A family model and a place in the Home

Our contemporary industrial family model has proven harmful to marriage and family.  The model early in the last century that kept woman at home all the time is viewed as pejorative to women (in it's own ways it was).  The blame has been attributed to Christianity and Christianity has been seen as degrading to woman.  In reality Christianity elevates women quite highly.  For example, it was not good for Adam to be alone even walking with God.  It wasn't until Eve was made by God that Adam had this need met.  Together Man and Wife bear the image of God even more perfectly than we perfectly do alone and only together can they fulfill the mandate to multiply and subdue the eath.  

In our fallenness however we have struggled to maintain a wholeness in our relationships between men and women.  We created a dichotomy where there should be unity between two complimentary parts.  So let it be known this is as much a critique of today’s “complementarianism” or strains of it.  Today we have reacted against an inaccurate and unbiblical model with one reactive and just as unbiblical. Let me start of with an illustration.

The Adam and Eve anachronism

          “Adam was sitting watching TV after a long day at work.  Eve looked out at him from where she was cooking and demanded “Adam, help me out and take out the garbage!  I've been watching the kids all day and cooking for you and I’m sick of not having any help around here!” Adam angrily replied “you’re not my mother!  I've been working hard all day to feed this family! It’s your fault you listened to the serpent in the first place!”

            The ludicrousness should be obvious to anybody, and it should extend further than the presence of a television.  The contemporary model that is both attacked by feminists and all too often affirmed by conservatives is anachronistic and contrary design in its own ways.  While it does contain the strength of affirming the differences between male and female it did so in an unhealthy way. The more radical liberation feminism is far off indeed, but many the Christian community seems to have bought into the dichotomy that “The Feminine Mystique” originally critiqued.  Both husband and wife used to do the same work together in the home .  Culture shied away from this more team oriented male leader model to completely split realms, observe the absurdity.

Don't forget the asbestos gloves too, you sexist

That was the new standard of modernism, but it's not the classical model of male headship.

Until the Industrial revolution took people out of their homes in the 19^th century and put everyone in factories, the family stayed and worked together in the home.  A butcher’s wife helped him be a butcher, a bakers wife helped bake and learned how to bake for herself.  There was division of labor, but more equally so especially in regards to business.  The wife would work with her husband in their house (where their business was) and he with her.  She would learn a skill that would help her should she be widowed and they would share in parenting duties in the house. teaching children their craft.

Division of labor has always existed and differed culture to culture. The chart below seems to indicate men did the jobs requiring their strength (showing an emphasis on necessity in my opinion).  This chart shows generalities and there are exceptions such as the Pawnee who assigned woodworking to women.  Yet even with this until the industrial revolution man and wife worked together in the home and out of the home.  The common task of running a farm or a business and raising a family was shared by both working together at home.  There are some who still hold to this pattern in Western society. The work of keeping a household and raising children was more equally shared.

Nancy Pearcey in her book Total Truth tells how she witnessed the older model coming across family owned businesses in Europe, bakeries in her case. While I was in Europe too I saw some vestiges of this remained, albeit ones that are growing weaker. A family I knew still made wine, but it had become a side business. We deviated from the original model and intention. Family, duty, and community were far more the purpose of marriage and family which were inseparable.  Today we split the family and it started with this dichotomy.

Trust me the old family model was way more chipper than American Gothic, but it still proves my point

This is exacerbated with today's view  that marriage (and all things) is primarily about personal fulfillment.  Today it's happiness that is seen as the ultimate good in a marriage.  Sadly not the others, but your own happiness is the underlying drive.  Why then get married or commit to a marriage if it's value is contingent on how you feel at a moment? This misperception of marriage is common even in the church having been absorbed from the culture.  Still it is the real difference between a biblical and the secular model. Happiness is the product of a good marriage but we have made it an ultimate thing.

The separation of man and wife has created a terrible situation.  For the first time in history, husband, wife and children are all living separate lives not just their own shared lives.  Family's spend far less time together. naive children likewise are learning not from wise elders but equally naive children their age which likely contributed to rampant sexual brokenness in our youth.  Such was the character of the stories and advice I heard when I was high school.  Advice was often "oh yeah I've done that" and therefore it was okay.  Long term consequences could be taught by adults.  Without adults however children are blindly feeling their way around making damaging lifelong mistakes. Often seeking elsewhere the attention they cannot get but desperately need from their parents.

The industrial revolution led to the further atomizing of the family.  Atomic family units are weakening to society as individuals break themselves off and tend towards pursuing pleasure.  This contributed and led to the sexual revolutions’ emphasis on personal sexual fulfillment (gratification) and todays debate about what marriage is.  If pleasure and self is central of course, what kind of relationship can be forbidden if it contains such things?

Is a woman's place in the home?  Well walk that back a second. Asked negatively that question often 

assumes the man's place is outside the home.  The man should be in the home too.  So of course a 

woman's place is in the home, just like a man's place is too.  In the old model as well, the men did not

get off scott free but missed out on the raising of their own children.

The old and new models were together unfair to the men too.  They were expected to not be at home and not invest in their family personally. It is also worth, noting the idea of a male and female sphere (keeping the woman in home and the man at work) grew out of the fact/value dichotomy.  Science vs Religion created two realms of truth and the notion of having a male and a female realm just seemed the natural outworking.  Yet instead of reclaiming the mutual sphere of united family life feminism reacted largely against this and did not bring husbands back into the home with the wife.

The more contemporary feminist movement became “have it all”. Have jobs and get out of the house like the men had.  However, men should not have had those expectations on them in the first place.  Women became what they hated and men have been forced to retreat and get out the way.  Instead of stopping at equality society has in some ways gone so far as to reverse the two roles that were too strongly opposed to begin with.  Women are encouraged to be what they want while choosing to be a stay at home mother in some circles is seen as somehow choosing to be oppressed.  Women are told to put off families, sleep around and pursue a career above all else.  In essence they're being told to be men before feminism, something even the men shouldn't have been.
Women have become the men they hated

This old new model of separation led to harm for both male and female.  It certainly lent itself to "Gender Arianism" which feminism rightly railed against.  To say or live as if women are ontologically (in being) less or inferior to men is to reflect the Arian heresy.  Having a woman stay at
home alone lent itself to this thinking and likely was even derived from it.  Men and women are equal in being and humanity.  Like the Godhead there does exist a heirarchy meant to be lived out in self-sacrificial love.

What is Gender Arianism you ask?
I also recommend C. Fitzsimmons Allisions' book "The Cruelty of Heresy" on this.


Ephesians 5:22-33
Wives submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.  23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself it's Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. 25 Husbands love you wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkly or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.  28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.  he who loves his wife loves himself. 29  For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church 30 because we are members of his body. 31 therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.  32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church.  33 However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

Christ died for his bride and conquered death for her, that doesn't sound sexist to me.

With such a huge hole in our modern industrial model, what’s the solution you may ask? I’m glad I asked for you.  Other than a better Gospel realization than even the older industrial male centered model I am not certain how but men and women need to be brought back together into the home in an industrialized world.  The temptation for society is payback and to reverse this with a reversed gender Arianism.  Reform and return to a model of male headship  that places both parents together is the only real solution.  The nuclear family needs to be restored and a belief that both partners are equal in being but with differing roles in hierarchy needs to be established.  Our atomic family structure with its over-emphasis on the individual and devaluing of family ties has led as it always does to hedonism and societal decay.   A trustee model where marriage and the family are sacred (in which civilizations flourish) or a domestic model (where family and individual rights are balanced) are the only two stable.  An atomistic model is the mark of a dying civilization. The traditional family must not just be “restored” but the creational design for the family needs to be realized at last in our fallen world.