The Surprising Origin of "Traditional" Gender Roles
Harrison Butker, please read a book!
Confession: sometimes when strangers ask me what I do for a living, I answer “trophy wife.” Because what’s the alternative? Talk about my writing? No thanks! Declaring myself an “activist” always makes me feel slightly fraudulent. And I don’t love the labels “stay-at-home-mom/housewife/homemaker/domestic engineer.” It feels like one of those things we keep having to rename as each term becomes pejorative. And I know that domestic work is important, but it also feels like it should come with some caveats, as Christianity itself seems to need explanations these days: we’re Not All Like That (“that” meaning being prejudiced and discriminatory.)
Harrison Butker’s Benedictine commencement speech has been making the rounds. I’m loathe to turn this Substack into a hot takes factory, but it is a prime example of our pervasive (and false!) narratives about gender and vocation. I watched the full speech, so you don’t have to, and it’s basically as has been widely reported: Butker takes swipes at the LGBT community, reproductive rights (including birth control), the “tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and pushes a narrow view of women’s “vocation” as wives and mothers. Butker’s “hard truths” were nothing more than the regurgitated culture war talking points we’ve all heard a million times, with a dash of hardline Catholicism thrown in. He loves a Latin mass! He criticizes the priesthood but NEVER MENTIONS priests abusing children and the ensuing coverups?!
The narrative is familiar one by now: back in the good old days, women stayed home and took care of their husbands and children, and everyone was happy, because this is the God-ordained way of things. But guess what? This is about as “ancient” and “Biblical” as Coca-Cola.
If I could press one book into Butker’s big, football-gripping hands, it would be Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. In it, Barr, a medieval history professor and pastor’s wife, tracks her own change of heart regarding women in church leadership, using her expertise to trace back where many of our ideas about women’s subordination actually come from. Spoiler alert: not the Bible!
In fact, Barr discovered that the early church and even medieval Catholicism awarded women more freedom and leadership opportunities than many modern protestant churches today. It was only after the Protestant Reformation, that marriage and motherhood were seen as women’s sole vocation.
But even in the sixteenth century, married women were not the “housewives” we think of today, because in pre-industrialized societies, an entire household was usually included in the family trade, be that farming or running a business. Women of this era also had side hustles, such as alewives whose homemade beer production was enough that they could sell it to others. It’s only since the Industrial Revolution that we have work changing from something done inside the home to becoming a thing you leave the house to do. As more women moved to cities to work in factories, a backlash formed, giving birth the Victorian Cult of Domesticity, which designated that “true women” were pure, domestic, and submissive.
This is a cycle we often see when women gain economic power. The tradwife-endorsed 1950s with its bananas cleaning routines (seriously, when was the last time you vacuumed your curtains?!) were a reaction to white women working “masculine” jobs during the war effort. (Women of color, by and large, worked outside the home continuously.) Today’s intensive parenting style seems to be a backlash against the rise of dual-income families. Whether it’s dusting baseboards or driving Timmy to Mandarin class, the requirements of “true womanhood” never decrease, they only adapt. This is especially maddening when it comes to technology—inventions like washing machines and vacuum cleaners were intended to decrease women’s workloads, but instead standards only increased.
Here’s the catch-22 of patriarchy: if you resist the demands of “true womanhood” many men, and even some Aunt Lydia types, will think it’s okay to demean and abuse you. This is the Madonna/whore complex; it’s the dangerous, victim-blaming twist of the No True Scotsman fallacy: no True Woman ever gets assaulted or raped.
And this attitude is alive and well in many churches. If I could press a second book into Butker’s hands, it would be Sarah Stankorb’s Disobedient Women: How a Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful Pastors, and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning. In her cataloguing of abuse scandals across various regions and denominations, Stankorb builds the case that enforcing feminine submission eventually leads to that place that all absolute power does: corruption and abuse.
There’s nothing wrong with being a stay-at-home mom or dad. It might be your passion, it might be the best of a bunch of bad options. The important thing is to allow people the dignity of agency versus having their roles dictated by an authority—one that, in the church’s case, claims to hold the only way out of Hell. The religious right doesn’t care about people fulfilling their potential or being happy. It cares about maintaining power. And when you build a hierarchy, someone must always be on the bottom. People like Harrison Butker don’t know what that kind of marginalization feels like, and frankly, they don’t care to.
What a contrast Butker strikes against the words and actions of Jesus. Going against the mores of his time, Jesus spent a ton of time talking to women, and often centered them in his parables. In contrast to today’s slut shamers, Jesus told those who lust to gouge out their own eyes. He forgave adulterers and talked to women from ethnic minorities. Maybe the Bible is the third book I should give to Butker.
Until then, maybe Butker should take his own advice and “stay in [his] lane.”
Do you have your own version of “not all like that” when discussing part of your identity?How have gender roles impacted your ability to choose your line of work? Have you noticed your profession become “masculinized” (professionalized, increased in pay) or “feminized” (prestige diminished, decreased in pay)?
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And I bet those alewives were brewing Bud Light too. 😉 If Butker was around in Jesus' time, he would have been standing there stone in hand waiting to throw it at the woman caught in adultery. And Jesus would have been writing in the dirt: "Note to self. Next important kick goes wide right."
Thank you for calling this out! I grew up within a culture that had Butker’s mentality too. It’s long past time we dump that antiquated ideology by the wayside.