Tea at Trianon: Flourishing in Work and Family Life: Considerations for Young Women

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

Monday, November 27, 2023

Flourishing in Work and Family Life: Considerations for Young Women

It's very hard to do both, especially without a full-time nanny. But the economic realities of the present time leave many women with no alternative but to take a job, often outside the home. The women in this article are coming from a background which permits many to work from home, and computers make that possible. Let us remember that throughout history women have always sought employment outside their families, even married woman with children, running farms, shops, trades, restaurants, inns and working as maids, housekeepers, nannies, nursery maids, and ladies-in-waiting to queens and princesses. They even had their own guilds in the Middle Ages, such as the Spinsters' Guild. From The Public Discourse:

I didn’t really have a career plan. After we got married we moved to Taiwan for our first year of marriage, and then we moved back to Colorado so my husband could go to seminary. I worked at a Chinese adoption agency, and loved it, and realized that I loved working in an office. And when I got pregnant with my first, I was really at a crossroads. I knew I wanted to be a full-time mom, but I also wanted to work. And I was like, “I just want to do both. How can I do both? How can I be a full-time mom and work?” And I realized I couldn’t do both, but I really, really thought for a long time, “What do I do? Do I mother during the day and work at night?” But ultimately I got to the point where I said, something’s got to give.
And I chose the kid. It was a good choice, but I mourned. I mourned. I probably had dreams for the next year and a half of my bosses at the adoption agency coming back and begging me to start an office in my house because I loved working.

So I didn’t ever think I was going to go back to work. I think I kind of believed the feminist lie that once you’re out of the workforce, that’s it, it’s over, you can’t take a break—and I didn’t have any plans of working. I was really involved in our church. We ended up having three biological kids. We adopted our youngest about twelve years ago, and that was a very emotionally demanding process for several years after we had him. So a lot of my focus was going towards mom life, and I didn’t try to move back into the workforce. I just got really, really angry. I got angry at what was happening in the world, and I thought, somebody needs to say something about X, Y, and Z. So I just slowly started writing on my own. And then, interestingly, with every new bit of independence and self-reliance and self-governance that my kids reached, slowly, work would start to fill in those spaces.

And so now I’m at the place where I’ve got one kid in college, I’ve got three kids at home, and like April, I wake up at about 4:30, knock out at least two and a half hours of work before everybody wakes up, put on the apron, serve the breakfast, kiss the faces, slam the door, work like crazy, get up, go pick the kids up from school, come home, and then work on top of everything else. I work in line at the grocery store, dictate e-mails while I’m on the stair-stepper at the gym, or just tell people if I’m having a staff meeting, “FYI, I’m going to be roasting vegetables.” And that’s kind of how it rolls for me. The good news about having an office at home is I clean and cook and do a lot of the household care and mothering care on top of my work life. So that’s kind of how it all gets done: two things at once all the time. (Read more.)