The conflict between work and family in our day is a problem in need of a fix. Though we debate various public policy solutions that might ease the tension, generally, we leave each parent to resolve the disharmony on his or her own. The result is a good deal of day-to-day stress.
For a long time, American politics has been stuck in a post-industrial rut. On both sides of the aisle, our politicians assumed that cheaper goods and services would serve every citizen well, and so focused on ensuring strong household consumption. The American right has tended to emphasize growing the market to do so, while the left has worked to redistribute its winnings. But neither of these approaches promote the highest good of the household nor the full flourishing of the household’s members.
To understand why the conflicts between work and family in our time feel so fraught, we need to look to older sources of wisdom. In this essay, I will propose three humanizing principles to think better about work-family tensions based on Aristotle’s observations about the political primacy of the household, the cultivation of the virtues within it, and the mother of all virtues: practical wisdom.
Aristotle’s Woman Problem
Before I get to Aristotle’s thinking about the politics and economics and virtues of the household, let me spend a bit of time wrestling with his writings about women.
Over the last several decades, scholars have paid important attention to Aristotle’s writings on women. And for good reason: his texts have powerfully influenced the philosophical and theological traditions of the West, and beyond. We can’t do that legacy justice here, but let’s take a brief look. In the Politics, Aristotle states that “the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior, and the one rules and the other is ruled, and this principle of necessity extends to all mankind.” Aristotle’s norm of male rule is enough to make some modern scholars ignore his work altogether. Perhaps more profitable would be to scrutinize in his thought the nature and purpose of rule.
As for men and women’s differing biology, Aristotle writes in his Generation of the Animals that females are “misbegotten” or “deformed” males. From primitive scientific observations, he concludes that the female embryo is created when human reproduction goes awry. To these moral and biological assertions can be added a third: that woman’s reason, he says in the Politics, “lacks authority.” So even though women are human beings with the distinctive capacity to reason, and even though they prove necessary to the human species for rather obvious reasons, human females, Aristotle seems to conclude, in one way or another… lack.
There has been voluminous debate over millennia about what Aristotle meant by each of these statements and all of them together. But I think it is fair to assert with a good measure of confidence the following interpretations: Aristotle views the male as the human norm, naturally superior both in terms of rational authority and embodied form. The female form of humanity, that sex that reproduces inside herself, is, in Aristotle’s account, lesser.
Correcting the Aristotelian Legacy
Aristotle’s observations about women have, understandably, made many of his key insights less accessible to our time than they might be otherwise. Happily, it is possible to decouple Aristotle’s views of women from his insights about the virtues and the household. This is a two-step process of correction. First, we ought to understand women as fully included in Aristotle’s definition of what it is to be human. Second, we should expand our understanding of what it is to be human, because that category fully includes women.
This process can be discerned in the work of some early advocates of women’s equality. The fifteenth-century intellectual and court advisor Christine de Pizan and the eighteenth-century philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft both challenged Aristotle’s legacy on women, even as they worked from within his own virtue ethics framework. Pizan and Wollstonecraft each argued in her own way that those with the capacity for motherhood (women) are just as capable of living in accord with their reason and cultivating the virtues as those with the capacity for fatherhood (men). These women corrected Aristotle from within a Christian framework, working from the revealed truth that both sexes are made in Imago Dei. Like many other notable scholars, Pizan and Wollstonecraft thus Christianized the Aristotelianism inherited by the West.
Thinkers like Pizan and Wollstonecraft prepared the way for nineteenth-century women’s advocates to make moral and legal appeals for women’s rights. Women were, by their account, fully human, “rational creatures,” whose full flourishing depends on cultivating the virtues. They undermined Aristotle’s male normativity by maintaining that women’s ability to give life through childbearing and breastfeeding—and the existential relationality and interdependence these capacities represent—are part of what it means to be fully human.
But even as these advocates revised Aristotle’s legacy, both of these women worked from the foundational Aristotelian principles we’ll turn to next. And, like us, they both wrote in the midst of world-transforming revolutions in which women’s equal dignity was specially threatened. Pizan’s work at the very end of the Middle Ages beautifully showcases the great economic and civic contributions of women of all classes within the medieval economy, despite masculine exclusiveness in guilds and similar organizations. Wollstonecraft, for her part, saw the threat of a new liberal regime that promised to elevate liberty, equality, and fraternity without ensuring that women would be virtuously educated as fully rational and responsible beings.
If we are to retrieve Aristotle’s insights about the household to help us think better about work and family today—which I will now argue that we ought—his thought should be examined with the contributions of thinkers like these.
Aristotelian Principle Number One: The Primacy of the Household
For Aristotle and his intellectual descendants, the household was the primary and most basic unit of human community, the first necessary society, comprised not only of parents and children, but extended family and non-relative members as well. As such, it was—and would continue to be until the Industrial Revolution—the most important sphere of society in the West.
Aristotle observed that the household comes into being to meet the needs of a couple’s daily life, and it relies upon the interdependent cooperation of its members. But its highest end is the cultivation of virtue and friendship among the household’s members. Importantly, this includes, at its best, the virtuous friendship of the husband and wife at the center of the household, who desire each other’s highest good, and whose children are their union’s common bond.
Though of primary importance, for Aristotle, the household was an imperfect society. It was relatively self-sufficient, but not wholly so. For its full flourishing, the household needed a community of other households, and it also needed the common goods—such as peace, security, and stability—that only the polis can provide. Indeed, in his view, the polis was the highest, or most perfect, form of association, because it could make up for the household’s insufficiencies. That is to say, the political sphere was responsible for providing whatever households and their members needed to flourish that could not come from themselves. In other words, the purpose of politics was to provide for the common good.
What strikes us immediately about Aristotle’s political thought is that we hear not first of autonomous individuals, markets, or governments, as we’re wont to think about actors in our time. We hear first of the household. The purpose of politics, markets, and the rest of society is to promote the highest end of the household and its members: namely, virtuous activity, including virtuous friendships aimed at each other’s good.
Thus, the first principle I want to cull from Aristotle’s work for our time: Markets ought to remain ancillary to, and in service of, households—not the other way around.
Aristotle, in his Politics, makes an important distinction between “householding” (or productivity in the household for use) and “wealth-getting” (or what he calls “unnatural” production for gain). Now, he knows that what he calls the “art of acquisition” is necessary to managing the household. Its members must either find or produce the necessities of life, or even trade necessities with others in markets. But there is a species of wealth-getting, of increasing money without limit, of producing for mere profit motive or gain alone, that is improper, he writes. It’s improper, or unfitting for human happiness, in that it originates in those who are “intent upon living only, and not upon living well.”
Markets, money, and profits should remain ancillary to the household and in service of its internal goods. They are a means by which households can obtain the necessities of life. And because they are secondary, they ought not distract from the household’s higher purpose, which is to “live well”: to cultivate human excellences, especially of friendship, which are, for Aristotle, the building blocks of a happy, fulfilling life.
The industrial era pulled productive, remunerative work outside of the household, transforming the household from society’s chief producer to its chief consumer. This put enormous earnings pressure on its members from the outside, subordinating the household to the market. As a result, remunerative work outside the household began to take priority above all else. This is why “balancing” work and family today feels as though family, friendship, and the other goods of life are to fit into the cracks left from wage or salaried labor. Market work is king.
The prioritization of wealth-getting for consumption in the post-industrial age has also had an enormous impact on gender relations. After industrialization, child-rearing wives became economically dependent upon their wage-earning husbands, who were now dependent upon industrial capitalists. Rather than maintaining relative self-sufficiency from the market, the household has become utterly dependent upon, even in some cases subsumed into, the market. And so, those who devote their time to making a home and caring for children are, ipso facto, economically vulnerable. But few, I think, see the root cause.
The political right often under-appreciates this distinctly feminine vulnerability, focusing their efforts on improving male breadwinning. The political left, cognizant of the economic vulnerability of caregiving women, tends to under-appreciate the complex factors causing it. Instead, they focus their attention on female breadwinning. But to really get at the problem, the focus should be on placing the modern household at the center of our politics, as the first necessary society, with other institutions supporting its important work.
Principle Two: The Most Excellent Work of the Household
The most important work of the household, for Aristotle, is the cultivation of the human virtues, or the formation of excellent human beings. For him, human excellence is the path to human happiness.
Of course, the members of the household must perform more mundane work, as well. Aristotle describes the work of the household as encompassing 1. that which is servile (and deteriorates the body, like manual labor); 2. illiberal (least in need of excellence, such as mindless or repetitive tasks); and 3. the excellent (that which is needed to live well). So while servile and illiberal work are crucial aspects of the household, the household’s most important work is to cultivate the virtues of its members.
It’s important to clearly understand what Aristotle—and Pizan and Wollstonecraft, too—mean by virtue. Virtue, in the Aristotelian tradition, is a cultivated habit of good character. Virtues must be learned and practiced. They are stable dispositions, or excellences of soul, that empower a person to act in accord with the good. The virtue of courage enables one to choose well in the face of danger or fear. The virtue of temperance enables one to enjoy the pleasures of life without slavish excess or ascetic repression. The virtues allow us to live freely, according to our highest principle, reason, rather than to give in to our fears and desires.
Importantly, human flourishing, genuine happiness, is not won through thinking happy thoughts. It’s won, Aristotle explains, through virtuous activity (energeia): a Greek word he coined that is best translated “being-at-work.” That is to say, cultivating the virtues in oneself and in one’s children—enjoying friendships of virtue, which aim toward real goods—is the highest kind of human “work.” It’s personal work that offers human beings the interior freedom and stable disposition to do the good that we ought.
Consider the totally different connotation of the word “work” in our day. With the industrializing rift between the workplace and the home, market-based wage labor became the prototype of work. “Work” became masculine: productive, wage-earning activity. “Home” became feminine: the realm of caregiving and consumption. With industrialization, women lost much of the remunerative work they had long accomplished alongside the nurturing and formation of their children—which was also part of their husbands’ work, too.
In truth, all work—the work of the household, the work of care, and remunerative work—provides an opportunity for cultivating the human virtues, for becoming fully human, capable of forming deep friendships. In a word, virtuous “being-at-work” makes us capable to give of ourselves magnanimously in generous service to others. Child-sized jobs in and around the household provide the means to cultivate the virtues in children, too, virtues that empower them to govern themselves: to become courageous, temperate, just, and wise agents of their own lives.
Principle Three: Practical Wisdom
Each of the cardinal virtues is important to human beings’ freedom for excellence. Yet one is the mother and guide of them all: practical wisdom. Learning to recognize and cultivate practical wisdom, once called prudence, is the final Aristotelian principle (and practice) that we need to recover. Practical wisdom is the learned capacity to discern what is right and good and just in the concrete context of a particular circumstance. I call this “heeding the duty of the moment.”
Arguably, we could more easily cultivate practical wisdom in the pre-modern age. Subsistence agrarian living demanded creative agency to respond to what the moment required: now milking the cow, now feeding the child, now crafting the cheese. Today, we see many women with young children seek flexibility in their jobs over higher pay. They wish to wisely determine which of their competing duties need tending to in the here and now at different stages of their children’s lives. I say we give this human excellence its ancient name.
We need to do a much better job, in our post-industrial age, not only of understanding that inclination toward for more flexible, remunerative work, but also of encouraging the practice of practical wisdom, for both women and men. We can do this by giving priority, in workplace policies and our politics, to the still essential work of the household: cultivating the virtues we all need to be free, responsible, and happy agents of our own lives. We can do this by giving each household the autonomy to discern what is best for its members within their circumstances, their gifts, their needs, and their desires. Practical wisdom requires each member of a household to encourage and support every other member in their particular gifts, in service of the household’s common good. Practical wisdom governs how members of each household determine—together—how to carry out the ever-changing responsibilities of the home, be they servile, illiberal, or excellent. And as an Aristotelian virtue, it must be acquired through habits—it must be practiced.
The beauty of practical wisdom is that, though we should all look to exemplars, each household must be practically wise in their own way.
Many mothers, and some fathers too, recognize that their own particular gifts suit them for traditional household work. This work contracts the household’s market needs, limiting its dependence on the modern market. Indeed, in our time we see profound interest in relearning the arts, crafts, and skills of homemaking—and not just among social media’s right-coded “tradwives.” When I attended college in Vermont thirty years ago, a movement away from a culture of consumption was well afoot, and leaned politically left. My own observation of these households, right and left, is that their members understand themselves to be economically interdependent, with the homemakers’ work often more highly valued than that of the wage-earning spouse. Law and politics should do more to support the practical wisdom of these households.
Some parents recognize in themselves far fewer personal gifts and aptitudes toward those traditional homemaking skills, and far more capacity to generate the kinds of goods and services that modern markets pay for. But this remunerative work that most modern households rely upon must also be subordinated to—or, better yet, integrated with—that more “excellent” human work of cultivating the virtues in ourselves and those in our care.
Authentic integration of work and family life will only be possible if we begin to see living well as the humane path to freedom and happiness, and wealth-getting as a means for living, and never its end. Only then will both our politics and workplaces give the first locus of that most culturally essential activity—the household and its diversely gifted members—the pride of place it deserves. As Aristotle, Pizan, and Wollstonecraft saw so well, the goods of the household, and the friendships rightly cultivated within them, are the basis of civic friendship—and so too of every other political, economic, and social good as well.
This essay is adapted from remarks given to Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program. Here’s a video of the event.
