Women Want to Be Homemakers? Say It Isn’t So!

This post actually started out as a comment response to a blog post but ended up being way too long…

Concerning the recent debacle about Southwestern Seminary offering a homemaking course, the website The View From Her had some interesting things to say. (I found this particular post from my friend Becky Vartabedian on her blog Flip the Pig.)

I think a lot of people have offered knee-jerk reactions to this story. The author of The View From Her is very concerned that this kind of course encourages women to not pursue other academic areas of study and yet if the author would have done a little more research she would have found out that homemaking is only a concentration of a larger Bachelor’s degree in humanities. Only 21 hours of 129 are devoted to the concentration. The other 108 hours are in those other more intellectually stimulating categories like history, philosophy and theology.

The author says “It is so singularly focused on keeping women in their place.” The homemaking course is not about keeping women “in their place” but about broadening their curriculum, bringing in more prospective students and responding to consumer demand. This may come as a shock to some - but there are women out there who actually just want to be housewives. Why shouldn’t these women have the opportunity to take classes that relate and will improve them in the areas in which they spend the majority of their lives? Furthermore if the Seminary had an agenda of keeping women in the home why do they offer multiple masters degrees in areas of missions, teaching and other things which take women from the home? In a recent news release the seminary responded to the question: “Do you believe all women should stay at home and take care of their children?” They were quoted as saying “We believe, as Baptists, that every person is free to do anything they want to do.”

The other item that the author rails on is the fact that the seminary is out to define the “role” of women while completely ignoring the man. That argument is a bit absurd and is like saying the reason the Iraq war is wrong is because we’ve been ignoring North Korea.

The only thing I can really see being concerned with is the fact that the course is only open to women. Why shouldn’t a man be able to take interior design and cooking classes? While this isn’t a big deal, I would assume the reasoning here is one based more on logistics and comfort of the majority of the class who most likely would be women.

I think this is another case of the media and other people making a mountain out of a molehill. We shouldn’t be so quick to make judgments, be offended, and whip out our favorite proof-texts.