Leon de Smet

WHEN I was growing up there was a television soap opera (I can’t remember the name) that I watched occasionally. One of its characters was a middle class housewife who always appeared in scenes in her kitchen.

Her kitchen was small and modest by today’s standards, especially by Hollywood’s standards, and she was not glamorous, unlike many soap opera characters today. I remember her wearing plaid blouses and skirts, and very little make-up. Everything in her kitchen was neat and orderly and she was never in a rush. During the course of the show, someone — a neighbor, friend or relative — would drop by to visit her. She always had the time to stop what she was doing and talk.

She would usually sit down at her table with the visitor and they would discuss some interpersonal drama, this being a soap opera. As they were talking, her face would register all the appropriate emotions, but mostly empathy and concern. I can’t recall who the actress was, but she was very good at it. This housewife was never angry or depressed or hysterical. Her tranquil empathy seemed a sort of filter through which the conflicts of this fictitious community beyond her kitchen passed. Nothing was truly solved in her kitchen, but worries and disappointments were cleansed by her attentive listening and wise suggestions.

The interesting thing about this character is that she was actually based in reality. There were middle class women like her. There were middle class women who, by today’s standards, had nothing to do. Of course, they had plenty to do running their homes and raising their children, but by the standards of today, they had nothing to do. And sometimes they did “nothing.”

I remember a neighbor’s mother who would sit down on a weekday afternoon at her kitchen table with a cigarette, a cup of tea, and a book. She would placidly read for an hour or so. In the middle of the day! Even though she and her husband had little in the way of possessions or money, she had for these few hours the leisure of an aristocrat. She was the mother who had the leisure to tell me at one point that I was not being nice to her daughter. She was right. I have often thought of the lesson she imparted so calmly and with wisdom, not accusing, but teaching. Only she had the time to participate in the morality tale of my life. Only she could see that this small soap opera that we were starring in was truly serious. She, after all, had nothing else to do.

When feminists attacked the worth of the housewife, it was the easiest thing in the world to do. After all, everyone knew imperfect housewives. Housewives were everywhere. That meant there were — human nature being what it is — plenty of bad housewives everywhere too. One could see all too clearly the imperfect manifestations of a perfect institution: the role of the homemaker.

Now if social reformers had advised doing away with, say, soldiers because there were so many imperfect and unfulfilled soldiers, which is true, people would have resisted. Or if they had said we should do away with doctors because there are so many discourteous, incompetent or unfulfilled doctors, people would have resisted. That’s because the need for soldiers and doctors lies so clearly in the material realm. They protect physical existence. The housewife works not only in the most practical tasks of survival, but in the universe of non-things, such as common sense and conscience. The housewife’s job is partly contemplative. Materialists not only don’t value that, they positively can’t see it.

The most significant thing about the woman in that television show, the woman at her kitchen table, was that she was not in a rush. It’s amazing that those placid pools of domestic nothingness ever existed in the savagely competitive jungles of modern society. She was not in a rush, and because of that, she could participate in the soap operas of the people she knew with tranquility and hard-won wisdom. The very nothingness of her days was the necessary condition of her good sense, the sort of sense desperately needed to keep all things sane.

— Comments —

Kathy G. writes:

I recall those days, when I was very young, a preschooler. My mom would clean the house, make the beds, laundry, etc., and then she would read, mysteries, biographies and the like, but it seemed like the most wonderful activity to me. I couldn’t wait to learn to read like her. I recall the mornings when she visited with neighbor ladies, also housewives, talking over coffee. I witnessed it as a child. Things changed and years later my mom was a single mother working to support us and we were alone much of the time. Not a good thing for kids. And not a good thing for women. They have been pulled from their natural milieu and purpose, told to be men. Women make poor men. After my generation dies off, no one will understand that kind of ordered, sane life, or that it ever existed. People do not understand what we have lost, how we have fallen, and the reality of the situation we live in.

May God have mercy on us.

FancyFree writes:

In those days there could be a contemplative aspect to the housewife. At least I saw that in my mother. She had time for contemplation.

I always considered my wish to enter the convent to being my destiny, because I had perceived it as something I wanted—no, was destined—to do from the age of five. I went off to a convent at 13-going-on-14, in the days (1964) just before Vatican II. Now I can see that my mother’s own capacity to contemplate the religious aspects of Catholic life surely influenced me.

The religious order I went into was dedicated to the active life—teaching and nursing—but there were contemplative religious orders too. Contemplative nuns were highly valued in the Church then, even though they “did nothing”—but they prayed, and bishops were eager to have contemplative orders in their dioceses because of the great graces the nuns generated.

The housewives of that time surely generated a high level of grace too. The loss of the presence of women in the home—women who “did nothing”—has rippled into apostasy in the lives of their children and grandchildren.

Whom or what do we blame? The changes that have wrought civilizational downturn have been generated in civil society, but it’s said that as the Church goes, so goes the world. Do we blame Vatican II? Well, yes, but the rot that highjacked that council was long in coming, and it echoed into society eventually, getting women out of the home and into the workforce so they could become consumers and feminists.

Consumerist and feminist women no longer spend (as much) time in the house, nor is there any value placed on the contemplation that might have occurred there. Nor grace, that influenced the moral raising of the children that such a “do-nothing” mother would have time for.

Only grace can counter decline. But grace accumulates only when humans beg and work for it. By “doing nothing” but having time to contemplate. Getting women to be in the home again—and raising their children—by itself would be an improvement, but there has to be a conversion. It could occur among individual women returning to “tradition”. But grace being sought at the highest levels—both in the Church and in society—needs to occur.

There still are those of us alive who recall a time when our mothers were in the home supposedly “doing nothing”. We need to be on our knees praying for the Church and the world to convert and bring back traditions and conditions that actually mirror the Divine.

Laura writes:

The loss of the presence of women in the home—women who “did nothing”—has rippled into apostasy in the lives of their children and grandchildren.”

It’s an incalculable loss. It’s so big most people can’t see it. Imagine a foggy mist of industrial vapors that settles over a town and after a while, no one notices it anymore. It creeps into every opening and dirties everything.

Worship was the foundation of it all.

“The Holy Fathers who have written upon the subject of Antichrist, and of these prophecies of Daniel, without a single exception, as far as I know, and they are the Fathers both of the East and of the West, the Greek and the Latin Church — all of them unanimously — say that in the latter end of the world, during the reign of Antichrist, the Holy Sacrifice of the altar will cease.” (Henry Cardinal Manning, The Present Crisis of the Holy See Tested by Prophecy, 1861).

We must humbly accept this chastisement. We must love what we had and what we still have.

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