Sunday, December 10, 2006

A Good Wife Always Knows Her Place

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This is a very interesting article from Housekeeping Monthly written in 1955. While the distance of time makes this somewhat humorous for today's reader, there are other emotions that come to me after thinking about it for a while.

My first emotion is joy. I'm filled with joy as a husband to know that my relationship with my wife is more than just her working to please me. I'm filled with joy that I have the responsibility and right to seek her better good.

My second emotion is quite different from the first as I also feel sadness about something lost. I'm not sad at all about the lost of June Cleaver wife roll. I am sad that most women are culturally encouraged to not serve their husband. But just as much, I'm sad that the movement away from June Cleaver, men were not challenged more to love their wives and to work to meet their needs.

Unfortunately, the liberation of women was about women have the right to ignore their husband's needs rather than focusing on the need for men to meet the needs of women. Rather than mutuality in marriage, our culture has focused on independence.

It isn't that I don't think there was a move away from the 1955 housekeeper roll in marriage. Certainly that was not marriage as God intended it to be. Although, I do believe that God desires both spouses to find high reward in meeting the need other their partner. Their can only be reward in interdependence and no such reward in independence.