Women, Work, And The Bible

Abigail Adams was the first vice president’s wife of the United States, as well as the first to become first lady (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ll start out by acknowledging this will make some people mad.  I will get hateful comments from people who hide behind anonymous email addresses, and that is okay with me.  If others get to espouse their beliefs, then so can I.

Does the bible say women shouldn’t work outside the home? No it doesn’t.  That is the plainest and simplest way I can put it.

This teaching comes from one verse (Titus 2:5) and is traced back to the 40′s and 50′s of the 20th century when the church started to come up with ways to stop the women’s movement. Their argument is that women only started working outside the home because of the debt families were incurring to buy more stuff.  That is categorically untrue.  Women have worked outside the home since biblical times.  In agrarian societies it was just a fact that women worked, and kids did too.  Even in the United States women have worked outside the home since people started landing on the shores.  Is that a good argument for women working outside the home? no, but it is an argument against this being a new phenomenon.

Being young and liberal (40 and married 18 years) I have seen this from both sides of the argument. I have a good friend whose wife went to college to get what she called an MRS degree.  She wanted to be a mother and homemaker, and she is.  She has fulfilled what she saw as her Godly argument and has paid a price for it from friends and church members who tried to get her to go to work.  When I married my wife WE understood that SHE made more money than I did.  I had no problem with that and it still holds true today.  I work from home and home school our kids, she is a nurse and works at a Dr’s office.

Do men and women have different roles in the marriage and family? Of course, 1st peter 3 gives us a glimpse of the family and some roles we have.  But nowhere does it say the wife should not work.  It just says that the wife should put her husband first, and the husband should put his wife first (CEV).  If we begin with love for each other than we will understand what  we need.  We can’t put our self-worth in having a job or not.  We also can’t put our self-worth in the hands of someone else.  God is where we should get our self-worth from, and He will guide us to a job or not.

My wife’s favorite passage of scripture, that she says people always fail to read when making the argument that women should stay at home and not work, is Proverbs 31.  It talks about a woman who can buy and sell land, she make clothing to sell to shop owners, and she still takes care of her family.  Does that sound like women you know today.  Women have worked outside the house forever so don’t let what people think the bible says stop you from being what God called you to be.  Even if that means a stay at home mom.