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.
Absolutely. This is the sort of adaptation I've experienced in my own marriage and seen in others, and as I say in the essay, I think it's possible precisely because we're both "all in" on the mission, we want to do right by each other and our kids, and the differences between men and women will naturally make themselves felt in all sorts of ways without us needing to conform to some precise script. I'm not suggesting that social scripts are always bad, but sometimes we need to adapt, and in the context of Christian marriage, we can.
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.
It's almost like marriage requires attending to a unique individual person who isn't interchangeable with someone else of the same sex, rather than attending to a principle.
Yes, I figured that. One has to navigate the politically correct semantics. I'm generally willing to do that, although I try not to impose politically correct semantics on others. Let me know if I ever do that so I can self& correct.
But whatever the terminology, "them before us" is the key principle. Being a professional writer/editor doesn't prevent you from putting motherhood and family first. That's the thing I respect.
Re: women and careers. Of course there are outliers, brilliant, intelligent women who can mostly work from home, have great careers and fulflill their duty of care for their children on their own terms, but those are, in fact, outliers. There is this to be considered: Western job markets, and the US one in particular, heavily rely upon abortion for their functioning. Almost 40% of American women who had an abortion (and one woman in four has an abortion in the US, so we're talking about a signficant part of the workforce) mention work and career as a reason. For this very reason, abortion has a high level of support in the corporate world. 90% of the companies with 200 employees or more offer abortion in their health plan, including interstate travel after Dobbs. More than half of the American female workforce works for those companies. Equal opportunity employment exists, to a large extent, because abortion acts as an insurance, reassuring employers that work will always come first. The price of the unsexing of men and women in the workplace is paid in blood. In my opinion there can be better ways.
I’m all for “better ways.” I do not excuse women for failing in their own serious moral responsibilities. Nor would I make some sort of “but it’s all worth it” argument, but, I would say, there are ways in which the complexity and scope of woman’s nature has been chronically under appreciated across most of history, and that bill has in a sense “come due.” It’s a question of “worth it”; there’s just no option anymore. That genie doesn’t go back into the bottle. We have to find a way to live together that doesn’t involve a reduction of woman to less than what she is. However, I do think there is a real need to develop more fully a sense of “womanly honor”: what honorable womanhood requires, and what women, given greater opportunity and freedom, are obliged to do with those gifts.
There's a long conversation to be had about the appreciation of womanhood in Catholicism and Protestantism, and why low appreciation, feminism and widespread abortion are a product of the latter, but this is for another day. I want to be clear that I don't want to lay the entire burden of abortion on the shoulder of women, for two reasons: those hapless women have had their children with men, who share a responsibility, and the abortion-based workplace equality system was mostly designed and legislated by men. The pro-abortion companies and also are by and large led by men. I try to be true to my idea of sexual integration: there is nothing about the sexes qua sexes which is only about women or men, both in the positive or in the negative. The sexes are an ontological dyad. Which is my reason for rejecting the one-eyed view of feminism on those matters. Having said that, the legal environment and the job market practices work as a "school" for the prevailing ethics, which is that families and childbearing are an issue to be managed, not a supreme good. The "sameness" imposed by those laws demand a surgical amputation of what's most proper of each sex (and therefore, making women "less" of what they are). This doesn't happen only in theory, but in practice. And the paradox is that ample welfare provisions only amplify this message.
I see that in my personal experience. I just wrote on another thread about my most recent hires, three truly brilliant women with an international research background. Two are married and in their early 40s and one is single and in her 30s. None with children. I don't enquire about their personal life, including for legal reasons, but I see that all the time and the reason is obvious. I agree that the genie is out of the bottle, though. paradoxically enough (and I'm half-joking and half-serious, thinking about our last exchange of the topic), you seem to be leaning towards a sort of "virtual Benedict Option", islands of culture and not necessarily of place, where the prevailing social values about marriage and family are overhauled in favor of better ones.
Right, but what if much of the time it’s not a matter of external pressures imposing “sameness” but of discovering that men and women actually are considerably more similar in abilities and potentialities than most have historically believed? That excellences once viewed as “masculine” primarily are in fact just human?
I’m familiar with this framing of course: we taught women that they need to be manly to be good, thus marginalizing their true feminine excellences! But I just don’t think excellence bifurcates very nearly into gendered forms. And I think women living under conditions of freedom will simply *want* to do many of the things that used to be reserved mainly for men. Because they’re genuinely excellent; because they are rewarding. Suggesting that they can’t or shouldn’t have those choices or develop those excellences does seem like a diminishment. That’s not just a figment of feminist rhetoric.
I'm not sure that's an actual discovery, in the Catholic world that was a given, as shown by the saints and the doctors of the Church. And of course I totally agree that in matters of the intellect and the spirit there are no differences. As I said, I work every day in a demanding intellectual environment with brilliant women I have hired. But we aren't disembodied beings, and because of that we have characteristic capacities and duties. One of them is the one in the first paragraph of "Humanae Vitae". Of course none of that is an issue for good Catholic men and women who can exercise discernment, but this rubric is about "Christendom reborn", so I suppose it is eminently political and not just about preaching to the converted. And the political reality is that "freedom" is mostly the result of technology, which has removed work from home and multiplied the opportunities for intellectual work (the area where men and women are the same) while in the meantime creating a social and public ethics going against family formation and virtue. Is freedom based upon the systemic use of artificial contraception and abortion, a system that would crumble the very instant those factors are removed from the equation, real freedom? After all, freedom isn't doing what I want, but what is right. As my mom used to say: "this is not liberty, but libertinism"
This is very complicated of course, but I think on the ground the talents of women very definitely have not been “a given” in the Catholic world or any other at least until quite recently. It’s “in there somewhere,” a sort of developing recognition that women are capable of much more than widely believed, but that insight has taken a long time to develop and robustly work itself out. This is too complex to summarize in a comment. But I think Christian history really shows us an interesting pairing of bright spots of insight and a substantial weight of evidence that on the ground, in the rhythm of normal life, women were still widely believed to be weaker and less intelligent, and to lack the capacity to do what men can do.
St Thomas maybe sort of crystallizes it (as so often happens), and he’s helpful because I don’t think for a moment he was a misogynist, merely piecing together the various data points on the table in his usual methodical fashion. He suggested that women were inferior to men only in accidents, not in essence, meaning that *redeemed* woman could be man’s moral equal. And he seemed to think there were instances of women who basically get those graces here below and transcend the natural (accidental) inferiority of their sex. He’s reconciling “what everyone knew” about natural female inferiority with his metaphysical and moral views, including the fact of the Mother of God being (obviously) transcendently good. He actually troubles to explain why she does *not* have to become male in her resurrected state.
So that to me is a pretty good bellwether of where things were. An enduring recognition of the need to “get to equality” juxtaposed against a ground-level assumption of non-equality (in this-worldly potentialities), which actually I think tends to push Thomas (and anyone following this line of thought) towards a gender unity view more than a gender complementarianism. That is: as they get more morally perfect, men and women *do* perhaps get more alike, because more successfully embodying a telos that is in fact the same.
I’m not saying that women are getting more morally perfect. But I am saying that yes, a previously-deficient understanding of feminine nature is part of the problem here. The social arrangements you probably have in mind were grounded in, and justified by, a lot of premises about men and women and their natures, some of which we now see to be false. They weren’t all false. But some were, and until we correct those errors, and work out a social arrangement more grounded in truth, robust gender traditionalism has no real chance of taking root outside tiny, reactionary subcultures.
Re: "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."
Out of curiosity, if you tried to state this prediction non-rhetorically, what might it look like? Would you predict that female labor force participation won't fall, or won't fall below some percentage, say 60%? Would you predict that there won't be prestigious occupations that are male-dominated? Would you predict that the marriage premium in earnings for men, and the marriage penalty for earnings for women, will disappear, or at least, won't increase? What are we actually talking about here?
I think there's a reasonably good chance that family information and employment patterns will shift in favor of more breadwinner-homemaker specialization in the coming decades. There's quite a bit of it still around, anyway.
"for women to consent to “be discriminated against” in the workforce. (I’m quoting, yes.)"
What a fascinating formulation! I've never heard the non-use of force to interfere with other people's freedom of association characterized as a form of consent. Fascinating!
If you want to put it that way, then yes, women and everyone else should consent to be discriminated against. Or to put it less tendentiously, we should all respect one another as freedom of association, with rare exemptions. People should be able to choose the criteria by which they choose. In the special case of African Americans, an anti-discrimination norm that goes against basic freedom of association, and is in itself mildly unjust, was nonetheless a prudent bit of social engineering to repair a social contract foundly scarred by slavery and segregation. It doesn't generalize.
White males have been expected to consent to be discriminated against for decades as a matter of course. Some object to this. They think affirmative action is unfair and wrong. Not me. I see affirmative action as a legitimate exercise of freedom of association by a wide variety of elite institutions. I consent to be discriminated against.
The really odd thing about the remark is the seeming tone of surprise and possibly indignation. Surely you're aware that freedom of association is a perfectly standard tenet of libertarian doctrine. Is your surprise sincere? Or is it a kind of clickbait stunt? Or an old habit from college debate, to gain a rhetorical advantage even at the expense of argumentative integrity? I honestly have no idea.
As performance art, it's rather fun. But it's forever preventing a serious discussion from getting off the ground.
You could be regarded as a housewife with a side-hustle. I approve! :) I can't help thinking your life is pretty admirable, even though you didn't put career first, and feminists might think you should have been a Girlboss.
Thank you for the compliment. That is gracious. Though of course, I really do not wish to be regarded as a “housewife with a side hustle.”
I’m aware of the term, eagerly promoted by Scott Yenor etc, but it seems to me the main purpose is to stress that working mothers, even when doing the work of experienced professionals, are categorically different. They are not real career women. If it were just a question of personal vanity it would be best to shrug it off, but I don’t think it is. Would a “housewife with side hustle” be someone you’d entrust with serious professional responsibility, potentially requiring her to have “career men” as subordinates? Seems fishy. Can she expect to be paid like a man?
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.
Absolutely. This is the sort of adaptation I've experienced in my own marriage and seen in others, and as I say in the essay, I think it's possible precisely because we're both "all in" on the mission, we want to do right by each other and our kids, and the differences between men and women will naturally make themselves felt in all sorts of ways without us needing to conform to some precise script. I'm not suggesting that social scripts are always bad, but sometimes we need to adapt, and in the context of Christian marriage, we can.
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.
It's almost like marriage requires attending to a unique individual person who isn't interchangeable with someone else of the same sex, rather than attending to a principle.
All very wise, thank you!
Yes, I figured that. One has to navigate the politically correct semantics. I'm generally willing to do that, although I try not to impose politically correct semantics on others. Let me know if I ever do that so I can self& correct.
But whatever the terminology, "them before us" is the key principle. Being a professional writer/editor doesn't prevent you from putting motherhood and family first. That's the thing I respect.
Re: women and careers. Of course there are outliers, brilliant, intelligent women who can mostly work from home, have great careers and fulflill their duty of care for their children on their own terms, but those are, in fact, outliers. There is this to be considered: Western job markets, and the US one in particular, heavily rely upon abortion for their functioning. Almost 40% of American women who had an abortion (and one woman in four has an abortion in the US, so we're talking about a signficant part of the workforce) mention work and career as a reason. For this very reason, abortion has a high level of support in the corporate world. 90% of the companies with 200 employees or more offer abortion in their health plan, including interstate travel after Dobbs. More than half of the American female workforce works for those companies. Equal opportunity employment exists, to a large extent, because abortion acts as an insurance, reassuring employers that work will always come first. The price of the unsexing of men and women in the workplace is paid in blood. In my opinion there can be better ways.
I’m all for “better ways.” I do not excuse women for failing in their own serious moral responsibilities. Nor would I make some sort of “but it’s all worth it” argument, but, I would say, there are ways in which the complexity and scope of woman’s nature has been chronically under appreciated across most of history, and that bill has in a sense “come due.” It’s a question of “worth it”; there’s just no option anymore. That genie doesn’t go back into the bottle. We have to find a way to live together that doesn’t involve a reduction of woman to less than what she is. However, I do think there is a real need to develop more fully a sense of “womanly honor”: what honorable womanhood requires, and what women, given greater opportunity and freedom, are obliged to do with those gifts.
There's a long conversation to be had about the appreciation of womanhood in Catholicism and Protestantism, and why low appreciation, feminism and widespread abortion are a product of the latter, but this is for another day. I want to be clear that I don't want to lay the entire burden of abortion on the shoulder of women, for two reasons: those hapless women have had their children with men, who share a responsibility, and the abortion-based workplace equality system was mostly designed and legislated by men. The pro-abortion companies and also are by and large led by men. I try to be true to my idea of sexual integration: there is nothing about the sexes qua sexes which is only about women or men, both in the positive or in the negative. The sexes are an ontological dyad. Which is my reason for rejecting the one-eyed view of feminism on those matters. Having said that, the legal environment and the job market practices work as a "school" for the prevailing ethics, which is that families and childbearing are an issue to be managed, not a supreme good. The "sameness" imposed by those laws demand a surgical amputation of what's most proper of each sex (and therefore, making women "less" of what they are). This doesn't happen only in theory, but in practice. And the paradox is that ample welfare provisions only amplify this message.
I see that in my personal experience. I just wrote on another thread about my most recent hires, three truly brilliant women with an international research background. Two are married and in their early 40s and one is single and in her 30s. None with children. I don't enquire about their personal life, including for legal reasons, but I see that all the time and the reason is obvious. I agree that the genie is out of the bottle, though. paradoxically enough (and I'm half-joking and half-serious, thinking about our last exchange of the topic), you seem to be leaning towards a sort of "virtual Benedict Option", islands of culture and not necessarily of place, where the prevailing social values about marriage and family are overhauled in favor of better ones.
Right, but what if much of the time it’s not a matter of external pressures imposing “sameness” but of discovering that men and women actually are considerably more similar in abilities and potentialities than most have historically believed? That excellences once viewed as “masculine” primarily are in fact just human?
I’m familiar with this framing of course: we taught women that they need to be manly to be good, thus marginalizing their true feminine excellences! But I just don’t think excellence bifurcates very nearly into gendered forms. And I think women living under conditions of freedom will simply *want* to do many of the things that used to be reserved mainly for men. Because they’re genuinely excellent; because they are rewarding. Suggesting that they can’t or shouldn’t have those choices or develop those excellences does seem like a diminishment. That’s not just a figment of feminist rhetoric.
I'm not sure that's an actual discovery, in the Catholic world that was a given, as shown by the saints and the doctors of the Church. And of course I totally agree that in matters of the intellect and the spirit there are no differences. As I said, I work every day in a demanding intellectual environment with brilliant women I have hired. But we aren't disembodied beings, and because of that we have characteristic capacities and duties. One of them is the one in the first paragraph of "Humanae Vitae". Of course none of that is an issue for good Catholic men and women who can exercise discernment, but this rubric is about "Christendom reborn", so I suppose it is eminently political and not just about preaching to the converted. And the political reality is that "freedom" is mostly the result of technology, which has removed work from home and multiplied the opportunities for intellectual work (the area where men and women are the same) while in the meantime creating a social and public ethics going against family formation and virtue. Is freedom based upon the systemic use of artificial contraception and abortion, a system that would crumble the very instant those factors are removed from the equation, real freedom? After all, freedom isn't doing what I want, but what is right. As my mom used to say: "this is not liberty, but libertinism"
This is very complicated of course, but I think on the ground the talents of women very definitely have not been “a given” in the Catholic world or any other at least until quite recently. It’s “in there somewhere,” a sort of developing recognition that women are capable of much more than widely believed, but that insight has taken a long time to develop and robustly work itself out. This is too complex to summarize in a comment. But I think Christian history really shows us an interesting pairing of bright spots of insight and a substantial weight of evidence that on the ground, in the rhythm of normal life, women were still widely believed to be weaker and less intelligent, and to lack the capacity to do what men can do.
St Thomas maybe sort of crystallizes it (as so often happens), and he’s helpful because I don’t think for a moment he was a misogynist, merely piecing together the various data points on the table in his usual methodical fashion. He suggested that women were inferior to men only in accidents, not in essence, meaning that *redeemed* woman could be man’s moral equal. And he seemed to think there were instances of women who basically get those graces here below and transcend the natural (accidental) inferiority of their sex. He’s reconciling “what everyone knew” about natural female inferiority with his metaphysical and moral views, including the fact of the Mother of God being (obviously) transcendently good. He actually troubles to explain why she does *not* have to become male in her resurrected state.
So that to me is a pretty good bellwether of where things were. An enduring recognition of the need to “get to equality” juxtaposed against a ground-level assumption of non-equality (in this-worldly potentialities), which actually I think tends to push Thomas (and anyone following this line of thought) towards a gender unity view more than a gender complementarianism. That is: as they get more morally perfect, men and women *do* perhaps get more alike, because more successfully embodying a telos that is in fact the same.
I’m not saying that women are getting more morally perfect. But I am saying that yes, a previously-deficient understanding of feminine nature is part of the problem here. The social arrangements you probably have in mind were grounded in, and justified by, a lot of premises about men and women and their natures, some of which we now see to be false. They weren’t all false. But some were, and until we correct those errors, and work out a social arrangement more grounded in truth, robust gender traditionalism has no real chance of taking root outside tiny, reactionary subcultures.
“I am still deeply committed to traditional Christian marriage“
From reading this post, it doesn’t sound like it.
Re: "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."
Out of curiosity, if you tried to state this prediction non-rhetorically, what might it look like? Would you predict that female labor force participation won't fall, or won't fall below some percentage, say 60%? Would you predict that there won't be prestigious occupations that are male-dominated? Would you predict that the marriage premium in earnings for men, and the marriage penalty for earnings for women, will disappear, or at least, won't increase? What are we actually talking about here?
I think there's a reasonably good chance that family information and employment patterns will shift in favor of more breadwinner-homemaker specialization in the coming decades. There's quite a bit of it still around, anyway.
"for women to consent to “be discriminated against” in the workforce. (I’m quoting, yes.)"
What a fascinating formulation! I've never heard the non-use of force to interfere with other people's freedom of association characterized as a form of consent. Fascinating!
If you want to put it that way, then yes, women and everyone else should consent to be discriminated against. Or to put it less tendentiously, we should all respect one another as freedom of association, with rare exemptions. People should be able to choose the criteria by which they choose. In the special case of African Americans, an anti-discrimination norm that goes against basic freedom of association, and is in itself mildly unjust, was nonetheless a prudent bit of social engineering to repair a social contract foundly scarred by slavery and segregation. It doesn't generalize.
White males have been expected to consent to be discriminated against for decades as a matter of course. Some object to this. They think affirmative action is unfair and wrong. Not me. I see affirmative action as a legitimate exercise of freedom of association by a wide variety of elite institutions. I consent to be discriminated against.
The really odd thing about the remark is the seeming tone of surprise and possibly indignation. Surely you're aware that freedom of association is a perfectly standard tenet of libertarian doctrine. Is your surprise sincere? Or is it a kind of clickbait stunt? Or an old habit from college debate, to gain a rhetorical advantage even at the expense of argumentative integrity? I honestly have no idea.
As performance art, it's rather fun. But it's forever preventing a serious discussion from getting off the ground.
You could be regarded as a housewife with a side-hustle. I approve! :) I can't help thinking your life is pretty admirable, even though you didn't put career first, and feminists might think you should have been a Girlboss.
Thank you for the compliment. That is gracious. Though of course, I really do not wish to be regarded as a “housewife with a side hustle.”
I’m aware of the term, eagerly promoted by Scott Yenor etc, but it seems to me the main purpose is to stress that working mothers, even when doing the work of experienced professionals, are categorically different. They are not real career women. If it were just a question of personal vanity it would be best to shrug it off, but I don’t think it is. Would a “housewife with side hustle” be someone you’d entrust with serious professional responsibility, potentially requiring her to have “career men” as subordinates? Seems fishy. Can she expect to be paid like a man?
I am a professional writer/editor.