In today's world, many of our female loved ones are engaged in a very personal spiritual battle about their identity and calling as women, and how motherhood fits into that calling. This episode shows how the mistake of overvaluing motherhood will hurt them but also how undervaluing motherhood can be devastating. Only the biblical worldview gets this balance right; so that is our topic today.
Our wives, daughters, and granddaughters recognize intuitively that gender differences are not superficial, but deeply connected to their very sense of identity. Mothers with children at home are torn between their career, which they have devoted years preparing for and their call to motherhood. One woman describes her inner tumult when she got pregnant as a graduate student.
I was profoundly ambivalent about this pregnancy. What would having a child mean for my future? How could I have children and still grow professionally? The only way I knew to pursue my deepest interests, to fulfill my calling before the Lord, was in the world of ideas through academic study. But having a child seemed to pose a profound threat to the possibilities of continuing my studies. When men have families, most are able to continue working in their chosen fields (though admittedly, they often do make tradeoffs between family and career advancement.) At times, I confess, it struck me as decidedly unfair that women should experience such intense pressure to chose between the two major tasks of adult life—between pursuing a calling and raising the next generation (Total Truth, by Nancy Pearcey)
After she had her baby, she, like many career-focused women, was astonished at the intensity of the love bond she formed with her newborn. On the one hand, she did not want to leave him to go back to her career; yet she believed that she had gifts that matched the calling she could only pursue in the world of academia.
This workplace vs home choice, faced by modern women, is not a dilemma that has been faced by woman throughout most of history, because the workplace WAS the home. To illustrate this truth, let’s take a look at family life (in America) before the Industrial Revolution separated the workplace from the home.
In the Colonial period in America, families lived much like they have lived for millennia. The vast majority lived on farms or in peasant villages. Productive work to make a living was done by family households, often including members of the extended family, apprentices, servants, and hired hands. Stores, offices, and workshops were located in the front room. Living quarters were either upstairs or in the rear. (Interestingly that design was followed in building the US White House in the 1790s). The integration of home with work had huge implications for family life. Nancy Pearcey points out:
The husband and wife worked side by side on a daily basis, sharing in the same economic enterprise. For a colonial woman….marriage “meant to become coworker beside her husband...learning new skills in butchering, silversmith work, printing, or upholstering—whatever special skills the husband’s work required.” A useful measure of a society’s treatment of women is the status of widows and historical records show that in colonial days it was not uncommon for widows to carry on the family enterprise after their husband died—which means they had learned the requisite skills to keep the business going on their own.
Of course, as in nearly all societies, women were also responsible for a host of household task, requiring a wide range of skills: spinning wool and cotton; weaving it into cloth, sewing the family’s clothes, gardening and preserving food; preparing meals, making soap buttons, candles, and often developing a “cottage industry” that produced additional family income through her creative skills. Colonial America was not a panacea. Yet the wife partnering with her husband at home, both in earning a living and raising the children, seems quite similar to the portrait of godly womanhood revealed to us in Proverbs 31. The fact that work and child-rearing took place at home meant that mothers were able to combine economically productive work with raising children. It also meant that fathers were much more involve in raising children than they are today. In the colonial period, the husband and father was regarded as the head of the household. Pearcey explains how working at home beside their family members facilitated the fathers’ leadership:
In their day-to-day work, fathers enjoyed the same integration of work and child-rearing responsibilities that mothers did. With production centered on the family hearth, fathers “were a visible presence, year after year, day after day” as they trained their children to work alongside them. Being a father was not a separate activity to come home to after a day at work; rather it was an integral part of a man’s daily routine. Historical records reveal that colonial literature on parenting—like sermons and child-rearing manuals—were not addressed to mothers, as the majority are today. Instead they were typically addressed to FATHERS. Fathers were considered the primary parent, and were held to be particularly important in their children’s religious and intellectual training (Total Truth).
The Impact of the Industrial Revolution on the Family
The Industrial Revolution built a chasm between the workplace and the home. During this era of history (1770-1870), the development of steel, expansion of the railroads for transporting goods, and use of steam as a power source to replace human labor, led to the building of factories and mass production. Whereas men used to work at home with their wives and families, they had little choice but to follow their work out of their households and fields, and into factories and offices. These are some of the results of this transformation of society:
- The physical presence of fathers at home dropped sharply. Leadership is always based on the quality of the leader’s relationships with his followers. Men, in particular, build relationships by doing things together. The damage to a father and husband’s ability to lead his home by separating home from work has been incalculable.
- The most striking feature of child-rearing manuals of the mid-nineteenth century (the height of the Industrial Revolution) is the disappearance of references to fathers.
- Because in America, the home had always been the place where children are taught moral character and religion, women began to be looked up to as those who were custodians of religion and moral character. Kenneth Keniston writes, The family became a special protected place, the repository of tender, pure, generous feelings embodied by the mother, and a bulwark and bastion against the raw, competitive, aggressive, and selfish world of commerce embodied by the father (All Our Children; The American Family Under Pressure.) Men, reflecting the sinful passivity of Adam, were all too willing to leave raising the children and leading the home to their wives.
- This was a stunning reversal. In colonial days, husbands and fathers had been admonished to function as the moral and spiritual leaders of the household. But now men are being told that they are naturally crude, appetite-driven animals who need to learn virtue from their wives.
- The identification of religion with women and children begun at this time continues to this day as documented by David Murrow, in Why Men Hate Going to Church. For example, Pew research published an article in 2016, entitled, In the U.S., Religious Commitment is High and the Gender Gap is Wide.
- The impact of this work/home divide may have been worse for women. The home ceased being a locus of economic productivity. Instead of enjoying a sense of economic indispensability, women became dependent—having to live off the wages of their husbands.
- Because household industries were replaced by factory products, women at home with their children were no longer able to utilize the full array of their gifts but only those relating to motherhood and household tasks.
- Not surprisingly, this cultural expectation that women should be at home, and not at work spawned the feminist movement, which was rooted in the rights of women to have their own career outside the home.
- Wives who used to be economically productive and care for the family with their husbands are now alone in their work; this natural partnership is gone.
- In short, he woman’s role as a mother became OVERVALUED. She is criticized if she doesn’t find, essentially all of her fulfillment by being home with the kids, and she is now the primary parent, if not the spiritual leader at home, instead of a partner helping her husband to raise the children.
Here is an attempt to put a biblical lens over the damage done by the Industrial Revolution to our culture’s understanding of motherhood and fatherhood.
1. There are some who want to blame the rise of technology for this problem and return to cottage industries. But the most effective way to fulfill mankind’s creation command to develop the potential God build into planet earth is through technology. The ideal is not a return to agrarian society. In fact, technology itself along with Covid 19 are causing more mothers and fathers to work from home and schedule meetings through zoom. Who knows what impact this might have in reversing the trend of work taking both fathers and mothers out of the home!
2. The church failed to adapt to the culture. When the church saw the new economic reality that the workplace was oftem gpoing to be separated from the home, church leaders should have responded by challenging their men to overcome being away so much by putting extra effort into building their relationships with their wives and children and into leading their homes well. Sadly, this never happened, and despite the recent rise of the men’s movement, the majority of churches still don’t equip men to be spiritual leaders at home.
3. The church never should have allowed the Industrial Revolution confine the exercise of women’s gifts almost exclusively to the homefront. Although God’s curse, which falls on Eve for her sin, is felt in her relationship with her husband and children, revealing her primary calling, Eve is also gifted and called with Adam in Genesis 1 to develop culture, i.e. to exercise dominion over the earth. The call to motherhood can be overvalued, producing feelings of frustration and guilt in hearts of women who don’t feel entirely fulfilled by being wives and mothers.
4. Overvaluing motherhood can also thoughtlessly wound women who long to be married or long to have children but can’t. The whole concept of a woman finding her identity in being created as a necessary ally for her husband or through her nurturing role as a mother can be extremely frustrating and painful for women who are single or childless. This pain is amplified today because the Industrial Revolution removed the workplace from the home. Single women’s extended families i.e. adult brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews no longer surround her at work. More than ever the church must remind its single and childless women that all the femininity described in the creation of Eve, in Proverbs 31, and in Paul’s letters can be fully lived out within a single woman’s extended family and church home. But she needs our open hearts, sensitivity, and welcoming love to do so.
UNDERVALUING MOTHERHOOD
Sharon Slater has devoted her life to analyzing cultural trends that impact the family. She summarizes radical feminism’s strategy to undermine motherhood:
First convince women that motherhood is meaningless, degrading, and confining, and that childcare is an unfair burden placed on women. Convince them that fulfillment can only be found in competing with men and advancing equality in the workplace. Teach them that postponing or sacrificing professional pursuits for the benefit of their children and family is too much to ask. Better yet, repeal all laws and policies that recognize any differences between men and women. Eliminate special protections or incentives that encourage motherhood, childbearing, or the raising of one’s own child and remove “harmful” symbols that stereotype women, like Mother’s Day (Stand for the Family).
Despite the token visibility given to motherhood because today is Mothers Day, I don’t think there has ever been a time in America when the opinion makers, in our case the social media, have so relentlessly promoted successful womanhood as having a career, while at the same time neglecting mothers who successfully live out a higher calling to motherhood. The biblical worldview is that a woman has gifts that go beyond motherhood, but that motherhood is at the core of her design. Gen 3:20 says, The man called his wife’s name, Eve, because she was the mother of all living (Gen. 3:20). “Eve” sounds like Hebrew for life-giver. Women give physical life to humanity, a task so great and so significant that it cannot be quantified.
A second influential force in our culture that devalues motherhood is the transgender movement. TSER (Transgender Student Educational Resources) promote, a fractured view of human personhood through its Gender Unicorn model. They teach that every individual has the right to determine: 1) his/her biology (through a sex change or hormone treatments), 2) his/her romantic and 3) sexual orientation, 4) his/her gender identity, and 5) his/her gender role. This worldview denies that physical differences (a woman’s womb, breasts, or estrogen) have any significance in determining healthy romantic or sexual attraction, gender identity, or her gender role. Transgenderism is the extreme case of a woman denying the truth that her body reinforces every month; she is designed to be a mother.
Guys, we need to avoid being passive men and step up to protect our women from these harmful ideologies that are wounding them. Devaluing motherhood injures mothers who often don’t realize that their culture has trained them to overvalue their career and undervalue their home. It is destructive for society, because a mother’s nurture is so vital for physical, emotional, and spiritual health. But it especially harms children. No one can meet her child’s need to be nourished as well as his mother can. She cannot delegate that responsibility. Mother Teresa, a great advocate for mothers, tells the story of a boy whom the sisters found on the streets of Calcutta:
He was living with his mother in a box. The sisters took the boy back to the orphanage, bathed him, fed him, and gave him a clean bed to sleep in. The next day he disappeared. They found him back in the box with his mother. Once again they took him back to the orphanage and once again he ran away. Mother Teresa said she learned a very important lesson that day. A mother, even a mother in a cardboard box, was more important than the physical comforts that the sisters could provide (Ibid).
Whereas masculine love provides whatever others need to flourish, a woman’s love is giving herself—surrounding loved ones with her personal attention and care. It is nurture. Although Western culture has greatly devalued the feminine call to motherhood and to be nurturers, in God’s economy, giving personal care and love to those who surround her life is the highest of callings. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love (1 Cor 13:13).
For Further Prayerful Thought:
1. How can understanding colonial culture where work took place at home, help you understand the conflict that today’s mothers have between making a cultural contribution (vocation) and motherhood?
2. How can you lead the way to help men understand that the separation of home and workplace means they have to work harder to build relationships with their family members, so they can lead their homes well?
