First, a disclaimer. My post earlier this week on “Making Men Marriageable” was not calculated to provoke a rage-a-thon, for the sake of teeing up the present essay. It just sort of happened that way.
I’m not saying I was greatly surprised. This isn’t my first rodeo! But I truly was just unfolding my thoughts in what seemed like a reasonable progression, and it only occurred to me last night how the week’s teapot-tempest actually paved the way quite nicely to today’s piece. In which I will argue that Christians have ever been brilliant entrepreneurs of marriage and family life, and that it’s time to be that again.
I know! I understand how that sounds. But I promise, this is a very traditional form of entrepreneurship. It’s what Christians have ever done! I’ll get to that, but first, let’s say a bit more about this week’s little dust-up.
It’s not news to anyone that social media easily stirs up toxic gender wars. Even so, it was somewhat convenient to have them (slight cough) flower right here on my own page, a quick-reference reminder of how some people really, really aren’t fine with women’s full involvement in the workforce. That’s not even what the essay was about! I said nothing whatsoever about women’s careers. But it took literally two minutes from the time I clicked “send” to the appearance of the first comment explaining that the solution to the problem of non-thriving men is for women to consent to “be discriminated against” in the workforce. (I’m quoting, yes.) A sentiment speedily echoed by many others.
Aww, gee. And to think, just a few short months ago, I would click “send” on these missives and wonder for hours if anyone was reading!
I’m well aware of course that many traditionalists assume that the only possible road back to cultural health runs through a diminishment of female freedoms and opportunities. And of course there are a range of views here. Mormon adolescence (in the 1990s) exposed me to a fairly mild, homeopathic form of gender traditionalism: no one thought it was inappropriate for us girls to go to college, wear blue jeans, or vote, but we were explicitly taught in Sunday School that maternity and domesticity were our presumptive adult vocation. We heard all the Hallmark-esque stories about women who thought they wanted careers until the blissful moment when they first held that baby and then… etc. Social media gave rise to a harder, more radicalized kind of revanchist: the ones who may in fact think it’s wrong for women to wear pants or vote. (It’s funny how those folks always think they’re going to shock you with their radical countercultural positions. Friends, it feels like I’ve been having this conversation from my cradle.)
Of course people differ, and yet after a while, there is a certain dreary sameness to all the interlocutors who turn out, with a little probing, to be deeply committed to forcing women back into our place. By scaling back our legal rights. Fencing us out of valuable opportunities. Reasserting more commanding paternal or spousal authority. Something. They’d prefer if we went cheerfully, but you know. The details after awhile start to seem less important than the ethos of the thing, the deep conviction that women’s full-fledged inclusion in a free society has been a disastrous mistake that must somehow be corrected.
My own case is particularly funny because I tend to be cast in these conversations as some sort of harpy-girlboss crusader, eager to toss family life on the pyre of the nine-to-five. In fact, I’ve never even worked in an office. My five kids have never spent a single day in daycare. I’ve been interrupted countless times as I’ve typed this by boys demanding things from me. (And broke off halfway through to drive over to the school for a string of parent-teacher conferences.) Perhaps I should qualify as a good example of a woman who made family a high priority? But clearly not, at least not for a certain sort of embittered reactionary. For him, as I’ve come to understand, a person like me really is pure kryptonite, probably much worse in fact than the garden-variety girlboss.
Which actually makes sense. Because I have everything a woman is supposed to want! I should long ago have had that come-to-Jesus Hallmark moment, when I locked eyes with my newborn, and my career drive burned away in the fire of maternal love. Why the heck am I so gosh-darn employed (even at a job a man might want)? That’s just greedy, right? At least with the childless cat ladies, you can smugly reassure yourself that they’ll die unloved and alone.
I don’t wish to be harsh. I do really understand many of the sources of frustration that drive this kind of reactionary radicalism. But we really do have to get past that to go anywhere, so allow me to state the obvious, for those people still yearning for a more rigidly gender-divided world. You cannot have what you want. Human civilization is not moving back towards a world in which women exist in a second-class protectorate. You can try to create it in tiny, cloistered communities, but only at the cost of being marginalized as reactionary cranks.
There’s a good reason for that, in fact, and it’s not “feminism.” The fundamental obstacle here, ironically, is found not in politics or culture, but in nature herself. Woman’s nature just isn’t what the reactionary wants it to be. Given the broad conditions of a free, information-oriented, rarified-labor society, our energies and interests don’t just naturally all flow right back towards hearth and kitchen. And if you look at the world today, I think it’s clear that the yearned-for Reactionary Paradise isn’t attainable anyway, even with intensely repressive tools such as the ayatollahs use. If you try to achieve it, you just find yourself in a despotic spiral, jettisoning one supposedly-cherished principle after another as you race towards “nature most foul.”
Here’s the funny thing, though. For all the pettiness of social media gender wars, and the bitterness of Very Online revanchists, I am still deeply committed to traditional Christian marriage. It is a beautiful and transformative thing. My experience of on-the-ground traditionalists is dramatically different from the online torrents of angst. What I see on the ground in tradition-rooted communities (Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, all sorts) is a lot of cooperation and vitality. Men and women working together harmoniously, as spouses but also as colleagues and fellow parishioners in our churches, schools, and other institutions. Energetic people adapting and experimenting with strategies for arranging households and ordering family life. People finding effective ways to build community, raise thriving kids, and protect human dignity.
It seems obvious to me that traditionalists are able to do this precisely because their sexual ethics and marital expectations are so rooted and robustly defined, not by a chore chart or pay stub, but by deeper and more meaningful things. Their defining relationships are secure enough to adapt without collapsing. It’s also crucial, of course, that doctrine, liturgy, and all the other elements of a full-blooded religious tradition, animate community life more broadly, giving us a robust set of common goals and shared loves.
I absolutely believe that churches and religious communities are going to endure as loci of cultural renewal. And I think, as other elements of society wither, that they will increasingly be beacons to meaning-starved people of all backgrounds, enabling those goods to spill over into a broader culture.
But this is not truly new. It’s what Christianity has always done. We did it in the first few centuries, demanding sexual fidelity from both men and women, and stressing that spouses were moral equals, a divinely commissioned “procreative team” with a very consequential task. Marriage became a great bulwark for protecting human dignity, especially the dignity of women. It’s interesting to note that the late Roman Empire experienced certain struggles eerily similar to our own: falling marriage and birth rates, men and women not particularly liking each other, people opting for comfort and ease over the challenges and anxieties of family life. Christian marriage offered a powerful antidote to all that.
Later on, as canon law developed, the Church became a great force for breaking up tribal kinship networks, using marriage especially as a mechanism. By forbidding cousin marriage, and forcing people to seek spouses outside the clan, Christians pushed the West towards a freer and more expansive kind of civilization, where universities, religious orders, and free markets could spur further growth and discovery. Joseph Henrichs (a social scientist, not a Christian!) has explored this process in his fascinating book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Christian marriage is indeed inflexible in a certain sense, but that very rigidity has sometimes enabled it to drive productive change.
We can do it again. I’m very confident that Christian marriage is strong enough to withstand the disruptive ramifications of women working, and of expanded freedom more generally. My guess is that marriage rates will continue to decline for awhile, as “companionate marriage” (that soft, hedonistic modern creation) continues to fray, and traditional marriage continues to adapt. But marriage will rise again.
Matrimony is a beautiful thing. It’s a hard thing, sometimes appallingly hard, but I find it very moving to contemplate how this thing–pillar of civilization, driver of social change, bulwark of human dignity–is ultimately built on many quiet instances of personal love. On a man and woman refusing to give up on each other. On promises kept and hands joined.
This is the foundation on which Christendom shall be reborn.
I am a married man with three kids. Our marriage is very traditional in some ways, but very "21st century" in others. For instance, I am as involved in child care as my wife is, and she had a bigger salary than me for most of our 20+ years together.
We never made a conscious decision to act according to our genders. As an overthinking Catholic, I do sometimes wonder if we should pay more attention to this. Still, we've naturally specialized ourselves in roles are gendered, but do not always match tradition. As an example: I do all sorts of heavy cleaning around the house, which obviously makes sense -- men are stronger! --, but my own household growing up wasn't like that at all.
What I am trying to get to with this rambling comment is this: we may have stumbled upon a pretty good way to deal with sex differences in marriage. We just let ourselves be, trying to be helpful to one another as much as possible, never denying the obvious with respect to our tastes and skills, nor denying our kids of what we could each do best in each context. As it turns out, gender is such a robust natural phenomenon that this seems to be enough for gendered roles to emerge.
I really appreciate your approach to gender and marriage. You said somewhere else that when you get married, it becomes obvious which one of you does pregnancy, and things kind of flow from there. That's how my husband and I have done things, and it does fall along fairly traditional lines. Probably the traditional roles came to be because by and large that's what worked for most families. That doesn't mean every detail of "traditional" gender roles will work well for every family in every century.
I would add a couple things though, mostly just an extension of the "attend to reality and try to be good to each other" principle:
-not every woman experiences pregnancy the same way, so for us it has required my husband to believe me when I tell him how I'm feeling, what I can or can't do, even when this differs from our expectations, how his sisters experience pregnancy, etc. He believes me because we have a good relationship, we're honest with each other and he is aware that no one's experience is universal.
-there are invisible things to attend to as well. Differences in temperament, threshold for overstimulation, values instilled in childhood, how much holiday decor matters to you, etc. Acknowledging "my spouse needs some quiet time even though I don't" or "my wife needs intellectual and professional work to thrive even though not all women do" is part of this, and not always obvious to everyone.
-household work adds up quickly and just takes a lot of time. I think a lot of household overwhelm and conflict come from not acknowledging this. Most people don't want to cook and do laundry, but most people want food and clean clothes, and it takes a lot of time to keep these things running. Acknowledging this and attending to it rather than just expecting it to happen magically makes a huge difference.