“When Work is Love
and Love is Something You Have to Work At”

No one questions whether men can have it all. No one looks horrified at the man who expects to have a family life and a successful and satisfying career. But a woman who expects to combine family life with a successful and satisfying career is accused of being unreasonable and unrealistic. It’s true that until the last half of the twentieth century women serious about their vocation or serious about their spiritual ambition typically did not marry and have children. They chose to remain unmarried as a voluntary profession rather than a transitional phase in their lives. Remaining single was preferred because women knew how nearly impossible it is to combine the obligations of family with a vocation that demands your passion, energy, attention, and time.

Take women in the bible, for example. To be able to recline at a desert preacher’s feet, like Lazarus’ sister Mary of Bethany enjoyed doing, and listen uninterruptedly to him expound on the great lessons of life -- why, that’s a luxury hardly available to mothers (especially mothers of small children) and hardly allowed women married to men who demand conventional wives. Being a celibate (which traditionally meant “remaining unmarried”) was one way to spare oneself the anguish of being pulled in different directions by obligations to family and obligations to a vision. Didn’t Jesus himself praise those who “made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:13) and called them “equal to angels” (Luke 20:36)? Putting off marriage and motherhood freed women like Mary Magdalene, Susanna, Mary of Bethany, and others from the tyranny of being subject to husbands who resented their work and children who needed them to be available. But when an itinerant carpenter turn rabbi from Nazareth of Galilee named Jesus ben Joseph came on the scene preaching a radically new kingdom, women, children, slaves, misfits, tax collectors, and the infirmed jumped at the chance to belong to this new kingdom.

Of course, the thought of a married woman abandoning her husband and children to join up with a man she wasn’t related to for the sake of a cause was a scandalous move. Her actions was sure to bring shame upon her household. A daughter belonged to her father until the day she left to join her husband’s clan. A wife was the property of her husband and belonged where he could keep a watchful eye on her. But JoAnna, the wife of Chuza, snubbed the norms of her day and devoted considerable energies to supporting the ministry of the oddball rabbi from Galilee. But despite the accusations of others that they were anti-family or immoral, which were surely hurled at them, women like Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and the other women, probably saw in Jesus’ movement the chance to devote themselves to a vision of a new world order, a world order where a woman was no longer property to be passed back and forth between men and having to live constantly under a father or husband’s suspicion that you were unclean, impudent, or guilty of some sexual immorality.
Not so long ago women joined utopian movements in the hopes of finding a community of equals even if it meant spurning tradition and running away from their families to join such communities.

For many centuries the cloistered, contemplative life of the nunnery was one option women chose to honorably avoid marriage in order to follow their spiritual and intellectual yearning. As celibate women, at last they could exercise control over their own bodies, and for once they had the freedom to move about as they pleased. For the first time in their lives these women probably felt a sense of vocation. They sensed a calling, a ministry, a purpose that went beyond their biology as females. They were determined to be free to devote themselves completely to a new vision of the world. Never mind that with their choice came a heavy cross. Never mind that the greatest freedom demanded the greatest renunciation.

It makes you wonder whether Phyllis Wheatley would have ever become the poet that she did had she been forced to marry, or whether Zora Neale Hurston would have been able to write her heartwarming novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, if the romance that inspired the novel had lasted and not come to an abrupt end. Consider also the nineteenth century AME preacher- turned-Quaker visionary, Rebecca Cox Jackson, who attracted by Shaker celibacy, spiritualism, and teaching on gender equality, founded a predominantly black Shaker sisterhood in Philadelphia in 1857. The decision to forego marriage or to give up the idea of having children has been seen as extreme by many, aberrant by most, demonic by still others. But it’s a choice many women have had to make in order to stay true to their own inner compass.

To some it may sound like sensible to choose vocation over romance. To others it may sound a noble, but foolhearty gesture. After all, a young woman is always working against the clock when she puts off marriage and having children. Wait too long and your chances for marrying and conceiving are drastically reduced. Choosing to take time off for work, travel, adventure, to return to school, to explore life, or to discover self are perfectly acceptable options for men who are not ready for marriage. But a woman who does the same does so at her own risk. She can’t be certain that if (or when) she decides she’s ready to marry and start a family after putting off both that she’ll be able to find a mate or be able to conceive. So frightened are some that career minded young women are rejecting the status quo, jeopardizing their futures, neglecting their duties as breeders and caretakers that a whole “mommy wars” debate has sprung up in years around the issue of women’s responsibilities to family and self. Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children and Danielle Crittenden’s What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman are just two books women on both sides of the debate use as ammunition against each other. According to conservative pundits, things aren’t what they seem. Women have to make choices that men don’t. And they’re right, argues those of us on the other side of the debate. But there other questions all of us have to ask ourselves when choosing mates. Is marriage in your twenties or thirties to whatever man proposes and making babies with whoever takes you in his arms the way to protect yourself against regrets in your middle years? Choosing out of desperation in your twenties, being filled with regrets in your middle years – what kind of choice is that?

Some years back best selling author Bebe Moore Campbell wrote a book Successful Men, Angry Women aimed at raising the question who comes first in a marriage of equals. I doubt that you’re decide that Moore Campbell’s interview of more than one hundred couples yielded unearthed any remarkable findings; but in reading the book it’s refreshing to observe couples trying to strike a balance, trying to come up with solutions, and women especially standing their ground, committed to find a way to be present to those they love while at the same experiencing the satisfaction of doing work that suits their soul. The book tries to shift the focus to how partners committed to work and family can come together to pursue their career goals, manage work, share in family responsibilities, and maintain a healthy relationship without anger, resentment, and jealousy. Just knowing that there are men around who are trying not to regard women as sexual objects, men who are trying not to live out the script their fathers’ willed them, and men who are trying to build a community where even socially spurned women are welcome is intoxicating enough to make you leave everything familiar and devote your life to working with such men in changing the world (which perhaps explains the choice Mary Magdalene made).

It’s unfair perhaps to leave readers with the impression that it’s impossible to combine meaningful work with meaningful love. There have been married women who have managed to be able to devote themselves to pursuing their intellectual and artistic vocations. But it goes without saying that these women have been married to unusually supportive and nurturing husbands, in a word: unconventional men. A marriage between equals, where both partners have talent and neither is made to stifle himself/herself in the name of gender roles, is a revolutionary marriage And there’s one thing that I’ve learned about revolutionary marriages is that they have to be continually reinvented, renegotiated, and reaffirmed. The point is simple: choosing an unconventional life for yourself, creating a life that runs counter to the norm, especially if you’re a woman, takes enormous courage. You gotta be willing to listen to your own soul, prepared to invent the life you want for yourself (with or without a husband in tow), and determined to stand your ground.

What every woman wants, finally, is the right to expect the same thing men expect, namely that our wish to find meaningful, challenging work and to enjoy a nourishing family life is a reasonable expectation for us as human beings created in God’s image. We want the freedom, like men, to engage in what’s going on at home and to disengage for some quiet time in solitude and reflection without being made to feel guilty; to prioritize family and, when necessary, to be able to give in to those seasons when work requires us to work harder without being made to feel guilty; to love our family dearly and to be loved for being passionately committed to everything we do without having to apologize. What the married women I know, and the single woman looking forward to marriage I regularly talk to, want (and it’s certainly what I was yearning for years ago when I married) is a marriage that goes beyond being a solution to one’s helplessness, poverty, loneliness or powerlessness. Life is about choices, and no one can expect to have “it” all. But the time has come to level the playing field so women can have the same chance at combining family life with meaningful work. For some of us having it all means simply: being able to expect to find a romance that does not stunt or diminish you as a woman, but represents your best efforts, first, at creating a balanced life for yourself, and, secondly, of loving and living in ways that bring the kingdom of God that much closer to reality. In the meantime, we pray for our daughters and trust that the next generation of mothers with sons will do better job of raising such unconventional men than have previous generations of mothers with sons. In the meantime, we love, we work, and we keep our eyes on God.

Renita J. Weems, Ph.D.