Essay: On houses, homes, corporations and large armies

Women who make a house a home make a far greater contribution to society than those who command large armies or stand at the head of impressive corporations. Gordon B. Hinckley. 

One of my friends posted this quote on Facebook.  I have several problems with this quote and Facebook was not the place to dissect it.  But luckily, we have the essay of the week.  And so:

Making a house a home is an important part of society.  Let’s just get this out of the way right now.  People (right now primarily women) who “do not work” outside the home are a valuable part of our society.  Families who can have one parent happily stay home full time not only benefit their own children, but the availability for volunteering, carpools, baking and the like has a ripple effect around them.  At the school where I work, we have parents who work outside the home who volunteer.  However, a lot of the heavy volunteer lifting gets done by parents who do not have paid employment outside the home.  If you are a “stay at home” mom (or dad), I greatly salute you.

Why only women?  I think the part of this quote that irks me the most is that it takes one gender and assigns them a role.  This closes the door for people of the opposite gender to take that path and it relegates the assigned to that role.  This is often done blatantly by religious leaders, and subtly by a good portion of the society.  Once upon a time, a Muslim man came to talk about Islam to the high school youth group I was advising and he stated that women spend so much time raising the children, they don’t have time to be involved in politics.  I wondered if women who did not have children and thus were not busy raising them could trade in their free time for politics instead, if that was what interested them.

I think I would also like a better sample size before making Hinkley’s pronouncement above.  Few women are the head of corporations and fewer still command large armies.  If the few that do those things do those tasks well, are they still not making a great contribution to society?  And is it because they are women and not making a house a home?  That seems a little unfair. Given that we don’t yet have a representative sample, I would say that the data is not yet in.

This quote also gives us a false choice of either “house/home” or “armies/corporations” Can one not do both?  Granted, in the United States today we lag far behind the rest of our peers in the world in making jobs friendly to families, but say that a woman works part-time outside the home and part-time inside the home?  Is she still making a great contribution to society, or is she required to only be a full-time homemaker?

If a person does not want to make a house a home, but does it under duress, that person’s home probably isn’t much fun to be in.  The fact is, if you are a woman who is not into making a house a home—and there are many such women out there—but you do that because you are “supposed to” your results might not be very good.  Better to outsource some of your homemaking work to others who are more into it and put your energy where your interests are.  As the needlepoint says, “When mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”  If full-time homemaking isn’t your thing, find something that is.

I must take a moment to note the speaker.  Gordon B. Hinckley was the President of the Mormon Church for nearly 13 years.  Why is it that powerful men make statements such as this?  While it supposedly lifts women up, it also cuts them off from roles other than homemaker.  Currently, no woman can be head of the Mormon Church, as Hinckley was.  His job is not available to women.  Thus his words seem to put women in their place, hand them a bit of candy and pat them on the head, as he gets on with other business.  Business that no one will ever question the value of.  Making a house a home is an important part of our society and I think both men and women should be able to do it, if that’s their calling.  But if it isn’t their calling, society is best served if they go into the world and do what they do well, even if that is heading an army or running a large corporation.  And even if they are a woman.