I don't often remember the details of when I read a section of a book for the first time - but I remember this one. "Joyfully At Home" by Jasmine Baucham had been a bit of a slog for me to read through - but I had decided that I was going to finish it. It was a cold, snowy winter night and I decided to read it curled up in bed next to my husband. (I am lucky to have a husband who can sleep with my bedside lamp on.) I plowed through Chapter 13 - and that chapter had enough crazy attempts to ignore the financial issues that a SAHD will face if she's unmarried when her parents died that I decided reviewing the book was worth it. I started reading Chapter 14 and was a bit confused as to why Jasmine was still attempting to refute the obvious idea that women may well need to support themselves at some point when we hit this lovely quote:
I burst out laughing so hard that I woke my husband up. I gave him a quick recap of Jasmine's living situation at the time and read him that quote. We both agreed that Jasmine was living in a warped fantasy world....and he went back to sleep.
Reality check time:
Jasmine Baucham wrote this as a fully fledged adult who had a high school diploma and was 19 years old. The local church would certainly be in a place to help her - but expecting a congregation to sacrifice to support Jasmine as a SAHD until she marries is financially unsustainable. Sarah Mally, for example, is 41 years old and Sarah Maxwell is 38 - are congregations supposed to have line items in the budget for several hundred dollars a week to go their mothers to support able-bodied adult women in upper-middle class comfort until they marry? How would that even work?
Instead, let's think about what help in this situation would have looked like historically. Jasmine, after all, has stated several times that she wants a return to a Biblically mandated society.
Biblically speaking, Jasmine would have been married off quickly to an available man. Forget all of the CP/QF obsession with the eligible man who shares the right spiritual beliefs and is ready to be a priest, prophet, protector and provider - the correct man for her to marry would be a man who was looking for a wife and able to remove her from the church charity rolls. That's a very different man than the imaginary husband who will be able to keep her and their children in upper middle class comfort without Jasmine working. The real husband of orphaned Jasmine might well be working two jobs to keep the two of them in a manufactured home in a trailer park. Adding kids means Jasmine starts working night shifts at the local grocery store to feed everyone.
Practically, a church would expect modern Jasmine to go to work. Most families in an average CP/QF congregation have daughters who work outside the home as nannies or mother's helpers. Families who are financially struggling may well have daughters working in food service or retail - and Jasmine would likely end up working there until she completed her college education. Voddie Baucham may well have enjoyed being able to show off that he made enough money to keep his unmarried daughter out of the workforce in middle-class comfort - but churches can't be expected to continue that conceit for deceased members.
I was hoping young Jasmine would bring up 1 Timothy because 1 Timothy 5 shows that the early Church was already struggling to provide for all of the needs of widows and orphans - and placed some pretty hard and fast limits on charity. 1 Timothy 5:3-5 starts by stating categorically that the grown children and grandchildren of widows are responsible for supporting widows in their families. The next two verses lay out that good widows pray a lot and bad widows party a lot. 1 Timothy 8 in the context of the chapter is not directed husbands or fathers; instead, it is aimed at the children and grandchildren of elderly widows. Historically, that emphasis on children and grandchildren makes sense since living offspring were the only form of insurance that women had after their husband died.
1 Timothy 5:9-15 is far more pertinent to rebutting Ms. Baucham's arguments. A widow should be supported by the church if she fits all of the following criteria:
- Is over 60 years of age
- Has been faithful to her husband
- Is known for good deeds
With the emphasis on family caring for widows in the earlier section of 1 Timothy 5, we can add a 4th requirement:
4. Has no surviving children or grandchildren for financial support
4. Has no surviving children or grandchildren for financial support
Now, Jasmine was 19 when she was writing this book and 20 when it was published. She's also mentioned on her blog that she was conceived in the first month after her parents married. Since a previous chapter mentioned that her mom was 23 when she got married, we can estimate that her mom was 23 years at marriage + 1 year of pregnancy + 20 years of raising Jasmine = 44 years old at the time of publishing.
This means that if Voddie Baucham had passed away unexpectedly neither his widow nor his daughter would have been old enough to be supported by the church.
What would have happened instead? 1 Timothy 5:14 states that younger widows should remarry. Remember, marriage was the primary way of organizing labor and family connections in the ancient world. Telling a young widow to remarry was the same thing as saying that she needed to remain in the workforce until she was older.
Long story short: the Biblical and modern answers to the question of "what will happen if your dad dies?" are the same: you need to be willing and able to be employable.
This means that if Voddie Baucham had passed away unexpectedly neither his widow nor his daughter would have been old enough to be supported by the church.
What would have happened instead? 1 Timothy 5:14 states that younger widows should remarry. Remember, marriage was the primary way of organizing labor and family connections in the ancient world. Telling a young widow to remarry was the same thing as saying that she needed to remain in the workforce until she was older.
Long story short: the Biblical and modern answers to the question of "what will happen if your dad dies?" are the same: you need to be willing and able to be employable.
I hope someone with a broader historical knowledge can comment here, but it seems that the QF/SAHD movement has confused the Biblical idea of women-are-primarily-responsible-for-domestic-duties with women-are-not-expected-to-contribute-to-their-own-livelihood -- those are two very different things. Historical examples, Biblical or otherwise, in which women were not obligated to work towards their own support, are typically examples of class and wealth. In my understanding, women who were not independently wealthy worked as domestic servants or alongside their husbands in agrarian or craftsmen pursuits, childcare and household chores were often shared in extended communal living, and the burden of sustaining the family's existence was one that everybody shared and contributed to. While the Bible does encourage women to take primary domestic responsibility, I'm not aware of there being prohibitions on women being financial productive; if anything, Proverbs 31 seems to indicate the opposite. This idea that a woman holding a financially productive job is a disgrace and that women are only obligated to do household chores, hobbies, and perhaps some volunteer work while someone else sustains their needs, seems to be an overblown 1950s fantasy that they're trying to force onto real life. I simply cannot imagine demanding that other families sacrifice their time and needs so that I and my able-bodied mother can continue to sit around sipping tea, reading books, and taking turns at sweeping the floor occasionally. The level of entitlement is asinine.
ReplyDeleteHistorically not only women but even young children would be expected to bring in money. Yes when you had 6 children housework would take up a lot of your time but you also needed a lot of income. So if your mother could look after the kids you might work outside the house. If not you took in washing from widowers/bachelors, or made pins, or did any of a million other exhausting, unhealthy things that would help put food on the table. During the industrial revolution you might put your youngest kid to bed with a sleeping drought while you and your 6-year-old worked 14 hours in the factory.
DeleteI believe that by the 1950's nursing and teaching young children were majority women occupations. My great aunt who hated children and never married became a teacher because those were the only two professions available that provided enough for an independent living.
DeleteI guess her response would be that young children should be taught at home but that doesn't solve the problem of all the nurses we still need. Male nurses are probably more common than in the 50's but we definitely don't have enough to keep the healthcare system from callapsing if everyone started loving by QF/CP rules.
DeleteGrumpyhedgehog, you are dead on. The devaluation of women's work is directly tied to the rising importance of cash and wage labor. Through most of history, male and female labor was paid in kind rather than in cash. That made it easier to visualize the sheer amount of work being done by both parties. In the US in the 1600's and 1700, families were moving closer to men as breadwinners - but only because men were being paid in cash while women continued to work in kind. Women had large networks of 'informal' trade where one woman would specialize in laundry or spinning or growing herbs and the women would trade labor or goods for labor or goods from other women. Married women ran shops out of their homes when their husbands worked as sailors or traders. As soon as income variance allowed it, richer families hired poorer women and unmarried girls to do housework for them. This continued through the industrial revolution - where the main change was that factories ended up providing an additional income stream to immigrant men, women and children.
DeleteThe only time where a large portion of society fit the male-breadwinner with dependent wife time was during the 1950's - and only because of the unprecedented amount of money available to white male veterans through various GI Bills and in various non-skilled trades due to the fact that the other centers of industrialization in Europe and Japan had been destroyed during WWII. Veterans of color and female veterans were left out of the largess of the GI bill - but there were enough factory jobs that many men of color also benefited from that stream of income while their wives continued to work.
Minda - my understanding from older teachers was that Catholic women in the 1940-1960's had five job options - wife/mother, teacher, nurse, secretary, or sister/nun. The teacher I had in high school chose teaching because she didn't like blood, didn't want to spend her life typing and hoped to get married. (She did get married.) I had a college professor who was a sister who told us point-blank that she became a sister because she wanted to go to college in chemistry and that was the only way she could do that.
DeleteCP/QF enforcers believe that all the underemployed men they know will easily be able to find a job if women left the workforce. The problem is that the reason many of those men struggle to find work is that they don't have the right degrees - and having all the female teachers and nurses quit en masse won't suddenly give those men the licences they need to get those jobs.
Wow. For a number of the chapters, I thought Baucham seemed a little bit more grounded/sane than the Botkin Sisters. This one... not so much.
ReplyDeleteThese two chapters feel to me like a very inexperienced person trying to ad lib their way through a debate. I do think Jasmine Baucham was more grounded in general than the Botkins due simply to the fact that the Bauchams dealt with plenty of racism in VF. I also think her mom, Bridget Baucham, either has a more feisty personality than Victoria Botkin or didn't buy into family cult as strongly which kept her kids more grounded in reality.
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ReplyDeleteWow..one of the biggest wake-up calls ever to the QF world. If they paid any attention to what the Bible actually says, that is. Not that the likes of Doug Phillips or his church would care to keep families in middle-class comfort anyway; they'd likely do minimal assistance and pay a lot of lip service.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how many CP/QF churches could support anyone in middle-class levels. Not many, IMHO. The combination of huge families, scoffing at education/working for others, and requiring families to be single-income pretty much puts most families at a financial breaking point with a living husband. If he dies, I don't know that the rest of the congregation could afford to sacrifice even a few dollars per family to support the family. That kept going through my mind when I was writing the post: Young Jasmine is expecting families to literally go without badly needed essentials like clothes or home schooling materials or even food so that she can continue not working until she marries. I suspect Adult Jasmine can hear the crazy now - but she certainly didn't at age 19.
DeleteHer "what if the church took care of us" response is as useful as her saying "what if food was free and we didn't have to pay for it?"
ReplyDeleteI mean... how is it helpful to just imagine up something that would serve your interests but is in no way in your power to control?
I mean... again... who edited this book???
For me, I chalked it up to the kind of deep metaphysical and philosophical conversations that seem to be genetically predetermined to be fascinating in your late teens and early twenties. Which makes sense - you are reeling with the power of using your adult skills for the first time and you want to make the world better.
DeleteThe issue is that at that age, the idealism is because you have so little life experience that you don't recognize the real world issues that apply. Like how absurd it is to ask a congregation that includes people on fixed incomes, huge families and families struggling to pay for SAHDs to live at home until they are married if their father dies.
Oh, Shelflife, no CP/QF book seems to have editors. Everyone but the Botkin family seems to use proofreaders - but not editors....