So here I am working backwards up the list of questions left in my mind by the Gunn Bros film The Monstrous Regiment of Women. I’m at my question 4:
Do I think ‘a woman’s place is in the home’?I should explain (they do tell you in the film) that “the monstrous regiment of women” is a quotation from a pamphlet written by John Knox in protest against political rule by women during the time of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. “Regiment” means rule or authority, and “monstrous” means unnatural, freakish. The image it conjures of an army of female trolls was probably, while not an accurate interpretation of what he said, not far from John Knox’s mind. So he thought the regiment – rule – of women was unnatural, against the order of creation. The film supports this view, promoting strongly the opinion that being a keeper at home is a woman’s highest calling, that large families are a delight and blessing of the Lord, to be cherished and sought, and that whether we are thinking of a business boss or a church minister, woman is not made for leadership or power.
Hmm.
Well, I am English, and as you know England has a Queen who is head of the Church of England as well as our monarch. And I have to say there is nothing in the way she conducts herself that would support John Knox’s view. The first Queen Elizabeth was also an excellent monarch – more admirable in every respect than her father King Henry VIII, who divorced two wives and beheaded two more. His masculinity blessed us not at all, and his treatment of the monasteries was nothing to be proud of either. He was not without good qualities of course, but that much can be said of all of us.
Queen Victoria was another very admirable monarch. Her moral standards and (partly under her husband’s influence) her concern for the public good were exemplary.
Other women in power? Abbess Hilda of Whitby, perhaps, who reigned over a dual abbey with some monks and some nuns. Or Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers? Or Mother Teresa? The more I think about it the harder I’m finding it to see what John Knox’s problem was.
I myself come from a line of strong and forthright Yorkshire women.
I well remember as a child listening to my mother in conversation with a man who had charged her an extortionate, unreasonable sum of money for lopping a dangerous branch for our oak tree that overhung the highway. He was an oily and unpleasant man, and murmured to her in obsequious tones as she handed him her cheque: “If ever you’re in trouble, just give me a call.”
“If ever I’m in trouble,” she replied, “I’ll get out of it somehow without coming to you.” And there is no doubt in my mind she would have made good on those words.
My great-grandfather started a village shop, and my great-grandmother did the accounts and cooked all the baked goods. She was by training a textile designer, and she also turned her hand to millinery and made her own clothes as well as tending her beautiful garden and keeping her home in apple-pie order. During the war their household expanded to include evacuees from more dangerous parts of the country.
Her daughter Kitty married a man who worked his way up from poverty to substantial wealth, owning a large farm and a number of other houses. Every year at Michaelmas they went to the fair to employ their horsemen for the year who, along with prisoners of war and various other farm hands, lived and ate and worked on the farm. Kitty oversaw the daily domestic running of the whole enterprise, and kept the accounts for the farm. The cleaning and childcare and domestic detail were taken care of by a housekeeper – Kitty managed the people, the money and the organization of this large community. Her husband was the actual farmer – the beasts, the crops, the building, the machinery, the choice of labour and the land were his area of concern.
Kitty’s daughter, my Auntie Jean, married into a similar setting. Swarms of gypsies worked on their land, along with regular farm workers and the rest of the family. My Auntie Jean also had hens, ducks and geese as well as the vegetable garden to manage on top of the orchestration of the household, the usual domestic chores and an army of people to feed.
My mother, Kitty's eldest daughter, did not marry a farmer. My father worked overseas and was rarely at home. My mother bought and sold houses as a means of making money – we lived in them while she enlarged, improved, refurbished and rebuilt them and then moved on. Eventually we were able to afford a home with five acres with room for sheep, ducks, hens, an orchard, a huge vegetable garden and many soft fruit bushes. We had our own wood and stream, with no need to buy in logs, and an abundance of flowers and herbs also graced the garden. With no man at home – just my mother, me and my sister – all the decisions, all the heavy labour and all the courage had nowhere to come from but women.
Kitty's youngest daughter, my Auntie Jessie, had chronic severe depression and periodic nervous breakdowns; it would have been realistic to expect her to hold down a job. But as well as that, in late middle age Kitty, then a widow, suffered a detached retina and became almost blind. My Auntie Jessie therefore was needed at home as a full-time carer for her mother.
So when I am faced with the proposition that a woman’s place is at home, and she is not suited to ‘regiment’ (ie being in charge of anything), all I see is a matter of location and scale.
When the Book of Proverbs in the Bible was written, and the description of the Good Housewife penned, the writer had in mind more the kind of housewife that my grandmother and great-grandmother were, than the Edward Scissorhands variety of household – neat as a pin suburban boxes surrounded by manicured lawns and topiarised bushes, occupied by women who lived there alone polishing floors and silver and furniture while their husbands worked for corporations and their children went to school.
Certainly my mother and her mother and mother’s mother treated men with deference and respect. They were waited on and served. They were spoken of always as the most important member of the household. But the women took great pride in the work they did and the area of responsibility they exercised. In such a setting, being a keeper at home makes perfect sense. No intellect could be stunted, no ability or creativity left unfulfilled, with such a broad variety of daily responsibilities to address.
My own life has been different. I married a man who became a schoolteacher, a musician. He worked the normal teacher’s pattern but added on innumerable music commitments besides – some paid, others for the beauty of it. His mother, a devout Methodist, worked part-time as a teacher alongside her husband, a headmaster.
I stayed home to raise our children – I would never have countenanced the possibility of sending them into the care of another woman – and homeschooled for a couple of years along the way, giving up under stiff and steady opposition from many sides.
Meaningful work in hospice and prison and church morphed into part-time paid ordained ministry which morphed into full-time ministry at which point my husband left with another woman – who also works full-time.
The peculiar circumstances left me with no job at all and impossible accommodation for our children. A very draining and difficult decade followed to put a life back together, which involved a great deal of very hard work indeed. During that time I was remarried, widowed, married again.
So when we ask, ‘should women be keepers at home?’ it seems to me a less simple question than it first appears. To manage the accounts and household, garden and poultry of a large farm is a different proposition from living in a small urban house equipped with labour-saving gadgets and having no garden. And what is a woman to do whose husband has walked out and left her with a large family and no means of support?
What if a woman has both an aptitude and a sense of vocation to, say, the practice of medicine, but has neither interest nor skill in domestic matters like laundry and cooking?
I believe that the strength of any civilization is founded on the quality of its home and family life. I believe that home is the place where values, faith, priorities and relational skills are taught. I believe that the home is the primary place of a person’s education. A child who grows up where there are no books is unlikely to develop a love of reading. A child growing up in a home where dull processed food from packets is served at every meal stands little chance of one day becoming a chef.
And a home is not made up of bricks and mortar only. For a home to feel like home, to offer the kind of sanctuary and nurture and support that makes it what home can be, people with home-making skills must be somewhere involved. To come home on a winter’s night to find hot food, a fire in the stove, the bed made and the washing hung out in the hours of daylight and now inside to air – this is quite different from coming home to last night’s washing up and pot noodles in front of the television.
I believe that most women are better suited to home-making than most men. Women, whether through natural aptitude or generations of tradition I do not now, manage the complex minutiae of responsibilities involved in running a household better than their menfolk, in most cases. When their wives are sick or leave them, many men rise to the occasion and work hard to keep home homely; but they rarely do it as well as women do. The bachelor establishments I have known have sometimes been clean and tidy: but they have lacked the cheerful orderliness of a family household.
In the end, I suppose, I can speak only for myself. ‘You ought to’ is rarely a helpful beginning to a sentence.
I know that the place where I want to be is my home. If I need to make money for this to be possible, I know how to be frugal, I am willing to take lodgers, I am happy to share with others to keep costs down, and I love to write books. But I don’t want to go out to work. My home is where I live. It’s the place I want to be. I don’t need holidays or trips abroad. I have no need to ‘get away’. This is where I want to be. My home and my family are my joy.
I do also enjoy having my own area of thought and life – writing, conducting funerals and retreats (for women). I love making things and thinking and reading: but I want to be at home. And if I had to go out to work I would be miserable.
However, if another woman felt the other way round – that she would be miserable stuck at home and felt desperate for a job to give meaning to her life, and felt lonely by herself at home all day and longed for the busy environment of an office/school/shop – well, I have no desire to make a woman’s home into her prison. And I think anyone who can run a farm can probably run a small country. Besides, who is to care for the many individuals who must be in nursing homes and hospitals? Men? Perhaps care work is thought suitable to women because it is menial - but is not a night care assistant looking after a floor of patients, including a number of men, in a sense ruling over them? She is in a chain of authority, but the nrse and the matron are most likely to be women too. Perhaps the Gunn Bros in their film meant that women can be given authority and responsibility but never prestige? They can have power over others, even be left in charge in situations of life and death, just so long as nobody else is going to call that important. And what kind of an idea is that? Dalits by another name.
Oh, I don’t know! What do you think?