Planet Bahá'í

O people of Baha! It is incumbent upon each one of you to engage in some occupation -- such as a craft, a trade or the like. We have exalted your engagement in such work to the rank of worship of the one true God. Reflect, O people, on the grace and blessings of your Lord, and yield Him thanks at eventide and dawn.  Waste not your hours in idleness and sloth, but occupy yourselves with what will profit you and others. Thus hath it been decreed in this Tablet from whose horizon hath shone the day-star of wisdom and utterance. The most despised of men in the sight of God are they who sit and beg. Hold ye fast unto the cord of means and place your trust in God, the Provider of all means.

(Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas, ¶ 33, p. 29)

In response to a question concerning whether Bahá'u'lláh's injunction requires a wife and mother, as well as her husband, to work for a livelihood, the Universal House of Justice has explained that Bahá'u'lláh's directive is for the friends to be engaged in an occupation which will profit themselves and others, and that homemaking is a highly honourable and responsible work of fundamental importance to society.

(Kitáb-i-Aqdas, note #56, on ¶ 33, p. 192; from a letter of the Universal House of Justice dated 16 June 1982.)

Recently I've been reading Prophet's Daughter, the biography of Bahíyyih Khánum by Janet Khan.  Despite all the drama and spiritual significance of her life, the passages that have made an indelible impression upon me have been related to the most basic of human occupations.  Ms. Khan quotes from Ella Cooper's description of Bahíyyih Khánum's daily round of work:

One day we caught a glimpse of her in the kitchen seated on a low stool, her firm, capable hands busy with a large lamb that had just been brought in from the market.  Quickly dividing it, she directed which part was to be made into broth, which part served for the evening meal, which part kept for the morrow, and which sent to those poor or incapacitated friends who are daily supplied from 'Abdu'l-Bahá's table.  On the shelves were huge pans holding rice soaking in clean water to be ready for the delicious pilau (a famous Persian dish), and there were many other visible evidences of the hours of preparation necessary to provide for the material welfare of the visitors.

It was then we learned of her practical efficiency.  The enormous amount of work attendant upon such entertaining with only the crudest and most primitive facilities, must be seen to be appreciated.

(Ella Gordon Cooper, "Bahíyyih Khánum—An Appreciation", Star of the West 23, no. 7 [1932]: 202; quoted in Janet Khan, Prophet's Daughter, pp. 91-2)

Another quote, from Mary Hanford Ford, makes another, equally telling, observation:

The ladies of the family are admirable housewives.  They make all their own simple wearing apparel, by the aid of a sewing machine from the western world. ...They typify the modern saint, the conception of whom obliges us to revolutionize our entire spiritual cosmogony.  A fashionable woman of the western world, as helpless as are some of these artificial dames, and so eager for spiritual culture, was caught in the gentle household without a trunk, and so handsomely garbed that she felt disgraced in the presence of the lovely simplicity that reigns there.  The Greatest Holy Leaf thereupon made her a print dress with her own beautiful hands, which was a model for grace and adjustment.  The western woman is still puzzling perhaps over the problem of how such profound spirituality can be associated with such excellent practical skill and sense, but in reality they are always found side by side.

(Mary Hanford Ford, Oriental Rose, pp. 162-3; quoted in Janet Khan, Prophet's Daughter, p. 92)

Suddenly I found myself thinking of Bahíyihh Khánum not in the exalted terms of, say, the Virgin Mary, but in terms of two of the women I most admire—my Grandma Kettler and Dale's Grandma Lehman.  Both of them were farmer's wives, used to making do with sometimes very little, hardworking, thrifty of time and resources but somehow simultaneously indescribably generous with both.

I hope that the woman for whom Bahíyyih Khánum made the dress cherished it.  I hope she did with it what I've done with a quilt made by Grandma Kettler and her mother, Great-Grandma Bauer:  used it until it was reduced to rags, then kept the rags.

In the quote heading this article, the Universal House of Justice rightly elevates homemaking to its proper position as real work worthy of acceptance as such.  What can we learn from this in the modern West where, as Carol Flinders perceptively remarks in the introduction to The New Laurel's Kitchen cookbook, "From every quarter the message comes:  housework is essentially demeaning, unmanly if you're a man, exploitive if you're a woman or child." (Carol Flinders, "The Work at Hand", The New Laurel's Kitchen, p. 23).  How can we gain, or regain, a healthy respect for homemaking?  Is it gone entirely?

To answer this we must first examine the course that homemaking has traveled in the West.  For the greater part of European history, homemaking and housework have been the province of "lower-class" women.  The class distinctions prevalent in the Old World meant that the farther up the social scale a woman lived, the less work she actually did—household chores were farmed out to an army of servants:  cooks, maids, nannies, governesses, and the like.  "Housekeeper" was a paid position; the one who held it was responsible to the lady of the house, who by the time of Queen Victoria had very little indeed to do beside approving menus, reviewing accounts, visiting socially acceptable people, and occasionally taking on a charity or two.  Even the one skill that most women still possessed—sewing and the other needle arts—was rendered somewhat useless by the vast number of      professional dressmakers and tailors who catered to the wealthy.  Further down the social scale, women performed most of the domestic work, but many middling households still employed one or two servants on a regular or semi-regular basis for heavy work such as washing clothes and scrubbing floors.  Occupying the lowest rungs of the social ladder were women with few or no marketable skills, who, if not actually forced into a life of petty crime, found scant employment in workhouses and factories.  (Since the rise of garment workers' unions to combat sweatshops, the neverending search for cheap labor has simply outsourced this kind of work.)

That's the short version, and of course there are many omissions, but as laborsaving appliances replaced human beings throughout the twentieth century and the standard of living rose across the board for most urban westerners, increasingly the role of the "housewife" or "homemaker", slouched toward the paradigm of the idle rich, giving rise to the 1950s cliché of the woman in pearls, on her hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor.  Many social forces contributed to this sort of schizoid image—the ending of two disastrous wars and the urge to return to normalcy, the retreat of women from the workplace, altered conceptions of the role of children and youth, the rise and ready availability of new technologies designed to lighten the burden of housework (washer, dryer, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, synthetic fabrics requiring less care, etc.). As machines replaced servants, homemakers become solely responsible for the burden of upkeep.  But the nature of the work being done had changed as well:  no longer did a woman produce much of her family's food and clothing (to say nothing of soap, linens, and the like); the market economy had by and large replaced the myriad tasks of keeping a household running with the supermarket and shopping mall.  Homemaking now shifted focus to cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children.  As women's contribution to the household economy shrank, it was simultaneously devalued, and another cliché arose:  the woman in front of the TV, watching soap operas and eating chocolates.  Like her Victorian counterpart, the homemaker was simultaneously exalted and scorned.  Given such extremes, it is no great wonder that many women of the time rebelled against their perceived role.

As Bahá'ís, we accept the doctrine of the equality of men and women.  Further, we do not expect a woman's role to be "confined" to the home.  But, as one who has spent much of her married life as a "fulltime homemaker", I am compelled to ask in what way am I confined?  My creative abilities are employed in, at the very least, gardening, needlework, and wordsmithing; I am responsible for managing a myriad things from time to household funds; I have ample free time for study and for volunteer pursuits outside the home; and the work I do affects the world at least in the form of five children making their way through it and the articles I write for Planet Bahá'í.  Many are the Bahá'í women who are doctors, judges, professors, and the like, but almost invisible are the women who have chosen to live as their grandmothers might have.  I wonder sometimes whether we still, the above statement of the Universal House of Justice notwithstanding, unconsciously use the "women's lib" template of the 1970s as the standard by which to measure women's achievement.  If so, are we shorting ourselves?

A reexamination of the nature of and our perceptions of homemaking is drastically overdue.  What is the role of homemaking in society?  Is it merely something we do because we must, although everyone loathes doing it?  Is it therefore something we should stop doing, and allow others to grow and cook our food, construct our clothing, and clean our houses?  Is housekeeping just brute labor, or is there an art to ensuring that all the members of the family have shelter, warm clothing, and nutritious food?  Does not homemaking involve the most basic structure of human existence—the family?  And does the care of the family not deserve the best of our efforts, rather than the least?  If we choose to allow others to care for those whom we love best, are we abdicating our responsibility to them?

Bahíyyih Khánum might reply that, yes, there is an art to homemaking.  Grandmas Kettler and Lehman would probably agree.  Social and economic pressures, however, which often dictate that every member of a family work for wages outside the home in order to pay the bills, combine to make this choice either completely impractical or impossibly idealistic.  Single mothers in particular bear a heavy burden.  More and more frequently one hears women speak of mothers who are "lucky enough" to be able to stay home with their children.  What was once commonplace is fast becoming a luxury.  These comments remind me of lost cottage industries that once helped sustain working-class families.  Family businesses, too, driven out by huge competitors, have become the exception rather than the rule.  Is it really becoming less possible for a mother, the first educator of her children, to fulfill her primary function?  If so, we are on the verge of losing something very precious indeed.

Meanwhile, what has become of the noble art of homemaking?  No longer does it consist of the sort of management that Ella Cooper mentions with regard to Bahíyyih Khánum.  It has become listlessly-attended home economics classes.  It exists in the half-life of "decorating", "entertainment", and other things we might well define as "household kitsch" for all the useful purpose they serve.  When my daughter Melissa and I recently visited a Jo-Ann store, she asked somewhat plaintively, "Remember when we used to go to the fabric store and it was mostly fabric?"  That was some twenty years ago; now the fabric stores seem to specialize in picture frames, plastic flowers, and premade decorative scarecrows.  I once heard Martha Stewart, doyenne of decoration, described as someone who is "making homemaking popular again", or words to that effect.  I beg to differ.  I have yet to see Ms. Stewart up to her elbows in sauerkraut or showing hired teenagers how to handle baled hay, and none of our four grandmothers spent any time in jail.

The challenges of the future—particularly economic and ecological concerns—will best be solved by applying lessons learned at our grandmothers' knee.  Let's look again at Bahíyyih Khánum in the kitchen, on that long-ago day, cutting up a market-fresh lamb.  What is she doing?

"Quickly dividing it [this is sheer physical labor, butchering], she directed which part was to be made into broth [here's thrift; you can make broth from bones and bits that aren't particularly edible but which will be fine for flavoring], which part served for the evening meal [care of the family], which part kept for the morrow [foresight, conservation, management], and which sent to those poor or incapacitated friends who are daily supplied from 'Abdu'l-Bahá's table.[charity, extending the care of the family to care of the community]."

Remarkable!  In one humble act of homemaking, she incorporates many, many virtues.  This is more than Fifties-style housewifery, and vastly more than deciding on a decorating scheme.

As someone who tries to measure her own output against her grandmother's—and considers herself woefully short most days—I believe that there is still much I can learn from my both my grandmothers.  My mother's mother, city born and raised, who married young and never worked outside the home, nevertheless got her husband, two children, and elderly father safely through the Great Depression and the catastrophic '37 flood.  I don't believe there is any justification for the sort of thinking that led a colleague of my father's, hearing of my own early marriage, to proclaim, "There goes a good mind."  Homemaking, despite the best efforts of the late twentieth century mindset to trivialize it, is still valuable, useful, and at its fullest a means of employment fully as engaging as any other career.  It is not a job solely for women (or men, for that matter); neither is it simply a set of survival skills.  It is the duty of each of us.  Every one of us stands to benefit from learning the foresight, thrift, industry, selflessness, humility, and myriad other virtues that our grandmothers possessed.  To care for the family, the fundamental unit of society, is noble and worthwhile work.  In our willful blindness we have come to deny that.  Whether or not one works outside the home is immaterial.  A stay-at-home mother has as much right to pride in her occupation as a Supreme Court justice.  Neither throwing out an otherwise perfectly good shirt because it lacks a button nor eating fast food every day are worthwhile options.  The cost to all of us, we are learning, is much too high.  To work, to conserve, to prioritize, to educate, to consider future generations—all these are.  Who better to learn these skills from than our mothers and grandmothers?

O My servant The basest of men are they that yield no fruit on earth. Such men are verily counted as among the dead, nay better are the dead in the sight of God than those idle and worthless souls.

(Bahá'u'lláh, The Hidden Words, Persian 81)

Greater is thine own work, even if this be humble, than the work of another, even if this be great.  When a man does the work God gives him, no sin can touch this man.

(Bhagavad-Gita 18:47, tr. Juan Mascaró)

With regard to your question whether mothers should work outside the home, it is helpful to consider the matter from the perspective of the concept of a Bahá'í family. This concept is based on the principle that the man has primary responsibility for the financial support of the family, and the woman is the chief and primary educator of the children. This by no means implies that these functions are inflexibly fixed and cannot be changed and adjusted to suit particular family situations, nor does it mean that the place of the woman is confined to the home. Rather, while primary responsibility is assigned, it is anticipated that fathers would play a significant role in the education of the children and women could also be breadwinners. As you rightly indicated, 'Abdu'l-Bahá encouraged women to "participate fully and equally in the affairs of the world".

(From a letter written on behalf of the Universal House of Justice, 9 August 1984, The Compilation of Compilations, vol. II, p. 385)

A woman of valour who can find? for her price is far above rubies.
The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, and he hath no lack of gain.
She doeth him good and not evil all the days of her life.
She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.
She is like the merchant-ships; she bringeth her food from afar.
She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth food to her household, and a portion to her maidens.
She considereth a field, and buyeth it; with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.
She girdeth her loins with strength, and maketh strong her arms.
She perceiveth that her merchandise is good; her lamp goeth not out by night.
She layeth her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle.
She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.
She is not afraid of the snow for her household; for all her household are clothed with scarlet.
She maketh for herself coverlets; her clothing is fine linen and purple.
Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land.
She maketh linen garments and selleth them; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant.
Strength and dignity are her clothing; and she laugheth at the time to come.
She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and the law of kindness is on her tongue.
She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.
Her children rise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her:
'Many daughters have done valiantly, but thou excellest them all.'
Grace is deceitful, and beauty is vain; but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised.
Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her works praise her in the gates.

(Kesuvim [Writings], Mishlei [Proverbs] 31,10-31)