A Peaceful Retreat, Part 1

This is such a multi-faceted subject, that I hardly know where to begin. To understand the elements of creating the peaceful retreat at home, I find that I must first educate the young women about its intricate value.

Why do young women shun the prospect of marriage, home, and family? Why is it boring to them? Why do they want to pursue careers instead? Why are they willing to endure the insufferable repitition of factory work, office politics, or industrial labor, instead?

I invited a young couple to my home once, for dinner. The young man was tired after a day's work at a paper mill, where he had also become responsible for a certain department and the employees. His wife stayed at home and educated their two children herself. She was also tired, but not as in need of encouragement as her husband. Because many of his co-workers were women, the subject turned to that of women working outside the home.

As he related to us his observations of the women in his department, his voice got louder and louder, and soon he began to shout.

"WHY OH WHY do they want to work, when they don't really have to?

" My job is hard and it is exhausting. If I could stay home, I would. So why won't the women stay home? There is less stress for them there. They function better there. Men need to come home to a real home that is a peaceful retreat. If the wife is gone all day, the home is anything but a retreat, for she can't put the atmosphere into it that makes it so.

" I can't understand why the women WANT to do this, when they can stay home. I don't LIKE going to work every day--why do they like it?"

Somewhere in all this ranting and raving, was some simple reasoning that always stuck in my mind. I have my own ideas about why women don't want to stay home, don't like it, are bored by it, and don't plan on becoming homemakers and leave the working world to the men. The first is education. Excuse me for daring to touch such a sacred entity, but there you have it.

While it is wonderful that women have the opportunity to be educated, to read and write and cipher, one thing I learned from homeschooling my own children, is that one has to be discerning about what one reads or listens to.

Learning and reading can be used for good, or for ill. That is basically the difference between government education and private education. Education can be a detriment to a girl's life, when it directs her into things that distract her from the things that should come second nature to her.If she spends four years in the University studying marketing, she isn't going to be inclined to be a homemaker. As the twig is bent, so the tree will grow.

Women naturally love the home, until they are trained out of it by education. Little girls play house, folding little blankets for their dolls, and playing with their little tea sets. If a girl spends many hours in college, she will either be shamed out of these early instincts or trained out of them. She will not come away from that experience more determined to have a lovely home, manage it, and guard it. She will not feel the challenge of having a good family and helping her husband in his life.

I know a woman who married a man who had nothing but a bicycle. Although she never pursued outside work, she helped her husband and encouraged him so much, that today he is one of the most successful farmers in the area that they live. He has modern barns, nicy shiny tractors and hay balers, his own gas station to fuel his farm machinery, and a brand new house with floor heating. If they chose to give it all up, they would still have enough to keep a small home and have future security. Her fulfillment was in forging a life together with him, raising their children, and pursuing her own talents. More about her, later.

For this reason, I find college education for girls very distracting, and very subversive. Sorry about that, girls, but those of you who have gone to college, let me ask you about your college days.

How much time did you spend at home, caring for it? How often did you show hospitality? Did you sew your own clothes? Did you dress femininely? How much time did you think about having a husband and how you would love and care for him? Did you dare even dream about it in the politically correct environment of the University? In however number of years you spent in that institution, was your importance based upon how you would lovingly decorate your home and how faithful you would be to your husband, or was value placed on your degree? Was your laundry caught up? Was your room clean? How often did you bathe or take a shower? Did tests and research papers take priority in your life? Did your college experience increase your yearning for a happy marriage, home, and a family of your own?Compare your education to the real life of home and family. How much of it really applies to the way you live in a home?

I spoke to a 40 year old woman the other day, who just came home from work, and is trying to adjust to managing her day at home and being a homemaker. She confessed to me that she would have been far better off to use all those years in college to learn how to run her home efficiently and learn to take care of her husband and children. Her years in college prepared her to work away from home; they did not prepare her for all the things that would confront her in homemaking. Homemaking is often mocked and scorned by the college elites.

She told me that when she was in high school and she was asked in a class what her plans for the future was, she said she wanted to be a wife and a mother. The teacher said, "You have to be something. Being a wife and a mother is not a viable career." Many a young girl, full of natural hopes and dreams about marriage, is humilated and discouraged by the educational "experts," and forfeit their right to have a beautiful life at home.

The other thing that prevents young women from pursuing marriage and homemaking as a career, is regulation. If they've gone to schools all their lives, they are used to getting up in the morning and going somewhere else. There, they are regulated by bells and time schedules which are imposed on them by someone else. They grow dependent on having someone else regulate their lives. The same thing happens at work. Life is regulated by hours, lunch breaks, shipments, order, and the like, and rewarded with paychecks.

Home is another matter. Instead of head knowledge, it requires heart. The heart is not something that is educated much in colleges. People are admired for their smarts, not for their hearts. We need to educate our girls not so much to earn a living but about good living. Peter Marshall, the US Senate Chaplain during the Truman presidency, said (http://www.ladiesagainstfeminism.com/artman/publish/article_20.shtml)


It remained for the twentieth century, in the name of progress, in the name of tolerance, in the name of broadmindedness, in the name of freedom, to pull her down from her throne and try to make her like a man.
She wanted equality. For nineteen hundred years she had not been equal--she had been superior. But now, they said, she wanted equality, and in order to obtain it, she had to step down. And so it is, that in the name of broadminded tolerance, a man's vices have now become a woman's.

Twentieth-century tolerance has won for woman the right to become intoxicated, the right to have an alcoholic breath, the right to smoke, to work like a man to act like a man--for is she not man's equal? Today they call it "progress"...but tomorrow,oh, you Keepers of the Springs, they must be made to see that it is not progress.

No nation has ever made any progress in a downward direction. No people ever became great by lowering their standards. No people ever became good by adopting a looser morality.

It is not progress when the moral tone is lower than it was. It is not progress when purity is not as sweet.

It is not progress when womanhood has lost its fragrance. Whatever else it is, it is not progress!

We need Keepers of the Springs who will realize that what is socially correct may not be morally right. Our country needs today women who will lead us back to an old-fashioned morality, to an old fashioned decency, to an old fashioned purity and sweetness for the sake of the next generation, if for no other reason.


Girls going home to grandmother's house may sense that there is something different about these homes, but they think it might be because Grandma has old fashioned tea cups in a china cabinet. They don't realize that the peaceful retreat of Grandmother's house didn't get there by grandmother's education or her dedication to the business world, trying to climb to the top of the ladder. She came by it through diligent effort. It takes years and years of living at home, oberving how the family operates and watching their ways, in order to figure out how to create this peaceful retreat. Homemaking requires a woman to be self-motivated. There will be no bells, tests, paychecks, or special motivational meetings. Your education doesn't count, when it comes to creating a schedule that suits your family. No one is going to tell you when to get up in the morning, when to rearrange your furniture, and when to do the laundry. Home requires a completely different mindset. The way you approach the work at home is dependent upon your love for your family.

For those of you waiting to be lifted up into the glorious clouds of interior decorating, I'll post part 2 of the Peaceful Retreat, which includes some of the things that the woman that married the man with the bicycle, taught me. ;-)


"Aria byFirelight" by Judy Gibson