Rethinking the Complementarian Wife

I had lunch with my mother and sister-in-law today. Both my dad and my brother are in the process of looking for new jobs, and both women expressed with the certainty of faith their belief that both men would soon find jobs, because, as both believed, "the husband is supposed to be the breadmaker of the family."

I was somewhat surprised to discover that I disagree with this sentiment.

I should back up. If you can't tell, I come from a pretty conservative background, and actually have inherited this position. I actually self-identify as Baptist. It's not an entirely true picture of my theology, but it's the closest picture that most people understand. And I'm a complementarian, which mostly means that, if I ever marry, I expect that certain details of husbandly and wifely roles will hold true.

Case in point: my sister-in-law is two months pregnant with her first child. As I believe that the wife is better suited to stay with the child, and that the child's physical/psychological/spiritual wellbeing is usually better off when the mother stays at home through his or her early development, I certainly expect my brother to get a more stable job than his current one. In effect, my brother will, by the grace of God, take on the role of the breadmaker of the family, a role which he and his wife currently share.

For Mom and Dad, however, this is a different matter. They're empty-nesters. Mom doesn't have to stay home to take care of her children. Dad's job hunt is for a new job so that he can take early retirement from his current one (if he doesn't find one, he just won't retire). In their circumstances, there's no reason that Mom shouldn't be the one earning the primary income (other than the fact that she may then have to give up certain leisure pursuits).

It's even scriptural. Consider the Proverbs 31 woman. She was the one who kept her family fed and clothed. She took charge of the charity contributions. She even kept up with the housework (though the litany of servants certainly helped in that). This freed her husband up to to Important Political Things of a nature that isn't entirely clear to me, other than that said work likely involved sandals. Point: the woman was the one who kept everyone fed and everything running. And if there could be such things as Active Business Women who were Not Also Harlets in those days, certainly it means that a middle-aged woman can get a job to pay the bills while her husband tries to figure out what God has planned. Or a young woman with young children can run a freelance business out of her house to at least supplement her husband's income. And you know what else? They talk about caring for the widow and the orphan, and that's certainly important, but in modern America, there are other social justice issues of more importance than taking care of women fully capable of getting jobs.