The ongoing discussion under Elisabeth’s post on Harvard Stay-at-home-moms has taken an interesting turn. The recent comments parsing the meaning of the Proclamation on the Family reminded me of a post I wrote just over a year ago. Here it is. The original post, found at the unpronouncable blog, here, also had lots of worthwhile comments.
From the Proclamation on the Family: “By divine design, fathers are to preside over their famlies in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help ach other as equal partners.”
The proclamation sets up an interesting symmetry here that, if examined, is likely to cause difficulty for some of the more conservative-minded members of the church.
The problem is illustrated in the words of a speaker I heard last week. He stated that in marriage, the woman is primarily responsible for the nurture and care of the children. Of course he included the obvious and necessary caveats that the righteous husband will share this burden, working alongside his wife to care for the brood. He then stated that the man is primarily responsible for providing life’s necessities, providing security and tangible goods. His next statement poses the problem: “and the wife is not to help the husband in carrying out his duties. The man must provide for the family, so the wife can focus on caring for their emotional needs.”
The asymmetry of these comments is glaring. But in a less explicit way, I suppose I’d always bought into the same reasonining without examining it. Everyone knows the basic roles set up for the sexes in the Proclamation. And then we read the final sentence, where both partners ought to help equally, sharing in each others’ burdens. What did you think that sentence meant? I admit my mind just converted it automatically into the normal P.C. boilerplate, meant to make sure no men out there take the express gender roles as an excuse to get out of changing diapers and wiping down high chairs.
But it doesn’t say men should help their wives and wives shouldn’t help their husbands. To the contrary, whatever level of help the proclamation dictates men should give their wives in their capacities as mothers, it dictates the same level of help be given by wives to their husbands in their role as provider.
We should ask two questions. First, what do we, the church, the ward, the individual, think the statement about helping means? Second, what does it really mean? My answers to those two questions are different. I think most of us think it means that men need to help out around the house. But what seems more probable from a plain reading of the text is that spouses should help each other in their duties. So just as the man isn’t walled off from assisting in the home, it seems that the Proclamation lends credence to the claim, held in disdain by many in the church, that women ought not be walled off from assisting in the financial and physical provisioning of the family.
How can women ‘help’ their husbands provide for their families? We don’t really think this just means that they ought to clip coupons and darn socks, do we? Can’t the Proclamation be read as an official statement of the church giving at least tacit acknowledgement, and at most authoritative encouragement, to mothers being gainfully employed? To many readers this is a non-controversial point, but I suspect that to the bulk of the conservative Church base, that would be a hard pill to swallow.
Have I misread?