As a young mother, I hated being told that I was doing “the toughest job in the world.” The patronizing pity rankled. I understood that people said things like this to be kind, but to me, the phrase “toughest job” seemed spectacularly inapt in capturing the real reasons why motherhood was a struggle.
If motherhood were a job (I used to fume, in socially acceptable settings), it would be the epitome of a dead-end job. You’re paid nothing, but you can’t quit. You never go off the clock. It doesn’t look good on a resume, because caretaking is decidedly low-status. Though traditionalists often blame this on feminism, I was not convinced that things could ever be otherwise. In America, we attach high status to jobs with good pay, rarified skills, and a competitive selection process. Motherhood stacks up abysmally on all fronts. It was possible, perhaps, to attain respectability as a mom, but that’s about as good as it gets. And (I thought at the time) I’m trying my best to come to terms with this reality, so please spare me your lame attempt to recast domesticity as a demanding career.
Middle motherhood has been blessedly free of condescending well-wishers, so I haven’t trotted out that particular hobby horse for quite some time. It was amusing, therefore, to open my friend Dia Boyle’s new book, The Thoughtful Home, and find explicit arguments that homemaking should be regarded as something very much like a demanding career. Boyle is a remarkable woman, who I have always found to be both wise and grounded, and as a mother of three grown children she knows her stuff. I suppose it is time, therefore, to revisit my youthful prejudices. Is there a sense in which it is helpful to view domesticity or homemaking as “one’s job”?
The Making of Home
In truth, The Thoughtful Home is much more than just an argument for professional homemaking. Though she doesn’t explicitly use this framing, Boyle is really offering a full-fledged philosophical analysis of what home is, why it matters, and what it takes to make one. That might sound obscure, but in fact the discussion is highly accessible, and full of trenchant observations drawn from her own experience. By framing her argument in Aristotelian terms, presuming that readers want above all to live happy and virtuous lives, Boyle is able to address potentially explosive questions compassionately, without seeming treacly or judgmental, and without getting swept up in culture-war battles. You won’t catch her rhapsodizing about tradwives or railing against girlbosses. There is no nostalgic yearning for the 1950s. Boyle simply wants to assist any reader interested in building or maintaining a happy home.
Animals do not make homes, argues Boyle. They may construct nests or scratch holes in the ground, but these tend to be rapidly constructed and just as easily abandoned. Homemaking is a uniquely human activity, because only humans can appreciate homes in all their textured richness, as places where people are accepted and loved for who they are and not just for what they can do.
Homes do of course serve utilitarian purposes, but a home should be much more than a temperature-controlled storage locker with some plumbing. It should be a place where we feel seen and valued, where our triumphs and trials are shared. At home we are always welcome, through the many vicissitudes of life. It’s the place where they have to take you back.
It is hard to resist Boyle’s conviction that humans needhomes, and that modern society has far too few. When we allow our homes to become little more than a place to hang our jackets, that neglect bleeds into deeper forms of alienation. Household members become estranged from one another. Loneliness increases. For children especially (but really for everyone), family life is the first school of virtue, as well as the place that we learn etiquette, conflict management, basic life skills, and the art of conversation. Dysfunctional homes make for dysfunctional humans.
Much of The Thoughtful Home is dedicated to describing the core features of home and considering how they can be instituted and protected. Good homes should have shared meals, common spaces, rules, chores, and family activities. Boyle makes practical suggestions for how to attain all of that. Every household develops its own microculture, but that culture can either be haphazard and chaotic, or else deliberate and ordered, conducive to fostering loving bonds and helping household members to thrive. Homemaking, as Boyle understands it, is the work of creating a rich familial culture, and maintaining an environment where people feel loved.
A Certain Professionalism
It’s an important effort, which is often badly neglected in our time to the detriment of everyone but especially children. What is to be done? Boyle’s solution is straightforward. We need homemakers. Homemaking is too vital an endeavor to be relegated to small spaces of “spare time.” It needs to be somebody’s job.
In saying this, Boyle makes clear that she is not condemning working women. Some people, she notes, have two jobs, and there’s no reason the same person can’t do brain surgery and then come home to make minestrone soup. Time constraints are a problem, and Boyle knows this, but she simply advises her readers to consider their decisions carefully and try to give“pride of place” to family and home.
It’s a reasonable position, and yet, for a working mother, it is a bit difficult to read Boyle’s thoughts on time management without the occasional dark chuckle. She acknowledges that balance can be hard to find, but then chides, “Is it not true that we frequently shortchange the family meal for the sake of outside activities? That we easily give up the sleep we need, so crucial for patience and cheerfulness, to meet a deadline at work?” Yes, that does easily happen! But what else is a mom to do when she has a deadline? As one who has burned a great deal of midnight oil over the years precisely so that I can be there for my kids when they most need me, I was occasionally perplexed as to how Boyle expected her “two jobs” scenario to be realized in practice.
Perhaps the more important point is that home work should not be regarded as lesser. However much time we give to our homes, Boyle stresses that homemakers should approach domestic work with a sense of professionalism. This is where she runs directly against my old “toughest job” prejudices. Though I still have certain doubts, I did find it helpful and even uplifting to re-envision homemaking in this light. I’ll be frank: it’s easier to do this now that I have attained sufficient status in other professional spheres. I don’t mind being thought of as “a homemaker” so long as that doesn’t imply that I’ve been erased from other spheres. But is it good to regard the role as analogous to a profession?
Boyle convinced me not that homemaking definitely should be thought of as “a job” but, rather, that it is helpful for some people to think of it that way.
Part of the point, of course, is to elevate homemaking in the order of priorities. Even drudgery may feel more bearable when we understand it in the context of a larger professional undertaking. (What job doesn’thave some boring parts?) But Boyle also hopes this paradigm will help people to see homemaking as more than an endless treadmill of dishes and laundry. It is a complex endeavor involving ingenuity, discernment, deep human sympathy, and the employment of a wide range of skills and talents. In this sense, perhaps it is fair to see it as analogous to a demanding career.
When jobs are embraced with purpose and enthusiasm, they can give workers a real sense of purpose. Homemakers don’t get raises or official promotions, but there is still a certain satisfaction to be found in executing a job capably and well. Competence builds confidence, and that in turn may build a sense of identity. Even on a level of social status, the rewards of successful homemaking may be greater than I once supposed. Within a community, established matrons can become important and well-respected persons whose personal talents are honored.
Domestic work really does require a great deal of problem solving, along with self-motivation and the capacity to rise to a wide range of challenges. Over time, some women build up authority and gravitas, not dissimilar from what professionals of various sorts might develop within their relevant spheres. Those matronly virtues may over time be applied outside the home, possibly to paid jobs but perhaps also to volunteer community or organizational roles. Churches are full of talented homemakers whose energies are applied to a broader community once their children have passed through the neediest phase.
One further advantage is worth noting. Because homemaking is, by nature, such very human work, the people who do it need not worry about being outsourced or replaced by AI. In a lonely and alienated world, “professional de-alienators” are in no danger of becoming obsolete.
I would summarize the point like this. There are some people for whom a domestic role truly is a very good fit. It draws on their existing talents, but also develops and expands those natural gifts in such a way as to help the homemaker mature into a person of real substance, rightly admired by all around her for her wisdom, compassion, and broad-ranging competence. The world will never have too many of these people. They are invaluable.
There’s a catch, though. As with any demanding job, the reality is that some people are far better suited to it than others. Everyone needs a home, but not everyone has strong potential to become a formidable matriarch. Thus, I still have certain misgivings about Boyle’s “professional homemaker” paradigm.
The Cinderella Problem
My concerns might be grouped into two categories: the practical-and-social, and the moral-and-philosophical.
Demanding careers are typically built through a drawn-out process involving education, several stages of meritocratic screening, and extended personal discernment. There are generally multiple points at which a candidate can either opt out or be found wanting. By the time a professional attains meaningful status in the field (with correspondingly high levels of responsibility), their profession alone signals a great deal to others about who they are, who they want to be, and what they are able to do. That’s why the question “what do you do?” became a staple of social gatherings. It’s certainly not everything, but it does communicate quite a lot.
How does one become a homemaker? By being female? Having a baby? If it’s a job, how does one get that job? Do my own preferences, talents, and personal dreams enter into the calculation, or do I just become a homemaker by default because the children are running around naked while the mail piles up? Naked children don’t emerge out of nowhere, of course, and neither do breadwinning husbands. A woman who wants to embrace homemaking as her exclusive job could therefore take certain steps to attain that goal, but much will come down to chance or providence; some highly talented homemakers will be obliged to earn money, while others whose talents lie elsewhere may find themselves pressured by circumstance to push their real gifts to the back burner while the soup simmers on the front.
Boyle stays away from these sorts of questions. She works from the assumption that readers are interested in being homemakers, and though she doesn’t actually say that it is necessary for one particular member of the household to “take point” on the domestic front, the “homemaking as quasi profession” paradigm lends itself most naturally to that arrangement. In households where that doesn’t seem optimal, Boyle’s appeal for “domestic professionalism” may also seem less apt. It is true that Boyle explicitly accommodates working homemakers, because “people can have two jobs,” but do most people want two jobs? Isn’t that usually a dire-necessity sort of contingency? Most adults do, by contrast, want both a job and a personal life, so for many the more familiar “work-life balance” framework may still seem more appropriate.
Identity questions are also potentially hard. Some people will like the way that the “homemaking-as-quasi-profession” approach can be a basis for a robust social identity. Others may explicitly not want that. People’s feelings on this can be complex, reflecting much more than their general attitudes towards homemaking. Professional identities, as already explained, can be instrumental in signaling to others what sort of people we are. A person who has carved out an appropriate-feeling social-professional identity may not appreciate being stuffed into a dramatically different one, simply because her domestic situation has changed. When a new mother moves into a lean-out phase and frets about “loss of identity,” this is the sort of problem she is managing. She might have a generally positive view of maternity or homemaking, but for her, the loss of another long-cultivated social identity may still feel disorienting or even devastating. If people try to soothe her with “toughest job in the world” platitudes, she may hear that as an invitation to throw her old self out the window.
Beyond these social concerns, The Thoughtful Home raises a deeper and more profound question. If homemaking, at its heart, is most centrally concerned with loving and humanizing people, what are the consequences of entrusting that task to a particular class of “professionals”? Isn’t there some risk that non-homemakers will be infantilized, permitted to be slobbish or callous, while homemakers are overworked and underappreciated? If “seeing people for who they are” is the work of homemakers, who sees them?
It’s easy to toss off putative solutions, but in reality, I think the problem is quite hard. Precisely because we are accustomed to outsourcing so much work to professionals, it feels natural to treat Mom as just another person whose job it is to take care of us. It’s very comfortable to take her for granted. But unlike teachers, social workers, and therapists, who get to clock out at the end of the day and go home, Mom doesn’t get to compartmentalize that way. Other people’s place of respite is the homemaker’s workplace. Their alienation and loneliness is her quasi-professional concern. Precisely because home is “the place of respite” for others, it can be hard for them to grasp how overwhelming that burden can become. I think of conversations I’ve had with working women about the immense relief of going to work on Mondays. Employers feel obliged to moderate their demands to something mere humans could achieve. They may even seem grateful when the work is done well. It doesn’t always feel that way at home.
I think, too, of amusing conversations I have sometimes heard (especially among conservative men with at-home wives) about the tragic decline of quilting circles, women’s organizations, homemaker-dedicated magazines, and other such homemaking-oriented supports. Perhaps it is uncharitable to chuckle at these laments, especially because quilting circles and women’s magazines can do real good. But it’s hard for me not to hear in these conversations some measure of hope that perhaps homemaking women, with the help of these institutional supports, could take responsibility for one another’s emotional needs along with everyone else’s. “Women are better at this emotional-support stuff. Can’t they just get together and make each other feel seen?”
I think, in the end, that effective solutions to these problems will probably require some expansion of the “homemaker as specialist” model. Everyone needs to be “a homemaker” sometimes and in certain ways. Although that potentially dilutes the honor of the full-time homemaker’s special vocation, it’s also likelier to ensure that she too will be the object of someone else’s care. This is not to say that certain people can’t embrace the role of homemaker in a more robust and all-encompassing way. Diversification of labor within the household is permissible, as long as it’s understood that the job of “making others feel loved” can’t fall exclusively on one person. In my own household, my husband and I have over the years developed a cooperative approach to homemaking, in which we each take charge of certain things. That requires a running conversation about what’s working and what’s not, and sometimes things fall through the cracks. But I think in the end it’s been fairly successful, precisely because we both make home a high priority, and take pride and pleasure in the family life we’ve built together. I understand now that I used to be uncomfortable with the “homemaker” label partly because my own talents really don’t lend themselves all that well to the kind of matriarchal excellence that women like Boyle exemplify so well. If homemaking was my real future, I felt doomed to long-term failure. Happily, there is more than one way to arrange a household.
The Thoughtful Home can help readers of all persuasions to think through these questions, precisely because it is so clear, practical, and cogently argued. In an age when this topic tends to be hijacked by crusading ideologues, it is delightful to read a book on this topic that is so reasonable, so compassionate, and so totally free of culture-war bitterness. Small-but-precious insights are sprinkled throughout, in a way that a review can’t fully capture. I am confident that Boyle would agree with me that the most important thing by far is not our precise division of labor, nor the niceties of identity and labels, but rather the effort to ensure that the people we love have places where they are genuinely seen and valued. Homes are essential for human thriving, and building them takes real work.
Let’s get to it.
