Working Moms & The Church

My series on NFP(cross posted on RCM)
Part 1
Part 2
have got me thinking about women and our role and the Church. I understand that when we marry we are open to creating life. I understand that we are supposed to have babies and nurse them and the whole nine yards. It seems, though, that if women were to do exactly as the Church says, we would never work outside of our homes since getting pregnant every few years then having to nurse them and day care is pretty darn difficult unless the mom works for a super supportive company AND makes a lot of money.

I know more and more families where the father stays home and the mother earns the money. But if she does work outside the house more than likely she is going to have fewer children than if she stayed inside.

Many women WANT to work outside the house, not just for money but for the satisfaction gained from doing so. I realize that I DO want to return to work at some point and NOT wait 20 + years to do so when my children are out of the house. I love to teach. I love to coach. My work schedule would, of course, work around my childrens’ schedule, but I would still be working outside.

It seems that the Church allows men to have it all. They get to marry, have children AND have a satisfactory career. Whereas, the Church almost implicitly encourages women to stay home if they choose to marry and become mothers. How else would these large families happen? Pope John Paul II recognized that women are more impacted by children than men in his apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem

Parenthood – even though it belongs to both – is realized much more fully in the woman, especially in the prenatal period. It is the woman who “pays” directly for this shared generation, which literally absorbs the energies of her body and soul. It is therefore necessary that the man be fully aware that in their shared parenthood he owes a special debt to the woman. No programme of “equal rights” between women and men is valid unless it takes this fact fully into account (18).

Mulieris Dignitatem focuses mostly on women and our dignity how and why we are special. That is great. But it really leaves unanswered how women are supposed to have large families and be able to impact the world via work. PJPII states in his 1995 Letter to Women

Thank you, women who work! You are present and active in every area of life-social, economic, cultural, artistic and political. In this way you make an indispensable contribution to the growth of a culture which unites reason and feeling, to a model of life ever open to the sense of “mystery”, to the establishment of economic and political structures ever more worthy of humanity.

Many devout Catholics have been questioning me on my understanding of Humane Vitae’s limits on NFP usage. I argue, of course, the limits are left up to the discerning husband and wife , they tend to argue that it is for rare circumstances only and that, like the Church teaches, children should be the first goal of marriage. Ok. These children don’t come out of cloth. They have to be mainly produced and later nurtured by women. Let’s say the woman does have job and she has to pump. In America right now, most jobs just do not allow women to pump. My sister had to quit nursing when she returned to work. She is like many women. This means two things: 1) Her child was impacted by the lack of breast milk which we all know is crucial for good healthy development and 2) her fertility returned very fast, which means either A)more children soon, very soon or B)delaying them.

My guess is that many Western women have this same dilemma. The reality is that women who stay at home are completely at the financial mercy of their husbands. Yet we know, men die before women. And as these two ladies are stating women are NOT prepared financially for their later years. I know of many, many Catholic families where the husbands leave their wives for other women. Some of these families are quite large, where the mother has sacrificed her life for her family and she is left with an empty bag at the end of it. Even if the husband IS a good man and does respect his vows, how many women are financially prepared?

It seems to me that the Church has MAJOR assumptions. 1)That married women only want to work inside the house. 2)That pregnancy is no big deal, and what I mean by this is that the men in Church (both clergy and laity) talk of pregnancy and children as if they appear. But being pregnant is difficult, some women have it easier than others, but many have hard pregnancies. 3) Women will be the ones who stay home and care for their children.

I won’t even begin to touch on society not working with working moms. That is whole other topic. But women are working now more than ever before and the Church has to address the needs of working women and the wants of working women. As more studies are showing, women are wanting a society where they can both work and care for their children.

I would be interested to hear how many of your wives work, how this impacts your family and if you do have large families? Of the stay at home mom types, how many of you want to return to work outside the home later on? Will you wait until your children are grown? How many don’t have a desire to work outside the house?