Proverbs 31 Career Mum

The Proverbs 31 woman is rightly held up as an ideal for Christian women. When her roles and responsibilities are correctly understood this can be a great help. However, it is disturbing when people choose to use the Proverbs 31 woman to argue for the virtue or acceptability of being a Mum who is primarily focused on a career and thus leaves the training of her children and the running of her household to others. This view of Scripture comes from being saturated in a feminist culture, not from the text itself. We need to be very careful not to twist the Bible to fit with current feminist thinking.

I have heard women say things like "The Proverbs 31 woman is the equivilant of a modern real estate agent". I am sorry, but since when does managing your finances well so you can buy some property make you a real estate agent? It doesn't, of course. It makes you a person who bought a field. Likewise, the fact that the Proverbs 31 woman made clothing to sell to merchants does not make her the equivilant of a full time factory worker. It makes her a woman with a small business, which does not even take away from her home responsibilities much.

Kimi Harris wrote down some excellent thoughts on the Proverbs 31 woman some months ago in Knitting and Proverbs 31

some people have taken the Prov. 31 woman and made her an example of the modern career woman. It should be noted that she did most of her work at home with her family around her and that we are told in the New Testament to be “workers at home” (Titus 2). I don’t think this is a Biblical mandate for a mothers having careers and leaving most of the child raising and home keeping to others.

The principle is having busy hands serving your family. That can and even should look different depending on your family’s needs and your own skills and inclinations. Some ways of serving may bring in income, other ways may save money, other ways will just be simply meeting the daily needs of a family.

In reading Proverbs 31, it is legitimate to conclude that it is acceptable and sometimes wise for married women and mothers to engage in business. As Carolyn Mahaney wrote in Feminine Appeal, God does not confine women solely to unpaid work in the home: "Scripture provides examples of godly women who worked in other settings and earned extra income, but never to the neglect of their families and homes." Scripture places importance on the role of a married woman in caring for her family and home, above any income producing activities she may want to pursue. I am not at all saying that women should never pursue paid employment. I am saying that home and children are to be the priority for a married woman. In considering my own career options, even as a single woman, I want to take this into account. I am thinking of pursuing a Diploma of Education, so that I can earn more money per hour. Then, if I did need to work when I had children I could earn more with less time away from home. (This would also be good due to my chronic back pain).

I believe that most attempts to twist the Proverbs 31 woman into a full time career Mum are rooted in a lack of vision for what God intended when he instituted the roles of men and women. God did not intend our roles to be shackles around us. Read Psalm 128. This is a beautiful picture of the fulfilled family - a father who works hard and enjoys the work of his hand, a fruitful and home-centered wife, and the blessing of children. God intends these pictures to inspire and uplift us. This is a picture of the good life. Not dual careers and 1.7 children appropriately cared for by professsionals so we can get on with earning more money to buy more things. Instead, hard work in our respective roles, contentment with the simple things of life, joy in one another and in the children God gives us.

Susan has written a great post on the roles of men and women, focusing on the fact that without the joy and perspective of the gospel, the roles of men and women are ugly and twisted. Many people have only seen such ugly examples, so naturally they rebel and look for ways to reinterpret Biblical teaching on these topics. Unfortunately, in doing so they forsake the joy they could have had in a gospel-centered embrace of God's ways.

As Susan says:

One cannot talk about headship rightly apart from the gospel. Without the gospel, headship is an ugly truth; with the gospel, headship is a glorious picture. To properly understand Ephesians 5, one must first read Ephesians 1-4. After reading Ephesians 1-4 and then reading Ephesians 5, including the verses that charge husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the church, I cannot feel cheated, torn down, or demeaned by my call to submission. I am to aid my husband as the church aids Christ. What a beautiful mission! My husband, though, is to act as a type of Christ to me and our household! Wow.

What a beautiful role given to the man, but what a heavy responsibility, and a responsibility I would not snatch from any man. That is obligation; that is a set of very big shoes to fill. Unless a man can speak of women's roles in light of the gospel and his own call to serve his wife as Christ, than I must stand with the feminists and find his writings to be demeaning and void of any real esteem for women. The husband and wife roles of Ephesians 5 are beautiful because they are complimentary. Either, without the other, is ugly; together they are a beautiful picture.

You can read the rest of Susan's post here.

I've wanted to write about this topic for months. However, I avoided it because it is an emotive one for me and I don't want to rant. I hope this has been inspiring rather than overly harsh, and that it turns you to God's word to evaluate current trends and feminist-influenced philosophies in the church.