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I am many things—child of God, wife, mother, writer, and blogger. My role as a homemaker facilitates all of these priorities.
In fact, I come from a long line of homemakers. For generations, the women in my family have chosen to arrange their priorities around their families and their homes. It is a role of which I am very proud and grateful to those who preceded me for the sacrifice the homemaking priority required.
My great-grandmother’s introduction to homemaking began at the age of 9 when she willingly shouldered the responsibilities of caring for three siblings after the death of her mother. Standing as the true Proverbs 31 woman, my great-grandmother picked the cotton fields of Blossom, Texas, to buy a winter coat for her daughter. It was only after her daughter’s marriage that she took a dry cleaning job on Haskell Avenue in downtown Dallas.
My grandmother was a homemaker too. Before marrying, she worked in Dallas at the Murray Gin Company making bombs for World War II. When my mother entered college, my grandmother took a job outside the home, filling catalog orders for another Dallas-based company.
My mother graduated with a bachelor’s degree in library science at the height of the feminist movement in America. But when my oldest sister was born, Mom made the unpopular choice to quit her job as the general librarian at the Mesquite Public Library. At the time she earned more than my father, who was employed at a bank.
From our earliest memories, it is our mothers who teach us what ministry looks like—how to serve and orient our lives around others, and the painful sacrifices that are sometimes required.
Paul describes one ministry of motherhood in Titus 2:5 when he admonishes wives to be homemakers. Paul uses the Greek word oikourgos, which means “working at home” or “caring for the house.”
My own mother taught me what the ministry of working at home meant—cheerfully putting another’s interests before her own. Sadly, fewer mothers are passing along that generational vision to their daughters and those who do often pass down the logistics of home management without the keen eye for finding joy in everyday activities.
The late Edith Schaeffer believed homemaking was a hidden art—an art form that satisfied and fulfilled oneself and others. Facebook’s female Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg believes homemaking is drudgery. One woman saw the miraculous in the mundane, the other inequality in the minutia.
In her recent book “Lean-in: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” Sandberg urges women to “lean-in” to their careers for the betterment of all women.
Like feminists before her, Sandberg believes homemaking lowers the “expectations of what women can achieve.” And by choosing to focus on their families, women are not “demonstrating courage to reach for more opportunities, sit at more tables, and believe more in themselves.”
Not surprisingly, modern homemakers are being relieved of their duty, the cost of which is revealed in the meaning of the word itself.
In the Byzantine text, Titus 2:5’s rendering of homemaker is oikouros from the root “keeping watch.” The Alexandrian/Western text uses the aforementioned form oikourgos (“home worker” or “caring for the house.”)
The main difference between these two words is the absence of a gamma (the letter g), a variance that Southeastern Seminary’s Maurice Robinson, senior professor of New Testament, said offers no real theological differences.
“…Even if some people might want to draw a fine line between ‘staying at home’ and ‘working at home’; I think both seem to indicate ‘managing the affairs of the home,’” said Robinson, a co-editor of the 2005 Byzantine Text, in an interview with the TEXAN.
Taken together, both oikouros and oikourgos demonstrate the importance of the homemaking task—one as an industrious worker, the other as a guardian. Neither nuance sounds inconsequential to me.
Last month, feminists around the world were sent aflutter when Susan Patton (a feminist pioneer at Princeton) advised female students at the historic institution to get married young.
Keli Goff, among other like-minded feminists, responded to Patton in an op-ed piece for The Guardian titled “Female Ivy League graduates have a duty to stay in the workforce.” It ran with the subtitle: “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a full-time mother, but you don’t need an elite degree to do it.” Goff points an angry finger at educated women who choose to stay at home, calling their degrees a “wasted opportunity.”
“That degree could have gone to a woman who does want to spend her entire life using it to advance the cause of women—or others in need of advancement—not simply advancing the lives of her own family at home, which is a noble cause, but not one requiring an elite degree,” she writes.
If Goff had her way the “next frontier of the admissions should revolve around asking people to declare what they actually plan to do with their degrees.” Her suggested admissions policy would bar some women from higher education—an odd move considering women like Susan Patton fought hard for admission to Ivy League schools not too long ago.
My mother wasn’t educated at an Ivy League school, but she poured her education into mothering her daughters nonetheless.
Before the dawn of Pinterest, my mother created her own card catalog out of a shoebox. Inside were hundreds of hand-written index cards bearing a variety of children’s book titles, their Dewey decimal numbers, and book summaries—organized by book genre. The shoebox, which was pulled out every summer to formulate reading lists for my two sisters and me, became a running joke in our family. Today, however, it is a family heirloom.
That shoebox represents to me a mother who put her classical education to creative use by educating her children on worldviews, cultures, and great literature long before the classical model of education ever became popular.
For my mother it would have been absurd for her to set about “advancing the cause of women” without first advancing the cause of the women living under her own roof.
In fact, most feminists would be surprised to discover that my mother opted out of the professional life not once but twice in her lifetime. When I was in high school, my father was laid off after a company merger. Because of the commitment my parents made to honor God’s prescription for wives to “guard their homes,” my mother chose not to pursue full-time work.
When I think of this sacrifice, the implications of which were financially serious, I get a painful lump in my throat. At the risk of her reputation as a “sensible” woman, she chose to cling fiercely to God’s promise of provision for our family.
While researching this piece, I asked my mother if she encountered any pushback over her decision to stay at home while my father looked for a new job. Yes, she said, but only from people in the church.
It is a sad day indeed when our nation’s guardians are being pushed from their watch posts on a regular basis. But it’s a catastrophic event when the family of God tears down those remaining women who are brave enough to run counter to the world for the sake of their families. There are, after all, very few left.
I pray that our churches find intentional ways to build up all mothers who are making tough sacrifices for their children—whether it’s the stay-at-home mom who puts her career on hold or the single/divorced mother who sacrifices luxuries the modern world declares as must-haves.
My great-grandmother was one such woman. When she found herself divorced at the end of the Great Depression, she made ends meet by watching children after school as well as keeping house and cooking for a family friend. My pride in my homemaking heritage is derived in part from my great-grandmother’s heroic response to difficult circumstances, but it also stems from the gracious posture she took against those who looked down their noses at her during a time when divorce carried a terrible stigma—inside the church and out.
When I see my great-grandmother, I do not see a woman who viewed her life situation as drudgery from which she needed emancipation. I see a woman who resolutely set her face toward the future by giving her heart to fully minister to loved ones in the present.
Last week my great-grandmother would have been 114 years old. Since her death, she has passed her post of “home guardian” to many mothers in my family. And while I often struggle to keep in step with her sacrificial spirit, I am forever grateful for the trenches she dug in preparation for my service.
