent) topic diversions have been to Dr Fleming's displeasure. I look forward to the next installment of this series.
"They also tend to be in the midwest or west, far away from the historically Catholic nexes of New York, Boston, Buffalo, Philly et cetera."
St. Louis, Chicago, New Orleans? Sante Fe? Los Angeles, San Francisco? What a crock of yankee condescension you posted!!
Some of the finest Catholics I know are scattered in SSPX graveyards across the Midwest because the silly New Church Bishops wouln't allow them to be buried in a Catholic cemetery if the requiem was offered for the repose of their soul. You folks instructing the SSPX on Jansenism and all their foibles wouldn't have a pot for your holy water or a stained glass window left in your indult Mass centers, if it wasn't for the Archbishop and serious Catholics who took a plunge when you kids were swatting flies and playing patty cake with politcal solutions in the 60's and 70's. Speaking for myself, you can all go to hell but as a Christian, I must hope better for you. So why don't you just shut up and learn something before you start spouting off about a movement you know nothing about except in little antedotal snap- shots from little catacombs you should be grateful to have even visited.
Sure this is not the right thread but let's start another one and have a real deabte instead of on some street corner or before children and lurkers who are powerless to decide. I would welcome it and perhap it might even dispel some of the invincible ignorance from outside advisers to the modern liberals favorite punching bag, the battered and tattered rag-tag group of the SSPX.
Robert, I think youre overreacting. Of course Monsignor LeFebvre and co are to be credited with much of the resistance. The problems I mentioned were not limited to the SSPX, it exists among many of the indults and are even worse among sedevacantists and independents. Please dont think I was singling the SSPX chapel goers out.
Robert, and what importance is death, except for those who are left behind? Myself being the offspring of a jack Mormon and non practicing Calvinist, I fail to see the attraction of Catholicism, old school or new school. There is a difference between the name and the reputation of the school one attends, and the knowledge and skills that one learns. In school or out.
Which brings me to a question. If as Mr. Dabney contends, Jesus offered himself as a proxy to serve the sentence of mankind, then is it true that Christ will never serve in Heaven, but instead must toil and suffer in Hell everlasting, for the benefit of Man?
Robert, and what importance is death, except for those who are left behind?
Neil,
There is attractivenes in a certain life of the soul as compared to the life of self serving debauchery. Socrates asserted the unexamined life is not worth living and that all philosophy was a meditation on death. While it might be true that there is not much left in the Church to be attracted to today, the only one there ever really was remains: In the invisible life of the Church one can still find the love of God.
As for your assertion:"There is a difference between the name and the reputation of the school one attends, and the knowledge and skills that one learns. In school or out;" my only response today would be, "NAME THEM!!"
I will name them. The names of all the wise men, and poets, and truth sayers that may speak to those who listen. By their fruits you shall know them.
Robert, I apologize; I did not write quite what I meant to write. The stereotype of American Catholicism is that it is largely Italian and Irish, urban and northern. This stereotype is not exactly true (I myself am of rural German extraction) but given such stereotypes it is true that the SSPX chapels are not necessarily distributed where one might expect: compared to the average baptized Catholic in America the average SSPXer is more German, more rural and less surrounded by fellow coreligionists. South Florida, a land of many Catholics, is pretty tradi-bare (though I do miss Fr. Hopkins).
As a fellow Minnesota-native SSPXer put it, "The Irish have all gone liberal!" Try finding a trad Mass in my VERY Irish/Italian home town of Rochester, New York--I think in fact it is not possible! One more reason I could no longer live there.
As for my complaints of the trad life in the States, it has nothing to do with the priests of the SSPX and their associates. But you yourself agreed that vibrant parish life is seriously lacking throughout the States, and the scattered distribution and shortage of priests go a long way to explaining why: it is not really the fault of the parishioners that life is simply not normal out there.
Moreover, in America--unlike in France--not all of the most solid believers have given up on the Novus Ordo; in France almost the only people who attend the Novus Ordo are Christian Democrats and Christian Socialists. That is not true in America. I wish it WERE true--there is nothing more annoying than having a good conversation with someone who has a good mind and mentality and then in the next non sequitur breath defends the indefensible (new Mass)--but so it is, very often.
I am in full agreement with you that were it not for Marcel Lefebvre there would be no indult and on a normal Sunday my conscience does not permit me to leave the SSPX behind (I say "normal" because there are always indult weddings, social obligations, et c.).
So next time I'll finish thinking before I open my mouth so late at night.
Any charitable traditionalist has had to stomach his share of snide remarks and false inuendos about his choice for the ancient rite. It is an honor to suffer such slanders from the enemy but a betrayal of cosmic proportions from fellow Catholics. Courage is sometimes possessing the ability to endure for one more second under all the circumstances, and I failed miserably in exercising any courage whatsoever in my post #64. It a very frayed nerve with me that can easily be touched when it comes to the SSPX. I am not a member, I am painfully aware of their shortcomings, and I do not attend their chapels except when I am visiting friends who do. Whether is is Clyde Wilson's inspired love for the South, Pat Buchanan's courageous and misplaced hope in the GOP, or Tom Fleming's passionate defense of Greek and Latin, I admire men who stand for something beyond rationalizing their own weakness and sins. Archbishop Lefevre was such a man. Like all fathers and founders, their sons and daughters are not always quite as good -- Or as Homer put it in his poem, "Most are worse and few are better." Enough of all this.
"Myself being the offspring of a jack Mormon and non practicing Calvinist, I fail to see the attraction of Catholicism, old school or new school. "
I hope Mr. Templeton will pardon me for using his statement to illustrate how American thinking has gone wrong. Imagine, someone were to say, "Growing up as trailer trash, I fail to see the attraction of--now fill in the blanks--Mozart, monogamy, Greek tragedy, good food and wine, hard work, economic independence, patriotism... You see, one's experiences are fine and dandy if they lead one to a higher and deeper existence, but if they serve as an impediment--the usual American affliction--to a richer life, then we must simply turn our backs to the extent we can and reach out to the richer life that is available. Obviously, I am not going to declare that the Catholic Church is the only route to a richer deeper life, because there are any number of routes, true and not so true, but consider only the rich philosophical tradition, the magnificence of architecture, the music and painting, the millions of lives shaped and formed and disciplined away from mere bestiality. Even if Christianity is false and Catholicism doubly false, I would not simply dismiss them because I happened to grow up under circumstances that limited my ability to grow in certain directions.
Let me close with lines from the beginning of an extremely Protestant book that made a profound impression on me the second time I read it (because I had to teach it):
Then said EVANGELIST, "Keep that light in your eye, and go up directly thereto; so shalt thou see the gate; at which, when thou knockest, it shall be told thee what thou shall do."
"So I saw in my dream that the man began to run. Now he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children perceiving it, began to cry after him to return; but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on, crying, "Life! life! Eternal life!" "
Even atheists of good character must be curious about the claim that we shall have life and that abundantly.
Thank you, Dr. Fleming. And thank you, Robert, as well.
I do not wish to be taken as causing trouble for raising this point, but given your view of Calvinism, Dr. Fleming, what about the staunch Calvinist Harold O.J. Brown? I know little about Calvinism, being too lazy to study theology, but I have been favorably influenced over the years by my contacts with Calvinists, not only Joe Brown but R.C. Sproul and Grady Spires (Joe Brown's good friend from Harvard who was my philosophy professor)--all very estimable men, very witty, incredibly learned and humane, every one of them. How does one reconcile all that with the dark view of Calvinism? Often people are better and more sane than their belief systems would seem to suggest--Mormons strike me this way. Perhaps the same is true of Calvinists?
One more time. Tennessee Ernie Ford.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdKXdDK0z3o
@11 Clyde Wilson,
"Feminism is only a secondary effect of male failure, an instinct to compensate for it."
While taking grateful notice of Drs. Fleming and Wilson's pointing out the baleful and disgraceful roles of males in the schemes and capitulations running from the 18th century capitalists through the surrender to money at Appomatox, avenues of study which doubtless will provide a fuller understanding of the causes and preconditions of feminism, I must demur over the above quote.
I hold that up until my father's time, who was born in 1901 and married my mother in 1933, men treated their women well, discharged their responsibilities as husbands and fathers admirably, and kept their expectations of women in line with nature and with some semblance of a code of honor. I don't think, in other words, that the requirements to have dinner ready and the house clean and the children cared for, and for the missus to put on lipstick and a cute dress occasionally, while reserving certain areas of life such as the club, the racetrack, the prize fights, the convention hall, (the latter two not always clearly differentiated) and of course the workplace, as off-limits to women was sufficient outrage to bring on a Betty Friedan. (Could anything be?)
Moreover, women have sought out and used contraceptives for thousands of years and of course were in the forefront of the movement for that most destructive development to any sense of male familial responsibility, the pill. Then there is abortion, a dagger ever poised to cut off a man from his highest role, to sever him from his patrimony, and to excise his legacy; I will argue that it was women, with their talents for dissembling, subterfuge, and conspiracy, and their tendency to nurse grudges, who kept the fire to the feet of men to strike down its prohibition.
Abortion was always and is still their ultimate equalizing weapon against men, far fiercer than cuckolding, and beside which the mere withholding of sexual favors is child's play. I can attest to the visceral defensiveness of women toward this their secret weapon (and the fact that it can be perpetrated in secret is what makes it so devastating and demoralizing to men) from what my own mother, b. 1907 - d. 2007, had to say about it. This morally upright woman, faithful wife and loving mother of four, though couching her defense of abortion in Sangerian terms of concern for the sufferings of poor women, (mother was often in the same Lower East Side precinct, which had so impressed Sanger, at about the same time, visiting her older married sister) yet could not keep out of her reasoning traces of an outrage, that I think is primeval in women, toward men for their alleged control of women through pregnancy.
Now that women have found their lives built on the satisfaction of every conceivable whim to be empty, the sleeping fitful in their liberated beds full of every imaginable partner, it is for them to sleep in them; or, as the wielders, true enough, of the real authority, to return to keeping their legs closed until married, to renounce abortion, contraception and "independent careers", and, in return for the added burdens on men of the large families and extra hours of toil this would entail, to place themselves once again in the background and nominally under their husbands' dominion. This, and this alone, can entice, inspire, and drive men to return to real manhood, for only this gives a man a stake worth the effort.