The Battle of the Sexes Belongs in the Home

'Marriage ... is ... mutual assured destruction. But it doesn’t destroy persons and things, it destroys ego, pride, and selfishness. Oh, happy war that ends in both sides winning.'

From Crisis

By Jason M. Craig

What is lost in this conversation about the roles of men and women in the family is the defining characteristic of a home as economic, the very meaning of “economics” being “household management.”

“Marriage is a duel to the death,” said G.K. Chesterton, “which no man of honour should decline.” Marriage fully lived is, to borrow a form of battle uglier than dueling, mutual, assured destruction. But it doesn’t destroy persons and things, it destroys ego, pride, and selfishness. Oh, happy war that ends in both sides winning.  

It follows that the home is the literal battlefield of the sexes, where their peace and glory are found. This is why Pius XI could, without much controversy at the time, say that God “has ordained and disposed perfect union of the sexes only in matrimony.”  

Marriage can be messy, of course, but the war between the sexes is even messier—and if Pius was right, futile—without it. Many of our “gender issues” today are so tumultuous (or just tedious) because we are trying to reconcile this ageless battle between the sexes in every place but the home, like public bathrooms and private boardrooms. These arenas, however, are battlefields of the worldly sort, meaning they’re where we fight for treasure and territory. 

Even the language speaks of “empowerment” because power is a central ideal—not order, integration, or peace. That’s why this outside-the-home fight between the sexes turns men and women not into their gendered maturity of father and mother but into the androgynous, boring, and horrifying ideal of power: “the boss.” Who gets to be the boss is the question of our age.  

At heart, therefore, these wars are being fought over economics: wages, titles, promotions, and so on. In critical ways, those fomenting these fights are wrong. But they are right in recognizing the fight as passing through economics. The problem is they don’t know what economy really means.

Relatedly, neither does the other side, those claiming to bring peace to the situation by framing the conversation as merely the “roles” of men and women—women at home; men at work. I think this argument falls flat not because women don’t belong to the home but because men do too. Or, conversely, it isn’t just because men must work by nature but because women do too.  

What is lost in this conversation is the defining characteristic of a home as economic, the very meaning of “economics” being “household management.”  

This redefining of home only happened in the last century and a half as households transformed from places of production and meaningful economics (workshops, farms, etc.) to places of amusement and consumption. Money is made in the workplace and spent at home, and the family as a whole is something quite apart from the daily reality of the workplace. Today, the “non-traditional” family sends both mom and dad out to work. In the “traditional” version, dad makes money and mom stays home. But, again, the entire model—whether mom “works” or not—is, historically speaking, very new. 

Is housewifery not work? Even the language we use of a wife being a “stay-at-home” mother is a result of everyone else—children, fathers, other mothers—leaving the place of home for real life. This is no indictment to those of us that find ourselves in the predominant suburban model that is proposed as a normal product of societal progress, but the fact remains that housewifery is confused in value and purpose today not by the mom being at home or not but the fact that the father and the home are often so distant. As John Cuddeback puts it, pointing out that housewifery is confused because husbandry—the art and work of a father around his home—is lost:

In reality what happened first went the other direction: we removed the rich art of “husbandry” from what men do. And the result was and is that both are isolated and impoverished: agriculture lost the aspect of being about “husbanding” the land for the sake of people; and being a married man lost the arts of caring for many concrete things, beginning in the home.

We might call the “traditional” arrangement a better one, since a mother’s presence in the home does bring stability and order to it, but it isn’t exactly the nature of the family to be in this arrangement. There’s more to the idea of “household” than who pays the mortgage and who keeps it clean.  
Cuddeback, like many others, has rooted his family in a homesteading culture as a way to unite with his own family as a household. But the home as an economic unit is not only a matter of agrarian versus industrial society; because the loss of productivity in the home was not just about growing food but doing all the other things natural and essential to humanity. 

“In earlier ages,” says Robert Nisbet in The Quest for Community, “kinship was inextricably involved in the process of getting a living, providing education, supporting the infirm, caring for the aged, and maintaining religious values.” None of these things involve “kinship” now. The “workplace” is where we get a living. The government provides education. An industry that runs buildings falsely called “homes” takes care of the infirm and aged. With so little happening in actual homes, it is natural that everyone else doing “real” work gets to maintain religious values, whatever they are.  

In a society of unapologetic consumerism, work must be treated this way —the means to get the money you need to buy what you need and want. In other times and places, “work” would have included all of these other things because money was but one tool among others that were used in a way of life. 

In recounting her time in the rural countryside of Russia, Catherine Doherty speaks of how she had a hard time learning what the word “chore” meant in English because there’s this sense of drudgery to it, whereas in her agrarian upbringing the work of life as a whole made up the way of life itself. Wendell Berry says the word “work” is the simple definition of our relationship with the world, and it is also our relationship with each other too.   

It’s hard to know the “roles” of men and women now because the industrialization of care no longer demands the coordination of men and women within marriage and family life.

There is nothing about the nature of woman that excludes her from the economics of a household. Eve provided companionship to Adam, sure, but she was given to him as a “helpmate” to the dignified—or divine—activity of work. The highly-praised wife of Proverbs 31, for example, spends her day buying fields and organizing labor to get them planted. Sounds like an economic input to me.   

This doesn’t mean there aren’t works obviously suited to the different sexes. Caring for infants is harder for men since they don’t lactate. Men are better at using axes because they have greater upper body strength. No one is arguing for “chestfeeding” here. But when the home was a productive force, the negotiation between housewifery and husbandry was certainly more complex than who does housework and who does “real work,” or who’s the boss and who gets to catch the shards of glass from the falling glass ceilings that seem strangely installed everywhere. 

There was work all around to be done. And in bonds of love and practical care, households worked hard and worked together. We have drained the home of its meaning and purpose, which results in devaluing even the work that does still happen there, likely overseen by the wife. 

I do not pretend that this work of recovering the nature of the home as a place of production is simple. It is important that we at least admit as an observation that there is more to recovering the home than recovering “roles.” We also can’t simply deny our present reality and play dress up. Living for and with our family is going to be more complex than imitating a moment of time or just branding ourselves “traditional” by purchasing fedoras and subscribing to “trad wife” feeds. But considering ways to repurpose the home itself as a place where “real life” happens with your family seems imperative.   

A widespread example of “re-functionalizing” the home is certainly homeschooling, which often brings a whole new level of work to the mother beyond cooking and cleaning. But, again, a very important piece is the father’s presence in doing something beyond laying the paycheck on the table. Men didn’t go to gyms in the past because they lifted weight all day long—why pay to simulate work at a gym? But, if that’s the reality many men face, maybe the act of bringing that gym equipment in the home and doing it with your family is much more akin to the nature of the family than a bunch of separate gym memberships.    

I also think the widespread movement of men wanting to homestead with their family is not only a reasonable answer but one that I can attest draws you into integration without the effort of coordination. But it is truly a matter of conversion, not just layering chickens and gardens on top of an otherwise suburban lifestyle. The focus of the Liturgy of the Land books and conferences, for example, is not simply to start imitating historical memes, buying a straw hat and moving to the country. But we can discern and begin fruitfully when we begin in the nature of things and how we, as families, can order ourselves and live more humanely.  

Some dismiss this as impractical romanticism. But what’s more practical than the fact that food grows in the ground? Have you ever split wood with your son? Its dignity and value need no defense, especially if that defense is that the heat pump is easier or that the whole act is theatrical simply because you could afford a heat pump. The family has suffered greatly from not having a shared work. So, one very simple way to regain some sanity is to, well, share some work.  

Whatever the means, our so-called economy needs the home to be its focus if we are to claim the family is the foundation of society. And that likely means the home has to find meaningful ways to be truly economic again.