The spirituality trap

Women’s work and the problem of vocation

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In a bit of misogyny and homophobia now heard around the world, Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker praised his wife for staying home with their children and called motherhood a vocation. A word that marries work and religious purpose — defining the act of care as a spiritual practice.

In a recent edition of her newsletter, the writer Sara Petersen catalogs the ways in which influencers are talking about domestic labor as transcendence — spiritualizing the daily drudgery of household chores. 

She quotes one woman, Nicole, who posts over on @littlehouseofgirls, “Mondays aren’t scary when your job is the best job on earth. Even though Mother’s Day is over, it’s never truly over when you’re raising your babies. I’m so thankful for all the little clothes to wash and toys to pick up. One day my house will be quiet, and my time will be my own again, and that’s a sad thought. This is what I was born to do 🩷”

The language of motherhood as a divine calling or innate gift is little more than a way of inflating a woman’s unpaid labor inside the home. As Chelsea Conaboy wrote in the Times in 2022, “The ‘sacredness’ of home grew as capitalism focused work and politics on individual competition and created a ladder for men’s earning potential. The family was seen as the backstop against such self-interest, ‘the arena in which people learned to temper public ambition or competition with private regard for others,’ the historian Stephanie Coontz wrote in her book “The Way We Never Were” …  A mother’s moral imperative and responsibility within the home were inflated — the ‘angel in the house’ — as her role in society shrank.”

Basically, elevating the role of mother and homemaker to the level of holiness is a consolation prize for women getting kicked out of public life and losing their earning potential. It’s not a divine mandate; it’s just misogyny. 

And it’s also not just white religious conservatives using this language of spirit to romanticize and spiritualize the role of domestic labor and care work. A recent essay for the New York Times criticizes three books about divorce (mine included), for being too ambitious and tied to capitalism. What if, the author posits, women don’t want material success? What if they just want to do care work?

These are superficial questions that don’t examine the heart of the matter. Why, for example, would a woman want to simply tap out and move to a farm and snuggle babies? Could it be the wage gap, the lack of affordable childcare, the fact that statistically that woman is doing more housework than her husband even if they both work full-time? Could it be the system is designed to exhaust women in part so they opt out, creating less competition for jobs and resources — helping to ensure that the lion’s share of earning power (and the actual power that accompanies it) remains with men? 

That essay’s author is not a religious trad wife; she self-identifies as a feminist. She has written a book that seeks to elevate the act of mothering as work worthy of celebration. And it is, but we celebrate motherhood a lot in our culture while failing to provide mothers with material support. (This phenomenon is not an isolated example — veterans come to mind.)

Opting out of full-time paid jobs to do care work is not “anti-capitalist”; it’s exactly capitalist. Because capitalism rests on the unpaid labor of women. Framing that work as sacred or anti-capitalist doesn’t change that. Different lipstick, same pig.

Anna Marsh, an assistant professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary, recently wrote about the idea of vocation as “a response to the disenchantment of the world. It sought to make more rather than less of human life into ways to serve God and neighbor.” Anna is a dear friend and has been parsing the idea of vocation in her own sense of work, personal value, and religious categories that aren’t serving her in the ways she was taught to believe or expect. Like so many academics, she took on a lot of debt and graduated into a world where the job market is shrinking and falling apart. When an idea that is supposed to add meaning to our lives becomes unhelpful, how do we decide what to keep, what to change, what to leave behind for the sake of our own sanity?

The radical idea of using work as a way to connect with the divine, community and the work of living has been co-opted to consecrate misogyny and to justify unequal and uncompensated labor.  However the term vocation began, today it is so often used to gold-leaf the shit labor that isn’t respected.

The language of transcendence we use has to be seen in the context of the world we live in. And in a country where lawmakers are pushing to end no-fault divorce and to take away birth control and the right to an abortion, telling women that it’s their god-given duty or their spiritual calling to be wives and mothers simply puts a halo on the trap designed to keep us locked in the domestic sphere.

In sum, the language of moralizing motherhood has been co-opted not as radical anti-capitalist or counter-culture empowerment, but as a way to add angel wings to the unchanged reality of misogyny.

Motherhood is good and important work. But it is still just work. It’s not any more mystical or magical or holy than anything else in this scrubby world.

And while, yes, Butker did call his fatherhood a vocation as well. But it’s worth pointing out the differences in sacrifices it took for him to pursue his vocation over those made by his wife. She sacrificed the possibility of a career, while he, well, he cites waking up early in the morning and not looking at his phone so much.

Look, I would love to fully divest myself from capitalism, but unfortunately, I am a single mom and the head of a household. I have to buy food. And telling women that pursuing achievement is pro-capitalist blithely ignores the fact that women’s pursuit of independence must so often come with an income. Because money is freedom. I wish the system were different, but it isn’t. 

Also, it’s important to note that statistically even women who are the earners in their household do more care work than their cis male partners. Acting as if ambition, and success, come at the cost of care work and the deeper, more mystical practice of mothering is a false binary. 

I am writing this from the gym where my daughter is weight-lifting. Later, I’ll do edits at the sidelines of my son’s baseball game. My work doesn’t come at the cost of my care work; it happens in tandem with it. They aren’t mutually opposing forces (although sometimes they feel like it, which is why I have noise-canceling headphones); they are happening in mutual support of one another and in service to each other.

I think often of the years I spent in couples therapy listening to my now-ex talk about the ways the Bible said I ought to act and think. That I ought to only want to care for my children and home. That children and home were my purpose as a woman. One therapist I went to called that “religious abuse”; another scoffed and said, “Hun, that’s just abuse abuse.” 

It’s easy to criticize the overtly religious attempts to shove women back in line. Far less examined — and still more toxic — are the ways this misogyny manifests on the left, under the guise of of anti-capitalism and sacred purpose.

Criticizing women on the right or the left for pursuing freedom (money), in a culture that is reducing options and opportunities for women instead of expanding them, is, at its core, criticizing women for wanting a way out.

Living on a prairie with chickens and a gingham dress does sound fun when your life is emails and quarterly reviews. But no one has that prairie or gingham dress without someone else’s work and income. It’s not divestment from capitalism; it’s not breaking away from society; it’s simply privilege. It’s entering a gilded cage of someone else’s making.