Tea at Trianon: Wanted: Keepers at Home

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

Sunday, November 9, 2025

Wanted: Keepers at Home

From Of Home and Womanhood:

We often hear this question: “Why is it always the woman who stays home?” It’s usually asked with a tone that suggests there must be a hidden injustice behind the pattern, that the arrangement itself proves some old inequity still exists.
I also used to think this very same question, but the problem was that my question assumed the wrong things. I, much like many other feminists, believed that men and women were one and the same. Sure we had different reproductive organs but that’s where our differences ended.
This is obviously an absurd question when you take away incorrect frames that it assumes.
When understood rightly this question is a silly as asking “why do women get pregnant and not men?” It’s obvious why. But unfortunately modern times have been plagued by not only a total lack of basic wisdom, but also much of its common sense. So it is, indeed, not a symptom of oppression that women tend to stay near the home, it is simply reflection of reality.
The modern world is built on the idea that sameness is the measure of fairness. If two things are different, we assume one must be higher and the other lower. That is the root of our confusion. We can no longer tell the difference between inequality and distinction. And so we look at the home, at the man who leaves it to labor and the woman who orders it from within, and we think: there must be power involved. We imagine that the structure of the family was designed by men to serve men.
When I became a mother, reality just became far more obvious. There is no committee vote about who stays home in those early months. My body made the decision before my mind ever weighed in. My child’s dependence on me was total, and not only for food. Everything about me, my voice, my presence, my steadiness, was the ground of my baby’s small sense of safety.
The child’s world is small at first, and the mother is its horizon. Civilization begins in that small space where a child learns that the world is trustworthy. From that first relationship comes every later capacity for loyalty, love, and belonging. Remove it, and you produce a generation of people who may be competent but cannot attach. I do not mean that fathers are irrelevant, far from it. But a father’s love takes a different form. He secures the perimeter. He makes the outside world stable so that the inner one can flourish. (Read more.)