Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: brownp@hatteras.cs.unc.edu (Peter Brown) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Should a wife work outside the home? Message-ID: Date: 25 Oct 90 06:18:48 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University Of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Lines: 52 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article gross@dg-rtp.dg.com (Gene Gross) writes: > >Is there Biblical reason to believe that a woman should not work outside >the home? If you believe so, please provide Biblical support by way of >references so that others of us can check them out. And the same for >those who don't believe so. I have never entirely understood the idea that it is un-Biblical for a woman to work outside the home. (Perhaps I haven't pushed my fundamentalist friends hard enough :-).) The separation of work into "inside the home" and "outside the home" is largely a product of the Industrial Revolution. In the agrarian societies I've seen (I'm an ex-Peace Corps volunteer, so this isn't just theoretical), the location of work is determined by what needs to be done; artisans, for example, may work in their homes, and domestic chores often take people quite far from home (e.g., to get water). We certainly see these same things in the Bible. I have a much easier time understanding the folks who say that there is "men's work" and "women's work", and men should do men's work and women should do women's work. To some extent I can agree with this (to cite a ridiculous extreme, breast-feeding is obviously women's work, because men just don't have the equipment) but I'm not sure how scriptural it is to draw the line in the economic terms that seem to be the usual ones proposed. The perfect wife of Proverbs 31 is clearly playing an economic role apart from her husband; she buys land and plants it (31:16) and has profitable merchandise (31:18). Her husband's economic contribution to the family is not mentioned, so we can't draw any conclusions (from this passage, at least) on who was the primary provider. We do certainly see women playing independent economic roles in the New Testament also (e.g., Lydia, the seller of purple goods in Acts 16:14), although there is not the level of specific approval that we see in Proverbs. It seems to me that the division of economic labor was not of tremendous concern to Biblical writers, which leads me to wonder how much importance we should be attaching to it as a matter of faith. Within a family, it's obviously important in practical terms, and we are clearly called not to advance our careers at the cost of neglecting our families (I see that as following directly from the call to husbands in Ephesians 5, for example; since I am a husband, that's the passage that hits closest to the bone for me). I do not see any hard-and-fast rules laid down anywhere in the Bible for the relative economic roles of husband and wife, however. Other folks may see more than I, of course. Peace, --Peter brownp@cs.unc.edu ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ "What the Truth has spoken, that for truth I hold." - St. Thomas Aquinas UNC couldn't possibly hold these opinions; it's a secular university.