- Feb 5, 2002
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“This destroyed household that now stands between the sexes is a wound that is suffered inescapably by both men and women.” My eyes were opened when I read these words of Wendell Berry. My wife’s suffering in a home arrangement that has shown itself more and more to be unnatural is in fact also very much my problem; indeed, a problem for our marriage.
There is something unnatural about the home that is consumptive and non-productive, and that is left almost exclusively in the care of a housewife while her husband works somewhere else (indeed, even if ‘remotely’ from home). The most obvious casualty in this form of home has been and is the wife, often overwhelmed and isolated while also stripped of many of the richer aspects of her work in the home.
Berry writes, “Thus housewifery, once a complex discipline acknowledged to be one of the bases of culture and economy, was reduced to the exercise of purchasing power.” There was and is of course still much ‘housework’ to be done, but it tends to be stripped of its more artful aspects, as seen for instance in how ‘convenience’ tends to replace the traditional standard of ‘thrift,’ which latter was “a complex standard, requiring skill, intelligence, and moral character.”
But “degenerate housewifery is indivisible from degenerate husbandry.” And Berry goes further, with this arresting assertion:
Continued below.
life-craft.org
There is something unnatural about the home that is consumptive and non-productive, and that is left almost exclusively in the care of a housewife while her husband works somewhere else (indeed, even if ‘remotely’ from home). The most obvious casualty in this form of home has been and is the wife, often overwhelmed and isolated while also stripped of many of the richer aspects of her work in the home.
Berry writes, “Thus housewifery, once a complex discipline acknowledged to be one of the bases of culture and economy, was reduced to the exercise of purchasing power.” There was and is of course still much ‘housework’ to be done, but it tends to be stripped of its more artful aspects, as seen for instance in how ‘convenience’ tends to replace the traditional standard of ‘thrift,’ which latter was “a complex standard, requiring skill, intelligence, and moral character.”
But “degenerate housewifery is indivisible from degenerate husbandry.” And Berry goes further, with this arresting assertion:
Continued below.
Husbands and Wives Need Husbandry and Housewifery - LifeCraft
“This destroyed household that now stands between the sexes is a wound that is suffered inescapably by both men and women.” My eyes were opened when I read these words of Wendell Berry. My wife’s suffering in a home arrangement that has shown itself more and more to be unnatural is in fact also...
life-craft.org
