Tea at Trianon: Homemaking Is a Vocation

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, July 12, 2023

Homemaking Is a Vocation

Creating and running a home is a full-time job, most especially if there are children in the house. And I think feminism should be thrown out along with socialism and communism. But the article makes some great points. From The Public Discourse:

Succumbing to the intrusion of market logic corrodes the family. We’ve seen this play out over the latter half of the twentieth century: mainstream feminism’s corporate-friendly embrace of the male experience as normative—not only in terms of career advancement but also in terms of relationships, sex, marriage, and childbearing—has not served women or children well, even as it has left men foundering without solid social scripts. As Erika Bachiochi has argued, the solution is not to reject feminism wholesale. Rather, we should seek a solid grounding for both the equality of and differences between the sexes and return to a conception of domestic life as a school of virtue for men and women alike.

Our society’s undervaluation of the home is unsustainable. It’s easy to downplay the importance of homemaking, kin-keeping, and community-building when these things are being done widely and well. The effects of their breakdown—from skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression among teenage girls, to rising suicide rates, to widespread loneliness and political polarization—are harder to ignore.

It’s time to embrace the centrality of motherhood and fatherhood to our identities as women and men, working to restore a cultural sense that home and hearth are important sources of both personal fulfillment and social flourishing. These are things that deserve our time, attention, and respect: not just caring for small children, but also maintaining an orderly home with a strong family culture; cultivating the habit of hospitality within our homes; investing in local institutions like churches and schools; maintaining a neighborhood network of ties beyond our immediate family; and perhaps even choosing to prioritize geographical proximity to extended family over maximal career advancement when choosing where to live. (Read more.)