ELISE WRITES:

I’ve been reading your blog for some time now, and I thoroughly appreciate what you write. Your blog posts are always refreshing and challenging. I wanted to ask if you would be willing to consider writing on the topic of the role of daughters within the family unit and of society as a whole. Your posts affirming the work of housewives (as in one of your recent posts) are encouraging – but as an eighteen-year-old homeschooled daughter wondering what the next chapter is in her life, I would be very interested to hear your thoughts about daughters.

I would love to someday marry and be the best wife, mother, and homemaker I can possibly be – but we’re talking about the (irreplaceable) role of the mothers, the wives here – what about daughters living at home? Is it enough to stay simply at home, being a help to mother in areas including housework, homeschooling, cooking, tending a vegetable garden, etc.? Do you think a young woman should get a job, or start a home business, so that she isn’t a “burden” on her parents?

I really think that the role of wives and mothers, with the Proverbs 31 woman as the role model, has become quite firmly established with the Christian homeschool community; but we’re still trying to figure out what post-school-age daughters are supposed to do, and how they are meant to fit into the picture! I would really love to hear your thoughts on this issue. . . if you had daughters in their late teens in today’s cultural climate (and what a hurricane of a “cultural climate” it is. . . ) what would you be advising them to do with their single years?

Once again, thank you for all of the thought and effort you put into your blog posts, it is much appreciated by many, myself included.

Laura writes:

Thank you for writing.

I’m impressed that you can speak proudly of wanting to be a wife and mother at your age. That proves your parents have done an excellent job; that there is a healthy subculture of traditionalists who are going against the grain, which is what you yourself are apparently destined to do, to go against the grain and be a radical outsider to mainstream culture; and that you are an interesting woman. For it’s one thing to secretly want nothing more than to be a good wife and mother, but it’s quite another to publicly admit that in our world. Saying so is viewed as a sign of weakness and laziness, of a lack of ambition and independence. Even though being a good wife and mother is immense work, and requires all the diligence and focus of a major career, it is considered weak to view it as anything more than a beautiful hobby. I know you realize how different you are, having been homeschooled, but it’s always important to bear this in mind, especially if you spend most of your time in this distinct Christian subculture.

For both women and men, work is the main part of our days. But of course work isn’t always paid. Implicit in what I say is the mutual understanding that much of what you will be doing is work but isn’t viewed as work because it is unpaid.

I don’t think there ever will be one definitive answer to the question of what daughters should do at your age, given the difference in temperament and inclinations of young women. The important thing is for you to establish some adult independence, enjoy your girlhood and cultivate diligence. Though you may always be a woman devoted to family, to your husband, to your children, to your loving parents, you are still an individual. You will be united with others, but never fused with them.  Traditional women shape their own destinies as much as the most independent of career women. In fact, women who are financially independent often possess no genuine independence at all, but are creatures of the herd who never think for themselves.

Traditional women can pursue their interests, talents and abilities with focus and discipline, but not with masculine focus and discipline. When they earn money, and indeed it may be absolutely essential that they earn money at some points in their lives, it doesn’t take over and override their main goals and energies. You should pursue your own interests and skills before marriage without ever losing sight of your objectives and while doing the hard work of searching for a man and of being affectionate and pleasing to him. It’s amazing how many women today arrive at marriage’s door in a state of exhaustion. They are emotional and spiritually wrecked by casual sex and a culture that demands they think and act like men. They are too depleted by constant self-assertion to love their husbands. They are too tired to have many children. They approach their children with excessive sentimentality out of exhaustion.

While it is good to help your parents around the house, you should develop a distinct identity and begin to separate from them without ever jeopardizing the deep ties that bind you. You live in the midst of others and yet inhabit your own island. I don’t mean an island of loneliness, although some degree of loneliness is inescapably part of the human condition, but a preserve of independence. To some degree, we stand apart from others in all of life’s trials and pleasures.

Whether you direct your interests and abilities toward paid work at this point depends on what these interests and abilities are, whether you need more education to pursue them or could better cultivate them through volunteer work or unpaid effort. Nevertheless, you should view your talents as potentially marketable, even if they are domestic talents, such as sewing, cooking and gardening. You may wish to make some money now, you will make good use of it later, but obviously some work is going to be closed to you completely. Most careers require at least six years or so, plus college, of concerted effort to just get established. By then, the best years for pregnancy and childbirth are gone. Running a small business, teaching homeschooled children, working in an office or at a job that doesn’t require this total commitment, acquiring learning in some field of the sciences or humanities that you may be able to teach or write about someday, pursuing an art or craft, these are all good possibilities. With the Internet, it’s possible to get a decent college education from home if that’s what you want.

There are some young women who are lazy by temperament, who have virtually no interests other than in clothes and men, and for them work before marriage, if they are not going to college or to further their education, is an especially good idea. If I had a daughter who needed to be continually prodded to do anything with diligence, I would want her to gain some discipline. There are other women who are always motivated and have the tendency to work too hard at things. They need to strain to achieve balance and learn to not become consumed with worry about the future. A small minority of young women have a true vocation to remain unmarried and celibate, and for them, a career or committed work life is good. The most important thing for you given your desire to be a wife and mother is your state of mind, that you are intent on not acting or thinking like a man, that you are always conscious of what motherhood will demand, and that you reject casual sex.

This means you are going to be a very different woman, a radical and dissident.

Don’t expect people to understand you. I know you already realize that. They won’t understand you even though the road you are traveling has been traveled by the majority of women before you. You are a radical and at the same time perfectly normal and healthy. That’s strange, isn’t it? Remember all that you do will multiply as you raise your children and as your children raise their own children. That’s how a revolution is born.

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