It is impossible truly to understand contemporary evangelical Christian debates about the roles of men and women without seriously reckoning with how they have been occasioned by a radical transmogrification of our economic, social, political, and sexual worlds in modernity. Mass urbanization and suburbanization, industrialization and mass production, the reordering of life around the automobile, hormonal contraception, the rise of a society of spectacle and mass media, the extreme spread of the logic of the marketplace, bureaucracy and the technicization of society, radical advances in sanitation and healthcare, the invention of countless labour-saving domestic technologies, the advent of the Internet and connected devices, democratization: over the past couple of centuries, these and a host of other disruptive transformations have almost entirely erased many ways of life that had endured through centuries of less unsettling change.
In the wake of such changes, Christian teaching about men and women has often become untethered from worlds within which it once felt commonsensical. As the natural differentiation between men and women has been dulled by technology and technique, universal rationalization has displaced custom, and our lives have become distanced from grounding realities of the world such as birth, death, bodies, and the earth, people have increasingly called biblical teaching concerning men and women into question. Others, seeking to defend the biblical teaching, have presented it in a more ideological form in response to this crisis. Without a firm felt grounding in our modern lifeworlds and our local customs, the biblical teaching can be dismissed as outmoded or re-grounded in prescriptive systems—ideology, divine command, law, or wisdom can all become much more load-bearing in such a context. Both complementarianism and egalitarianism are novel in many respects, attempts to negotiate such new situations.
Within his thoughtful essay, Aston Fearon considers how to relate biblical teaching concerning women to the current environment, reckoning with the extreme diminishment of the order of the household that originally grounded it. The household, formerly a central unit of production, education, capital, welfare, and much else besides, is now marginal and hollowed out. And, with it, much of the weight that marriage and family once bore has been outsourced to other agencies, reducing them to more sentimental bonds. Fearon wrestles with the question of how the biblical teaching might once again be ‘at home’, situated in an order within which it makes its proper sense.
The primary biblical text that he works with is Titus 2:3-5:
Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.
Within this text, he particularly focuses upon the term translated ‘working at home’ above (οἰκουρούς), arguing for the importance of the realm of the household as a grounding reality for the labour of women.
Those hearing that women should keep their households may also presume that a sharp 1950s style division of realms of gendered labour is being suggested: the man puts on his hat and goes out to his workplace every morning, while the woman stays back and ‘keeps house’ and looks after their kids in their suburban home. This, however, is rather anachronistic; for most of human history, the household has been the focal location of men’s labour too.
Reading Paul’s statements in Titus 2, it is easy for them to be framed by our polarity between the home and the workplace, with Paul emphasizing the importance of women’s commitment to the home, rather than the workplace, as their proper realm. However, I think that the accent of Paul’s statements lies elsewhere and may perhaps be illuminated by similar statements elsewhere in the pastoral epistles. For instance, in 1 Timothy 5:13-14, Paul speaks about the inappropriate behaviour of some of the young widows:
Besides that, they learn to be idlers, going about from house to house, and not only idlers, but also gossips and busybodies, saying what they should not. So I would have younger widows marry, bear children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander.
‘Working at home’, it seems to me, should be contrasted with the behaviour of those who are idle busybodies and troublemakers, neither diligently managing their own households not minding their own business. Just as men are charged to attend to the matters of their own households (1 Timothy 3:4-5), so women should be diligent labourers in them. The woman who works at home, then, is not standing in contrast to the woman who goes out to work, but to the idle woman who is going from house to house and getting into everyone else’s business. This need not deny the importance of the household as the proper realm of the woman’s labour, but I am not sure that this is where the accent of Paul’s teaching lies.
Fearon helpfully discusses passages such as Proverbs 31. In addition to his remarks, it is important to recognize that the ‘household’, while not without a spatial significance, is less of a spatialized concept than that of the home typically is. The ‘household’ is chiefly a network of relationships of common life and production, not simply a place, even though it is almost always focused on a specific place of cohabitation. When Priscilla was making and selling tents in the marketplace in the business that she shared with her husband, Aquila, she was keeping her household. Conversely, the woman who is working from home as an employee for someone else’s company is not—at least not in the paid labour that she is performing (even though working from home will probably make it much easier for her to integrate her paid labour with her keeping of her household). None of this is to deny the importance of the location of the home, but to highlight the element of ownership of one’s labour and vocation that the ‘household’ implies.
In ways that Fearon registers in his essay, the modern concept of the ‘home’ is not typically synonymous with biblical or historic notions of the ‘household’. When people think about the ‘home’, they tend to have in mind the domicile of a nuclear family, a place of rest, shared consumption, and private life, a domestic retreat from the affairs of society. To say that women should ‘work at home’ in the modern world tends to imply that they should be removed from the ‘workplace’, from active involvement in civic life and life of many societal institutions, and from public affairs. Christopher Lasch writes:
All societies distinguish between women’s work and men’s work. Such distinctions are often invidious, serving to keep women in a subordinate status. It is only recently, however, that “woman’s place” has been defined in such a way as to exclude her from participation in the common life beyond the household. The modern home, which presupposes a radical separation of domestic life from the world of work, was an invention of the nineteenth century.[1]
Lasch argues that the work of Betty Friedan and other second-wave feminists was provoked in large measure by the limited horizons of the suburbs, contrasting the ennui experienced by many of the 1960s women who resonated with her work with the active civic involvement of their grandmothers and great-grandmothers:
Housework and child care by no means exhausted women’s energies. On the contrary, both housewives and single women threw themselves into a variety of activities that took them out of the home. They organized benevolent societies, female reform societies, and foreign missions. They put together a vast network of temperance societies. They took up charities and philanthropies of all kinds. Many of them enlisted in the antislavery crusade, the peace movement, prison reform, and of course the movement for women’s rights. Historians have known for a long time that woman played a central part in all the reform movements that swept over the country in the nineteenth century, not to mention the evangelical revivals that furnished much of the moral inspiration behind those movements…[2]
He goes on:
Social reform was the most visible but by no means the exclusive or even the most important contribution made by women to public life. Their work as volunteers sustained a vast array of public services—libraries, hospitals, nursery schools, social settlements, parks, playgrounds, concert halls, museums.[3]
Women’s role in wider civic life, Lasch argues, was diminished as women went into more private forms of life, through suburbanization and entering the workforce (Lasch’s recognition that the workforce is largely a realm of private affairs is an important one). Paid professionals and governments assumed many of the social roles that were once performed by women. As women entered the workforce en masse, they were subordinated to the logic and ownership of capital, gaining income of their husbands, but diminishing much of their own agency and ownership.
In the contemporary world, we tend to measure value in money. However, the household is not commensurable, nor exchangeable, nor fungible; the labour proper to it is neither abstractable nor alienable. It is a network of life, which can extend and expand far beyond the four walls of a house. For instance, in the early Church, several women were patrons or hosts of churches, their own households spreading out to support communities and institutions beyond. The woman in Proverbs 31 forms her own household, yet her household is expansive, extending into the economic, civic, and political life of her society. The contrast with the work of the woman who earns a salary working for a corporation is not chiefly to be found in the location of their respective work, but in their ownership of their work: the Proverbs 31 woman is building up her own household and community, securing the commonweal of her family and neighbourhood.
The contemporary world is not very hospitable to the household, nor to women, who bear such a particular relationship to it. Women are too often caught between the marginal and privatized realm of the modern home and the world of work, social involvement, and political activity outside and largely alienated from it. If the solution for idleness for the women of Crete in Paul’s day was to be workers at home, too many modern women adopting such an approach may find themselves wrestling with the gnawing dissatisfaction of Friedan’s ‘problem that has no name’—there may simply not be enough to keep them occupied in the modern home, as so much of the labour once belonging to it has been outsourced or is performed by appliances and so much of the meaningful social involvement once possible from it is so no longer. Besides this, financial necessity will nowadays force many women into the workforce.
I believe Fearon is right to look for a recovery of some understanding and forms of the household to address this problem, to reintegrate elements of women’s—and men’s—lives that belong together, but which have been placed at odds with each other. To his stimulating essay, I would want to say more about how the household is a focused yet expansive concept, which, rather than retreating into domestic privacy, naturally spreads life into the neighbourhoods, communities, and societies in which it grows. As women diligently keep their households, from those households they will rise to form greater social worlds.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast.. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
[1] Christopher Lasch, Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism (London, W.W. Norton, 1997), 94.
[2] Lasch, Women and the Common Life, 95-96.
[3] Lasch, Women and the Common Life, 97.
It is impossible truly to understand contemporary evangelical Christian debates about the roles of men and women without seriously reckoning with how they have been occasioned by a radical transmogrification of our economic, social, political, and sexual worlds in modernity. Mass urbanization and suburbanization, industrialization and mass production, the reordering of life around the automobile, hormonal contraception, the rise of a society of spectacle and mass media, the extreme spread of the logic of the marketplace, bureaucracy and the technicization of society, radical advances in sanitation and healthcare, the invention of countless labour-saving domestic technologies, the advent of the Internet and connected devices, democratization: over the past couple of centuries, these and a host of other disruptive transformations have almost entirely erased many ways of life that had endured through centuries of less unsettling change.
In the wake of such changes, Christian teaching about men and women has often become untethered from worlds within which it once felt commonsensical. As the natural differentiation between men and women has been dulled by technology and technique, universal rationalization has displaced custom, and our lives have become distanced from grounding realities of the world such as birth, death, bodies, and the earth, people have increasingly called biblical teaching concerning men and women into question. Others, seeking to defend the biblical teaching, have presented it in a more ideological form in response to this crisis. Without a firm felt grounding in our modern lifeworlds and our local customs, the biblical teaching can be dismissed as outmoded or re-grounded in prescriptive systems—ideology, divine command, law, or wisdom can all become much more load-bearing in such a context. Both complementarianism and egalitarianism are novel in many respects, attempts to negotiate such new situations.
Within his thoughtful essay, Aston Fearon considers how to relate biblical teaching concerning women to the current environment, reckoning with the extreme diminishment of the order of the household that originally grounded it. The household, formerly a central unit of production, education, capital, welfare, and much else besides, is now marginal and hollowed out. And, with it, much of the weight that marriage and family once bore has been outsourced to other agencies, reducing them to more sentimental bonds. Fearon wrestles with the question of how the biblical teaching might once again be ‘at home’, situated in an order within which it makes its proper sense.
The primary biblical text that he works with is Titus 2:3-5:
Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.
Within this text, he particularly focuses upon the term translated ‘working at home’ above (οἰκουρούς), arguing for the importance of the realm of the household as a grounding reality for the labour of women.
Those hearing that women should keep their households may also presume that a sharp 1950s style division of realms of gendered labour is being suggested: the man puts on his hat and goes out to his workplace every morning, while the woman stays back and ‘keeps house’ and looks after their kids in their suburban home. This, however, is rather anachronistic; for most of human history, the household has been the focal location of men’s labour too.
Reading Paul’s statements in Titus 2, it is easy for them to be framed by our polarity between the home and the workplace, with Paul emphasizing the importance of women’s commitment to the home, rather than the workplace, as their proper realm. However, I think that the accent of Paul’s statements lies elsewhere and may perhaps be illuminated by similar statements elsewhere in the pastoral epistles. For instance, in 1 Timothy 5:13-14, Paul speaks about the inappropriate behaviour of some of the young widows:
Besides that, they learn to be idlers, going about from house to house, and not only idlers, but also gossips and busybodies, saying what they should not. So I would have younger widows marry, bear children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander.
‘Working at home’, it seems to me, should be contrasted with the behaviour of those who are idle busybodies and troublemakers, neither diligently managing their own households not minding their own business. Just as men are charged to attend to the matters of their own households (1 Timothy 3:4-5), so women should be diligent labourers in them. The woman who works at home, then, is not standing in contrast to the woman who goes out to work, but to the idle woman who is going from house to house and getting into everyone else’s business. This need not deny the importance of the household as the proper realm of the woman’s labour, but I am not sure that this is where the accent of Paul’s teaching lies.
Fearon helpfully discusses passages such as Proverbs 31. In addition to his remarks, it is important to recognize that the ‘household’, while not without a spatial significance, is less of a spatialized concept than that of the home typically is. The ‘household’ is chiefly a network of relationships of common life and production, not simply a place, even though it is almost always focused on a specific place of cohabitation. When Priscilla was making and selling tents in the marketplace in the business that she shared with her husband, Aquila, she was keeping her household. Conversely, the woman who is working from home as an employee for someone else’s company is not—at least not in the paid labour that she is performing (even though working from home will probably make it much easier for her to integrate her paid labour with her keeping of her household). None of this is to deny the importance of the location of the home, but to highlight the element of ownership of one’s labour and vocation that the ‘household’ implies.
In ways that Fearon registers in his essay, the modern concept of the ‘home’ is not typically synonymous with biblical or historic notions of the ‘household’. When people think about the ‘home’, they tend to have in mind the domicile of a nuclear family, a place of rest, shared consumption, and private life, a domestic retreat from the affairs of society. To say that women should ‘work at home’ in the modern world tends to imply that they should be removed from the ‘workplace’, from active involvement in civic life and life of many societal institutions, and from public affairs. Christopher Lasch writes:
All societies distinguish between women’s work and men’s work. Such distinctions are often invidious, serving to keep women in a subordinate status. It is only recently, however, that “woman’s place” has been defined in such a way as to exclude her from participation in the common life beyond the household. The modern home, which presupposes a radical separation of domestic life from the world of work, was an invention of the nineteenth century.[1]
Lasch argues that the work of Betty Friedan and other second-wave feminists was provoked in large measure by the limited horizons of the suburbs, contrasting the ennui experienced by many of the 1960s women who resonated with her work with the active civic involvement of their grandmothers and great-grandmothers:
Housework and child care by no means exhausted women’s energies. On the contrary, both housewives and single women threw themselves into a variety of activities that took them out of the home. They organized benevolent societies, female reform societies, and foreign missions. They put together a vast network of temperance societies. They took up charities and philanthropies of all kinds. Many of them enlisted in the antislavery crusade, the peace movement, prison reform, and of course the movement for women’s rights. Historians have known for a long time that woman played a central part in all the reform movements that swept over the country in the nineteenth century, not to mention the evangelical revivals that furnished much of the moral inspiration behind those movements…[2]
He goes on:
Social reform was the most visible but by no means the exclusive or even the most important contribution made by women to public life. Their work as volunteers sustained a vast array of public services—libraries, hospitals, nursery schools, social settlements, parks, playgrounds, concert halls, museums.[3]
Women’s role in wider civic life, Lasch argues, was diminished as women went into more private forms of life, through suburbanization and entering the workforce (Lasch’s recognition that the workforce is largely a realm of private affairs is an important one). Paid professionals and governments assumed many of the social roles that were once performed by women. As women entered the workforce en masse, they were subordinated to the logic and ownership of capital, gaining income of their husbands, but diminishing much of their own agency and ownership.
In the contemporary world, we tend to measure value in money. However, the household is not commensurable, nor exchangeable, nor fungible; the labour proper to it is neither abstractable nor alienable. It is a network of life, which can extend and expand far beyond the four walls of a house. For instance, in the early Church, several women were patrons or hosts of churches, their own households spreading out to support communities and institutions beyond. The woman in Proverbs 31 forms her own household, yet her household is expansive, extending into the economic, civic, and political life of her society. The contrast with the work of the woman who earns a salary working for a corporation is not chiefly to be found in the location of their respective work, but in their ownership of their work: the Proverbs 31 woman is building up her own household and community, securing the commonweal of her family and neighbourhood.
The contemporary world is not very hospitable to the household, nor to women, who bear such a particular relationship to it. Women are too often caught between the marginal and privatized realm of the modern home and the world of work, social involvement, and political activity outside and largely alienated from it. If the solution for idleness for the women of Crete in Paul’s day was to be workers at home, too many modern women adopting such an approach may find themselves wrestling with the gnawing dissatisfaction of Friedan’s ‘problem that has no name’—there may simply not be enough to keep them occupied in the modern home, as so much of the labour once belonging to it has been outsourced or is performed by appliances and so much of the meaningful social involvement once possible from it is so no longer. Besides this, financial necessity will nowadays force many women into the workforce.
I believe Fearon is right to look for a recovery of some understanding and forms of the household to address this problem, to reintegrate elements of women’s—and men’s—lives that belong together, but which have been placed at odds with each other. To his stimulating essay, I would want to say more about how the household is a focused yet expansive concept, which, rather than retreating into domestic privacy, naturally spreads life into the neighbourhoods, communities, and societies in which it grows. As women diligently keep their households, from those households they will rise to form greater social worlds.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast.. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
[1] Christopher Lasch, Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism (London, W.W. Norton, 1997), 94.
[2] Lasch, Women and the Common Life, 95-96.
[3] Lasch, Women and the Common Life, 97.
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