Episode 246: “Best of” Series – “Are Women Human” by Dorothy L. Sayers, Ep. 9

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast: Episode 246 – “Are Women Human” by Dorothy L. Sayers, Ep. 9

Release Date: October 15, 2024

Introduction

In Episode 246 of The Literary Life Podcast, hosts Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks, alongside lifelong reader Cindy Rollins, revisit one of their listener-favorite episodes, delving deep into Dorothy L. Sayers' compelling essay, “Are Women Human?”. This episode, part of the “Best of” series, explores the intricate discussions surrounding the humanity of women, historical gender roles, and the evolution of societal expectations.

Historical Context and Gender Roles

The conversation begins with Angelina and Thomas setting the stage by contextualizing Sayers' essay within historical frameworks. They trace the shifts in women's roles from the Medieval era, where women were more integrated into societal functions, to the Victorian age, which imposed restrictive and idealized notions of womanhood.

Angelina Stanford highlights, “Victorian women were expected to be the 'angel in the house,' serving as spiritual and moral anchors for their families while being detached from meaningful work” (16:48).

Dorothy Sayers' Critique of Victorian and Enlightenment Views

A significant portion of the episode focuses on Dorothy Sayers' critique of both Victorian and Enlightenment perspectives on women. Sayers challenges the Enlightenment-infused idea, largely propagated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that women are inherently less capable and relegated to mere decorative roles in society. She argues that such classifications strip women of their individuality and humanity.

Thomas Banks reflects, “Sayers is pushing against the Enlightenment patriarchy that infantilized women, claiming they are overgrown children incapable of substantial intellectual contributions” (50:54).

Industrial Revolution's Impact on Women's Roles

The discussion transitions to the Industrial Revolution's role in redefining gender dynamics. The hosts explain how industrialization displaced women from their traditional roles within the home, pushing them into consumer-only households devoid of productive engagement. This shift not only marginalized women but also altered familial structures and societal expectations.

Angelina Stanford notes, “Sayers emphasizes that the Industrial Revolution took meaningful work out of women's homes, reducing them to mere consumers rather than active producers” (18:04).

Modern Implications and Technological Shifts

Angelina and Thomas explore the contemporary relevance of Sayers' arguments, particularly in light of technological advancements and the rise of home-based businesses. They discuss how the internet has begun to reverse some of the Industrial Revolution's impacts by enabling women to engage in meaningful production from home, thereby redefining traditional gender roles once again.

Thomas Banks observes, “The rise of the internet and home-based businesses is allowing women to reclaim a sense of purpose and production within the home, challenging the old industrial model” (28:32).

Education and Feminism

The hosts delve into the educational disparities highlighted by Sayers, arguing against the notion that women have different educational needs than men. They criticize the historical exclusion of women from classical education and support Mary Wollstonecraft's stance that education should be based on individual desire rather than gendered prescriptions.

Angelina Stanford asserts, “Sayers advocates for an education system that respects individual interests over arbitrary gender norms, aligning with Wollstonecraft's vision” (50:54).

Personal Reflections and Real-Life Applications

Towards the episode's conclusion, Angelina and Thomas share personal anecdotes about navigating gender roles and expectations. They emphasize the importance of individual identity over societal categories, reflecting on their own journeys of self-discovery and the challenges of parenting within these frameworks.

Thomas Banks shares, “Finding our identities beyond imposed categories has been liberating, allowing us to embrace our authentic selves and roles” (57:24).

Notable Quotes

1. Thomas Merton on Authenticity
   Angelina Stanford (02:57): “Many poets are not poets for the same reason many religious men are not saints. They never succeed in being themselves.”

2. Dorothy Sayers on Gender Categories
   Thomas Banks (36:29): “A category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.”

3. Sayers on Individuality vs. Class
   Angelina Stanford (38:33): “You are both an individual and a member of a class, and you have to figure out which one of those things is applying at any given moment.”

4. Sayers on Totalitarianism and Categories
   Thomas Banks (47:46): “If you wish to preserve a free democracy, you must base it not on classes and categories. For this will land you in the totalitarian state where no one may act or think except as a member of a category.”

Conclusion

Episode 246 of The Literary Life Podcast offers a profound exploration of Dorothy L. Sayers' examination of women's humanity, challenging entrenched societal norms and advocating for individual recognition beyond restrictive categories. Through historical analysis, personal reflection, and critical discourse, Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks, and Cindy Rollins provide listeners with a nuanced understanding of gender roles and the ongoing struggle for authentic self-definition.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Angelina Stanford (02:57): “The stars have aligned and clearly the universe has decided that people need to hear about Thomas Merton today.”

• Thomas Banks (36:29): “A category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.”

• Angelina Stanford (38:33): “You are both an individual and a member of a class, and you have to figure out which one of those things is applying at any given moment.”

• Thomas Banks (47:46): “If you wish to preserve a free democracy, you must base it not on classes and categories. For this will land you in the totalitarian state where no one may act or think except as a member of a category.”

Final Thoughts

This episode serves as a compelling invitation to listeners to reflect on the historical and ongoing debates surrounding gender roles, individuality, and societal expectations. By revisiting Dorothy L. Sayers' work, The Literary Life Podcast encourages a deeper engagement with literature and its power to illuminate and challenge the complexities of human identity.

Transcript

[Cindy Rollins]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. We've grown quite significantly since our debut in 2019, and we've had many requests to highlight older episodes that new listeners may have missed, as well as revisit listener favorites. To honor that request, I present to you this episode of the Best of the Literary Life Podcast.

[Angelina Stanford]

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week, we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast.

[Thomas Banks]

Hello and welcome to episode nine of the Literary Life Podcast with Cindy Rollins, me and Angelina Stanford.

[Angelina Stanford]

Hello.

[Thomas Banks]

Hey, Angelina. So we have a. This is a pretty exciting time for the podcast and for Angelina. So we're having to work around her because she has decided to get married and interrupt. Interrupt our programming.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, after finishing Gaudy Night, what else could I do?

[Thomas Banks]

That's right, you got your this is so meta riff.

[Angelina Stanford]

I couldn't have planned it better.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, so this is perfect. So the next few episodes. This episode, episode 9 is Are Women Human? And we will delve into that today.

[Angelina Stanford]

The ominous title.

[Thomas Banks]

Very, very ominous. And we'll try to figure this out because we're not sure. But Dorothy knows, so we'll ask her. But before we do that, we thought we would do our normal commonplace book quotes. Angelina, do you have a quote today?

[Angelina Stanford]

I do have a quote. And I wasn't intentionally trying to coordinate thematically with what Dorothy was doing, but it worked out that way. This quote is very apropos. This is a quote from Thomas Merton.

[Thomas Banks]

That's my quote.

[Angelina Stanford]

Do you have a Thomas Merton quote, too?

[Thomas Banks]

That is my quote. I mean, you probably have a different one, but I have one. That's crazy.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. The stars have aligned and clearly the universe has decided that people need to hear about Thomas Merton today. So a Trappist monk and a great poet. And so what he had to say in this quote really struck me deeply. And then later, when I was reflecting on the essay Are Women Human? I thought how interesting it was that he's basically getting at the same idea here. So this is from his book, New Seeds of Contemplation. He says many poets are not poets for the same reason many religious men are not saints. They never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, I just love that.

[Angelina Stanford]

I just.

[Thomas Banks]

Wow. Wow. Now, that reminds me. I'm reading a book by Esther de Waal with a group of girls, and it's talking about the Benedictine life. And very much that that is what St. Benedict was getting at. Not that we're all just nobodies in a monastery, but that we're all somebody monastery. And that is a very good quote.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. And I'm excited to talk about this when we get into the Sayers essays. But this whole tension between the individual and the community, we are really struggling with that as a culture right now, trying to figure out what does it mean to be a particular human being and a member of a class. And the pendulum keeps swinging further and further in both directions.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, it really does. There's so much there and so much that's helpful to us right now to think about and maybe get a little frustrated about also. But that's a great quote.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, now, I'm dying to know. What was your Thomas Merton quote? I cannot believe we both had Thomas Merton.

[Thomas Banks]

I can't believe it either, because I switched this out. I was gonna do a Beth Streeter Aldrich quote, which would have been really short, but instead I have a really long Thomas. Thomas Merton quote, because it spoke to my heart in such a way that I feel like that God does speak to us in many times. And this is called Raids on the Unspeakable. This is where this is from. It was an essay he wrote. I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield, said vespers, and put some oatmeal in the Coleman stove for supper. It boiled over while I was listening to the rain and toasting a piece of bread at the log fire. The night became very dark, the rain surrounding the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth. A whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it. All that speech. Pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside. What a thing it is to sit absolutely Alone in the forest at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world. The talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows. Nobody started it. Nobody's going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants this rain. As long as it talks, I am going to listen.

[Angelina Stanford]

That is such a Cindy Rollins quote.

[Thomas Banks]

It really is fantastic. Yeah. I just love that if we're listening, if we're paying attention, we're gonna hear things that God has put out there. And I think the reading life is like that, too. God speaks to us in unexpected places if we're paying attention.

[Angelina Stanford]

Absolutely. And the common thread seems to be, you know, drowning out the noise. So we can hear. So you can hear the rain, so you can hear the voices in the books, so you can hear yourself think. And. And it's never been easy to do that. That's just part of the human experience. But it's very, very difficult to do it in the modern life. Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

We are distracted by distraction for whatever. You know, It's. That's Elliot T.S. eliot. Distracted by distraction for distraction or something like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. I mean, and he said that before the Internet.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. It's amazing. It is amazing that he said that. But. But I hope that we all are doing that today, that we're listening for the things that are in that. That. That take a little effort to listen to.

[Angelina Stanford]

Absolutely. And I agree with you about, you know, that this is part of what the literary life does. It's about carving out those quiet moments.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. So here we are. We are at our Women Human. We have been anxiously waiting to get to this essay. I have to put my glasses on.

[Angelina Stanford]

I can't wait to hear what you think, because I was just. I'll tell our listeners how tickled I was of you messaging me while you were reading this. And you were so pumped and ready to talk about this and so fired up and that. Really excited. That really excited me. It's always fun for me to see you get excited because you're so even keel.

[Thomas Banks]

That's true.

[Angelina Stanford]

I mean, I get excited about everything. I'm like, oh, a shiny new pen. You know, I'm always at 11.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. Well, I am. I do get excited. It's just the way I show it is very, very subdued. And I don't try to be subdued. It's just the way I am. So they would say, you be the.

[Angelina Stanford]

Human you are, and I will be the Human I am, you see.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, you know, Lynn Bruce, one time, it was very freeing for me, and it was the first time somebody said this to me. We were at a hotel room, and she said. And I was like, copying everything she did. Oh, she washes her face. I'll go wash my face. And she finally, she said to me, she goes, you do you. And I'm like, what I can do me? I don't even know who that is. And it sent me on this little. This little philosophical journey to find out who I was. Which. And today that's what we're on. We're on a philosophical journey to find out if women are human. Now, I really like the. I have the book now. The essay's online, so you don't have to buy this little book put out by Erdmans, but I have the book with the introduction by Mary McDermott Scheideler or Schittler. I'm not sure how she says her name, but I thought the introduction was really good. She brings out the point that Dorothy Sayers has these conversations throughout her literature. She has them in Gaudy Night. She has them in Busman's Honeymoon. She's written a couple of these essays. And also she speaks about some of this in her introduction to Dante's Purgatory, introduction to her translation. So one of the things that she brings out, and I think this is sometimes something we miss about Dorothy, is that she has a rapier wit.

[Angelina Stanford]

This essay was hilarious.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, it really, really was. But I wonder if you don't. If you can miss that, if you didn't realize that she's actually being funny a lot of the times, because I think that's how. I think she has a lot more jokes, even in books like Gaudy Night, than we even realize where she's, you know, making a pun or joking, teasing off of something that she's already heard. But here's what she says. Here's what Dorothy says in her about Beatrice and Dante, that which turns women into mother images, inescapable sources of primitive energy, but terrifying and tyrannous. And that which interprets women is somehow deviant from a male norm of humanity. And so ineffably mysterious, enticing and perilous. Here's what. Actually, that was this lady. What's her name again? Mary. But she. Here's. So Dorothy is going to address these two issues that the woman as a siren, or as the person who brings men down, or the woman as the goddess, the mother, the mother figure, the pure mother who can do no, wrong. And she says, whereas there has been from time immemorial an enigma of woman, there is no corresponding enigma of man. The sentiment man's love is of man's life, a thing apart. Tis a whole woman's existence is in fact a piece of male wishful thinking which can only be made to come true by depriving the life of the leisured woman of every other practical and intellectual interest. Lovers, husbands, children, household, these are all major feminine preoccupations, but not love. It is the male who looks upon the amorous adventure as an end in itself, dignifies it with a metaphysic. The Great Love lyrics the great love tragedies, the romantic agony, the religion of beauty, the cult of the eternal woman. I'm not going to read the German there. The entire mystique of sex is an historical fact, a masculine invention. The exaltation of virginity, the worship of the dark arrows, the hypothesis of motherhood, are all alike the work of man. The fatal woman is his discovery, and so indeed is the fatal man. So I just thought that this was a really interesting that we have this juxtaposition of womanhood as either women are outside of humanity because they are either totally pure or totally evil. And they don't fit in that. And that is Dorothy Sayers talking in Dante, which she doesn't cover in this book, but which I thought. I thought it would be interesting to hear what she had said in that when she was talking about Beatrice herself, who. How would you describe Beatrice Angelina?

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, well, Beatrice is an idea for Dante to fall in love with. She's not a real human, and she is definitely not a real human in the book.

[Thomas Banks]

Right, right. So she's that perfect, pure woman that it is almost unhuman.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And I mean, he never has any real interactions with her in his life. She's just this woman he saw and she becomes this ideal in his mind for him to be dedicated to. So it is. It is a dehumanized portrayal of Beatrice. I mean, now the Divine Comedy is meant to be allegorical, and so it's. That's not a problem in terms of the book, but I think the point that she's making is that you can't put those categories onto real women.

[Thomas Banks]

Is that medieval? That. Do we. Do we see this happening in medieval literature a lot? That the dichotomy between women as pure maidens or. And mothers or evil sorceresses who.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, you'd see that somewhat in the courtly love tradition, but less so. The medievals tended to have a lot more comfort with women being real women. So you end up with somebody like the wife of Bath who is just refusing to be on anybody's pedestal or be put in anybody's category. And she pushes really hard against any of those characterizations of women and insists on being a real woman and has quite, quite a few earthy and uncomfortable things to say to the men around her to make the point that she's a full human and is going to live the life of a full human. So it's not. I would not put the blame there on the Middle Ages. That's much more a Victorian construct. It's something I hoped we talked about today because I think Sayers is implying it a few times without mentioning it, because of course she wrote this in 1938, so this would have still been pretty, pretty well known. And she's pushing back against it. So the Victorian idea, there was a poet named Coventry Patmore who wrote a poem called the angel of the House. And this, okay, so this becomes the Victorian ideal of womanhood. So the over spiritualized woman who can do no wrong, whose presence is just, you know, the angel in the house. She doesn't have a real existence because the ideal Victorian woman would have had a governess and a nurse to take care of the children, a housekeeper to run the home. Okay. She would have been basically a house ornament for her husband. But even worse than like a modern trophy wife because she's not going and hanging out at the gym, even like she, she's just at home and she's a salvific figure. Suppose she's supposed to counteract the carnal nature of her husband. What ended up happening though? Because that's less than a full human existence. Right?

[Thomas Banks]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Just to be the spiritual force of your home who doesn't actually do anything. The education that we're giving was just a smattering of this and a smattering of that. Right. You know, so a little bit of drawing, a little bit of finishing school. Yeah, but, but nothing real. Nothing real. You know, women, women started to feel the need to actually have some purpose. I like when Dorothy Sayers basically says in this essay, we keep saying women should be at home. What exactly are to be doing there? That was a serious question for the Victorians because they weren't cooking, they weren't caring for their children, they weren't, they weren't doing anything. Someone, I mean, someone else was doing all of those things. This would have been a mark of a man's success that he had these things.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And it really struck me that she was bringing out a historical change that had occurred that we. That we're so far away from that we didn't see that that is what had happened. Like, we're looking at, like, say, the sort 60s and the 70s and the 80s and the 90s and that times that our lives have touched and we don't. And we. And the mother. And we think of our own motherhood. Like we want to be at home with our children and we don't want to be working so that no one is at home with the children and we don't have nursemaids and we don't have all these things. But we also haven't maybe seen the progression of the life of women.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yes.

[Thomas Banks]

Clearly. As it changed from very purposeful in medieval times to very unpurposeful in Victorian times.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. And there's no way for us to answer this question without understanding the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the home. Completely. Displace the home completely. And Dorothy Sayers talks about it takes away all of the meaningful work that was going on at the home, takes it out of the home and puts it in the factory. So I love that she says. She basically says we have to define our terms. What is it when we mean when we say women belong at home? That's a question I find myself asking all the time when I hear the current debate about should women work or should women be at home, quote, unquote, at home? That's so Vegas to me. Nothing. You know, the 1950s at home, the 1890s at home, the 2019 at home, these things don't look alike.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And, you know, it's kind of interesting to me because I sort of feel like homeschooling has become a revolution for women at home.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

That women at home. So I was at home and I loved being at home, but the reason I loved being at home was because I could craft for myself the kind of life that I wanted to live.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right.

[Thomas Banks]

And that was a life of reading and letters and thinking and writing and helping and teaching my children. That was kind of a gift for me. But that isn't how it is for everyone, because it comes down to there's so many more factors going into this and just, oh, this is. But. But it seemed to me at the time that I had to make a choice. I was either going to be a stay at home mom or I was going to go out into the workforce.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right.

[Thomas Banks]

It's kind of been interesting to me that God Took all those years of my being a stay at home mom and created something marketable out of it. I did not see that coming.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. And so just to go back, I like what you're saying. Let's put this into some kind of historical context so that we can. So we can, you know, come to a common understanding of the terms here. Even a term like feminism would have meant something different in Dorothy Sayers time. It would in our own. So in 1938, women's suffrage, for example, was in the United States and in England, but still not in France, still not in very many places of the world. So feminism initially meant women's suffrage. But it's really interesting. If I can just give, like, a really brief summary, what ends up happening is you have all these house ornaments in the Victorian age. Okay, Right. They need something to do, they're wasting away. There's, you know, the yellow wallpaper, that short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which talks about women going insane because they're not given any meaningful work. Which is true. Right. Human beings are made to have meaningful work. No human being is going to thrive and be happy and, you know, emotionally balanced if they're not doing something meaningful with their life. Now, we can, of course, begin to discuss what is meaningful work, but we have to agree that people are made to work and to get some joy and satisfaction out of doing something of value with their lives. So Victorian women wanted this too. And so this is when you begin to see the great works of charity that women are involved in. They're getting super involved in the church, they're getting super involved in social projects for charity, and they're getting super involved in women's suffrage. Now, what's interesting is that what they did is that they used some of these angel in the house ideas to their own advantage to push forward some of these social and political agendas that they had. So taking the idea that women are a spiritual force for good and that men are a carnal force. And so in the home, we have almost the opposite view now, where we expect men to be these spiritual leaders in the home. That would not at all the Victorian view. The Victorian view is that, you know, men are going to be going in the wrong direction. It's up to a woman to make sure that the civilized. Yes, that would be a civilizing influence on him. Absolutely. So the early slogans for women's suffrage tapped right into that and said, look, you know, if women are the spiritualizing force and civilizing force for good in the home, how much more so on the world stage, right? And so you had slogans like, a vote for women's suffrage is a vote for world peace, right? Women were going to come in into the political arena and then be this spiritualized force in the world. Obviously, that hasn't happened. And I love that Dorothy Sayers makes that comment that she taps right into that when she says that at first people thought women in politics was going to bring all this, you know, female perspective. And then when it didn't happen, people were mad about it. Well, why didn't you spiritualize the world? And why didn't having women in politics and women voting bring about world peace? Well, because probably women can't do that. No human being can do that. So that was. So women are beginning to try to have some meaningful existence. And we even saw in Gaudy Night that question about, can women have a life outside of the home? Can they have a career and a profession? And so many doors, of course, were closed to women in the 1930s. But over time, you see more and more of this. So the Industrial revolution just, it takes all the meaningful work out of the home. It continues to do so. Even worse, by the time you get to the 1950s, which is where sort of your second wave feminism is born. Now you have so many quote, unquote, time saving devices. I actually like to, because I'm weird like this. I actually collect old women's magazines advertisements from like the 40s and 20s, because it's fascinating to me how marketers have always appealed to women. And so, you know, I've got this ad for the kitchen of the Future. It's from 1947. And it's all about how, see, women, with technology, you don't have to do a thing at home, right? Open this can of soup. It's just like, mom made it. Put this frozen dinner in the oven, right? And so the meaningful work for women gets less and less and less and less, right? Just. Right, Just have a frozen dinner. So you're not even making like healthy foods. Everything about what a woman is supposed to do in the home gets taken away. She's not making clothes, she's not making food, she's not growing food. It's a totally industrialized life. And so, so you get that. You get the stereotype, you know, get the, get the feminine mystique, the Betty Friedan thing where she's saying, all we're doing is sitting around, you know, popping Valium and in our day, pair, in our day, pearls, because what are we supposed to be doing? So it Makes a lot of sense then that, that women began to look for meaningful work elsewhere. One of my favorite parts of this essay is when Dorothy Sayre says there's always the cry from men that women are taking men's jobs. And she says, but you took them from women first.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. And I thought that was a new perspective I had not thought about before. And I thought that was a very powerful perspective on history.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And once you start studying this, it's extremely eye opening that our little narrow categories of what we thought of as women's work and men's work are actually not historically true. I mean, in the colonies, women owned blacksmith shops. Like, who would have thought that was a woman's job? It was. And you know, she talks about weaving and spinning and cooking. But in an agrarian life, there were so many parts of their lives that were all hands on deck.

[Thomas Banks]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And that meant women, that meant men, that meant children, that meant grandma and grandpa, you know, so everybody in the.

[Thomas Banks]

Culture had a purpose.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

And so we don't just see the fallout in women. That's a good point. We see the elderly being pushed aside because now they no longer have a purpose in the family and in the, in the, in the economic part of the family. You know, it's just like a whole breakdown coming from this revolution.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. And the Industrial Revolution also takes men out of the home. Families are moving to cities so men can get jobs in factories and industry. So honestly, the whole way that a home functioned and the way that genders interacted with each other radically changes at the Industrial Revolution. So here we've been industrialized for a couple hundred years now. We are no closer to figuring out how to make sense out of this. Women have been displaced, the elderly have been displaced, children have been displaced, but so have men. So have men. This idea that somehow it's the divine ordination of the world and a man goes off to work, quote, unquote, and a woman stays home. That is such an industrial model. That is just a blink when you look at all of history. Men didn't quote, unquote, go. I mean, really, Abraham went off to work and Sarah stayed home. Like there wasn't. There wasn't any going off to work. There wasn't an industrialized society. This is a whole new model. Go ahead, go ahead.

[Thomas Banks]

No, no. And the poverty, that is, it makes poverty. She makes that point somewhere in here that this is never even a question with poor people. They always. The woman was always having to do something to bring money. She was Never sitting around, you know, just knitting or you know, making tapestries.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. So even, even well into say like 50s, 60s. Okay. Even in a town a woman would have kept a garden, she would have had eggs and chicken, she would have sold the eggs to the local store for sale, she would have earned money like that. This, this is a new phenomenon that we have homes now that are essentially consumer only and not produced.

[Thomas Banks]

Right, okay, that's a really good point. So now we have homes where we just consume rather than produce. Now is the Internet is the technological revolution that we're in now, does that kind of change that?

[Angelina Stanford]

I think so. It's super exciting to me to see, you know, all these Etsy shops and men coming back home to work from home. That's radically changing the family dynamic. That's very exciting to me. You see, I mean technology and the shipping infrastructure and all this stuff has allowed for the home based business to boom. And that is radically changing the home. I'm fascinated to see where this is going to go. I think there's a lot of potential here for us to find our way. But you can see what happens to these old categories of the man goes off to work and the woman stays home. If you have a home based business.

[Thomas Banks]

Right, right. It changes the dynamic back into the home. So now it becomes important that your home becomes something beyond. Something beyond just what you consume but what you actually produce.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. And so to try to make the debate be a man goes off and has a career and a woman is supposed to stay home. In terms of industrial, what you're really saying is men are supposed to produce and women are supposed to consume, but no one is going to be happy consuming all the time. We're not made for that. It's going to be miserable and then we can't be surprised when somebody says, okay, this is misery.

[Thomas Banks]

Right, right. So, you know, for me, the thing that always is interesting is because I always wanted to be at home and I wanted to have my children, but I also wanted to have a purpose. And so I feel like homeschooling gave me that purpose that I was looking for, even though. So I wasn't producing, I wasn't producing my children. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to say that because that would have been. Maybe there was a time when I thought that, but I was producing something out of my home in a way that was beyond just sitting at home, you know, with a vacuum cleaner.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, but absolutely you were because you, I mean, you were running a school.

[Thomas Banks]

And I enjoyed it thoroughly. It was. You felt like you had a purpose when you were doing that.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I think that that experience has been true for a lot of homeschoolers. I don't want to say all of them because of course, I don't know all of them, but that's something I hear a lot that homeschooling has placed a new value on the work of the home.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, and I think if we go back to the whole idea of leisure now, this is the way I looked at it. If leisure is the basis of culture and nobody in the culture has leisure, the person who has leisure is going to be the person who is able to change and affect culture. And to me, that person was the mom at home. Now, every mom at home knows when you say that she has leisure, that that's a joke. No mom at home has leisure, but she does have something that other people often don't have. In the Industrial Revolution, that means that she could wake up and decide whether she's going to read a chapter and then change the baby's diaper or change the baby's diaper and then read a chapter. She had more autonomy over her own schedule. Many women, I feel like, took advantage of that leisure. And I end quotes there, leisure in quotes to make themselves better people. I mean, that's when I think about Kelly Cumby that we're going to talk to next week. She's a woman who took the leisure that she had at home and turned it into a life.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, you know, absolutely. I absolutely agree with that. And my brain is going about 50 different directions now as we. As we trace these ideas. But, you know, so Dorothy is saying in 1938 that men took women's jobs and that when women try to take them back, they get rebuked as being feminist. And this is a huge part of the confusion of this conversation happening right now where we are. There are so many claims about what is supposed to be historically men's work, and that women getting involved in that is somehow out of place. It's just not historically accurate. And she doesn't talk about this in the essay, But I have to tell you, what immediately came to mind to me was the field of obstetricians and gynecologists. Boy, I really blew that word obgyn, right? What could have been more of a traditional female job than bringing babies into the world? And yet around the 50s, right, this gets taken away from women, where midwifery becomes illegal. Now, again, now we're seeing A pushback, a wonderful pushback against that now of women saying, actually, I think this is women's work. Right. In the best possible way. Right. This is the intimate calling of women to have this. I hate to say job, but this vocation, this calling, right. To care for pregnant women and to bring babies into the world. This is women's work. In fact, you know, I grew up in the. In the industrial model, where you go to the hospital, right, and you're in a room, in a sterile room with one doctor and he delivers this baby. So eye opening to me to read accounts of the ancient world or the medieval world, or even in, you know, rural America of what it was like where all of the women of the community would come together, right. And they'd push the men out. Because. Because this was the world of women and that. I remember being really inspired by that sisterhood. And you have all these experiences and all these voices who can. Who can tell. And there is something sort of ridiculous about a man is going to tell a woman how to deliver a baby.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, exactly.

[Angelina Stanford]

Which isn't to say there aren't some, you know, gosh, you know, save the hate mail. I had a wonderful male doctor. But there is something sort of ridiculous of saying this is something men and institutions know better than women. And part of the fight, you see, with getting midwifery legal rights across the United States is that these male institutions, these hospitals, these medical schools, they do not want to give up any of this to these women. And they will do all kinds of dirty, underhanded things to make sure, well, if you have a midwife and something goes wrong, we're not going to give you access to this hospital. Like, that's crazy.

[Thomas Banks]

Right, Right. And so, in a way, you are having. You are. She is not saying that there. There are not categories where that, that's a woman's work and this is a man's work. But she's challenging us to look at what those categories are, that we have mistaken, what it means that men have work and that women don't have work. There are feminine pursuits, and like you said, yes, there are male doctors. I had a good male doctor and I had a great. I had several really wonderful midwives over the years. But I like how she says we are much too inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served. And I think that we're finding that now in our culture that if we find ourselves in a category, then we feel like we are. We're kind of boxed. We're boxed into that category, and we have no. There's no Venn diagram. We're allowed to be in. We have to be in this category. We. To be in that category. And we aren't really allowed to bleed out into other categories at that point.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I loved that part. I love how she's talk. She says, no human being wants to be exclusively part of a class and not seen as an individual. No human being. This isn't just a special thing that women are offended at. No human being. And, you know, one of the things we see happening in our culture is this incredible tension between, am I a member of a class or am I a unique individual? Right. The pendulum keeps swinging back and forth. We have arguments pro class. We have arguments pro individual. We can't seem to make sense of our experiences and our existence with this kind of fight. And I love that she says, the answer is that you are both an individual and a member of a class, and that you have to figure out which one of those things is applying at any given moment. Right. So she makes the distinction between special knowledge, which class could have. Right. The elderly might have a special knowledge that the young don't have. Right. A man may have special knowledge a woman doesn't have, and vice versa, but that. That doesn't then negate the individual experience. And so I love when she said, you know, that she gets offended when somebody says, well, can you give us the woman's perspective on the detective novel? And she says, there is no woman's perspective. You might as well ask me what the woman's perspective of a quadrilateral triangle is. There's some of that humor we talked about, but, you know, that's not relevant. You could ask the women's perspective on, you know, the best kind of stove there is, because women might know more about stoves because they use them more than men do, or the best kind of diapers or something. But, you know, you can only have those kinds of general questions when you're talking about special knowledge of a group. But we're all allowed to be individuals, right? She says, I don't know what the woman's perspective is. I only know what my perspective is.

[Thomas Banks]

Right?

[Angelina Stanford]

And she talks about how frustrating it is for everyone because, you know, you can't find two women to agree on anything. You and I are both women who've stayed at home and homeschooled our kids, and we are very, very different.

[Thomas Banks]

Right? And so we have to have some generalization in order to communicate. But we cannot carry our generalization so far that we. They become meaningless. And I think that. That that's what we see going wrong, that we have these wide generalizations that don't. Don't follow. Actually think this traces back to Charlotte Mason when she said children are born persons. And this once again takes us back to the Victorian age where children were looked at as less than their minds. They were almost like little blobs that, you know, we are going to make them into superhumans because we have the power over them, because they're just a blob and they don't have any. Their minds aren't working. They aren't anything yet until we make them. That was the Victorian idea of what a child was. And so Charlotte Mason came along and said, no, that is not true. Children are not blobs that we get to create into being whatever we want them to be. They are actually already persons from the time they are born. And so this is kind of a side note, but are children persons? Yes. Are women humans? Yes. Oh, love it that we're asking here. And just for the sake of honesty, that's Karen Glass that I'm quoting here when I talk about the Victorian view of children.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because my master's is in Victorian literature, and I am of the firm conviction that we have not gotten over the Victorian assumptions of reality, that we are still trying to work our way through that. I am horrified anytime I see anyone hearkening back to the Victorian age is the good old age that we need to get back to because. Nope, nope, nope. Things went very, very wrong there on a number of levels. So child rearing, marriage, male and female relationships, suffrage, education. There's a lot that we are still working through. And I am super sensitive to. Anytime I hear someone say, well, you know, the traditional way, and then they end up describing a Victorian thing, and I say, nope, nope, nope. That's modern. That is not the traditional view. That's the Victorian view. So I'm really glad that you. That you brought that up. And so how did we get to that place, though? How did we get to those ideas? Well, actually, we can. We can place the blame for that firmly on the head of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Enlightenment. So when you look at anything about him, might I. Might I have an opinion about. Oh, jjr, as I like to call him, but. So when you study history, females were not considered uneducatable. There are some remarkable, highly educated medieval And Renaissance women. And the assumptions about women in the Renaissance were that they were fully human and just as capable as men. It's in the Enlightenment that that starts to change. So it's not the narrative that in the old days women were treated terrible and now they're being treated better. That's not actually a correct narrative. In the old days, women were treated a certain way. Then the Enlightenment comes and they smack. So they. The Enlightenment is the one that has to talk about children being a blob. And you can shape them. And institutions are the best place to shape them, and not individual parents and families. But institutions need to shape the blob of your children. We can thank Jean Jacques Rousseau for that. We can also thank Jean Jacques Rousseau for the. The idea that women are just basically overgrown children and therefore cannot be educated, don't have the minds for it. And so the sort of, you know, infantilization of women that comes from Rousseau. This, my wife is just this pretty little play. For example, the character Dora in David Copperfield, right, She's like a Rousseau ideal, as opposed to Agnes, who's a more real woman in that Dickens novel. So these, like, silly little playthings, these pretty little toys for these men to marry who didn't actually accomplish anything because they couldn't. That all comes from Rousseau. So it's not the patriarchy of Christianity that did these things to women. It was the patriarchy of the Enlightenment that did these things to women. In fact, before this was mind blowing to me to research. I bet this would be mind blowing to you too as well. Did you know that in the Puritan colonies of the United States, women had the right to vote?

[Thomas Banks]

Wow, that doesn't actually surprise me at all.

[Angelina Stanford]

Women had the right to vote because the Puritans did head of household voting. So if you were the male head of household, you voted. If you were a female head of household, like a widow or something, then you voted. So it was not male, female voting. It was heads of household votes. Gender is irrelevant. So women voted. Women lose the right to vote after the Enlightenment. So when you look at the history of female suffrage and you say, oh, those feminists came in and wanted to give women rights that they never had historically, you know. No, actually, no. They wanted to give them back the rights that had been taken from them in the Enlightenment.

[Thomas Banks]

That is very fascinating.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, it's extremely. I mean, just you start studying the history of this stuff and you realize that the narrative breaks down completely. I mean, women in the American Revolution, women followed their husbands around in War, they were back in the camp cooking dinner, taking care of the wounded. I mean, even our whole concept of women in the military, if you really start studying it, the narrative breaks down. She says, Dorothy Sayers says here the question is delicate and complicated. That is what I keep discovering as I, as I read, delicate and complicated.

[Thomas Banks]

And she has this interesting little narrative towards the end of the essay where she, she has this man who is. He says, I've been married 11 years and think a great deal of my wedding anniversary. I remind my wife a month in advance and plan to make the evening a success. But she does not share my keenness. And if I did not remind her, she would let the day go by without a thought of its significance. I thought a wedding anniversary meant a lot to a woman. Can you explain this difference? And Dorothy says, poor little married gentleman, nourished upon generalizations and convinced that if his wife does not fit into a category of a woman, there must be something wrong. And I just thought that was a beautiful illustration that people in marriage are people and humans and we don't fit. I know my husband and I always laugh about sometimes, you know, I act more traditionally manly. I mean, he's more thoughtful, so does that make him feminine? And he's not feminine at all. But he gets pushed. You know, if he has a certain side of his character and I have a certain side of my character, suddenly we're not acting our proper roles. Instead of being, this is who we are in our marriage, we're two human beings who are married to each other.

[Angelina Stanford]

Completely agree. I think we could also be asking the question, are men human? I am just as uncomfortable with rigid male cat. My son is a sensitive, artistic poet who, you know, does not fit into the traditional male stereotype. And yet he's not feminine at all. He's a masculine man, but he's sensitive to beauty and he's poetic and he always has been. And those, I think those rigid categories don't do anybody benefit, right. This harmful to everyone. I love when she says that. Men keep saying what do women want? But that's the wrong question is what it's what does this woman want?

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, yes. And of course, what is the traditional answer to what do women want? And I guess what who gave the answer, A lady wants her way. That is what people think of women.

[Angelina Stanford]

That comes from the Wife of Bath's Tale in the Canterbury Tale.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, does that come from the Wife of Bath's Tale?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. The knight goes on the year long quest to find out what do women want? And to get her way is the answer.

[Thomas Banks]

And now, you know, I have not read all the Canterbury Tales. I read some of them and I've downloaded the book and my husband actually listened to the whole thing before I got a chance, so he's way ahead of me.

[Angelina Stanford]

But, yeah, I mean, I think we're definitely tracking here. I love the fact that she says, you know, women are human and so they are allowed the full and varied experience that any human would have. And she says it's just mind blowing, the fact that you would say, what do women want? But you would never ask, what do men want? Because men don't want the same things, nor should they.

[Thomas Banks]

Right, right. Well, she ends this here. She said, if you wish to preserve a free democracy, you must base it not on classes and categories. For this will land you in the totalitarian state where no one may act or think except as a member of a category. I terribly fear that this is where we are ending up.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

This totalitarian state where we are all required to think and act in certain categories and those are the only acceptable ways to think and act.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. Yeah. Another thing that she touched on that I thought was very apropos for our current cultural discussion was in the question of what kind of work is appropriate for a woman. That the real answer is, is this woman good at this work? Yes or no. Is this particular woman gifted for this particular work? And she says that it makes no sense to try to do things you don't want to do and don't like, just so you can say, look, a woman did this too.

[Thomas Banks]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And that touched a nerve with me. That, that, that, that sort of need we feel sometimes to. To prove that we could do it. Yeah, but you don't want to do it. Yeah, but I could if I wanted to. And we want to. Like, we choose weird hills to die on.

[Thomas Banks]

Right, right. And I think. I think you see that a little bit in the military, where there are jobs that men are just physically capable of doing that women are not capable of doing. It's silly. When women. There's plenty of military jobs that women are capable of doing. They don't have to die on the hill of doing, you know, so many more push ups and what a woman is actually made to do. It just gets very confusing when women feel like to prove that they are a human, they have to prove that they can do something manly when that isn't the case at all. A woman shouldn't have to prove her. Her humanness by being manly.

[Angelina Stanford]

Mm. And I and I love to go back to the education idea on page 26, what she says about classical education and the male dominance there, because I think this also fits in with what you were talking about with Charlotte Mason. I think that there's a lot of discussion and concern about what does an education for a woman look like? Should it be one size fits all the same as a man? Should it be different? And, you know, because she's crafted for some other vocation. And so here's what she says about that. At one time, for instance, men had a monopoly of classical education. When the pioneers of university training for women demanded that women should be admitted to the universities, the cry went up at once, why should women want to know about Aristotle? The answer is not that all women would be the better for knowing about Aristotle, still less, as Lord Tennyson seemed to think, that they would be more companionable wives for their husbands if they did know about Aristotle, but simply what women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle. It's true that most women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him. But I, I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him. I love that. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

That's beautiful. Yeah, it's.

[Angelina Stanford]

What is. What do I want to learn? What do I want to explore? Who am I as a person? And she's absolutely right. They're sitting here saying, well, what do women need to know about Aristotle for? And she says, look, most of these men at your school don't need to know about him either.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. This is a human topic, not a male, female topic. The people who want to know about Aristotle are the ones that should learn about him, not just because they're male or female. You know, it makes me. It reminds me of the idea that the Victorians, I think it was the Victorians had. They would look at Greek culture or Homer, some of the writings of Homer, some of the early playwrights, and they would say, this had to be written by a woman, as the Victorians just had such. They didn't understand the time frame when the roles of male and female were. Or of the home was much broader part of life. So if, if someone knew a lot about home life, like Homer apparently did, then that. Then he must have been a woman, because he, he couldn't have known that in Victorian times. What did the man. What would a man know about what goes on at the home. And. And so they didn't have that concept of that. The Greeks had that. The home and the workplace and all of that was very fluid.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yeah. No, I love that. I love that theory. I think. I think you're right. And. Yeah, well, I think you see that play out in a number of ways, but. Sure. And so the. Again, my mind's going in a million. Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

One of the ways you see it play out is when the Victorians translate ancient.

[Angelina Stanford]

Ancient, right. Samuel Butler. I was thinking about that. Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

He does it in such a stiff, unpleasant way because he doesn't get it. He doesn't get the home.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, right. And I'm not here to bash all the Victorians and everything they ever did that. There's a lot of things about the Victorians that I think is admirable, but I just want to make sure we never confuse Victorian views of gender with traditional. You know, when you start talking about traditional women's roles in the home, you have got to define your terms. And as I said before, but I'll say it again, because this is absolutely a soapbox for me to die on right here. This little soapbox hill. I will die on it. When I hear people talk about, you know, the model God set up is that men go off and have careers and women stay home, I start screaming like, you'll never find the word career in the Bible, because that is in a modern industrial concept. Right. Abraham didn't have a career, Jacob didn't have a career, Paul didn't have a career. This is a modern industrial model. So what they are describing is the Victorian age. And. And it's fraught with danger to start saying, that is the model we're all supposed to be emulating. And when you take a broad view of history, you realize that what we have labeled as, you know, feminist attacking on traditional roles is really just women pointing out the flaws of the Victorian view. So take, for example, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women. When I was coming up in my conservative school, Mary Wollstonecraft was heralded as, you know, a Jezebel, a banshee, a horrid, wicked woman who we should steer clear away from. And I remember A Vindication of the Rights of Women always being talked about in the most negative terms as this terrible feminist diatribe. I finally read it a few years ago and was shocked to find that it was extremely conservative and was not an attack on traditional gender roles. It specifically attacks Jean Jacques Rousseau by name. That is what she was going after that Enlightenment view that women are just overgrown children and their minds can't be taxed with too many. You know, save all the heavy thinking for us, dear. Don't, don't, don't, don't, you know, don't bother your little pretty head about that. That's not a traditional view of women. That's a Rousseauian view of women. That's an Enlightenment view of women. And we are right to push back against that.

[Thomas Banks]

So we are not trying to overturn society or Christian society or become feminists in the worst sense of the word. We don't want to generalize that either. I mean, there are some corrections that have been made as we've gone along in the course of history. And there are also some sad things that have come out in the name of feminism. So we're not here to tell everyone, go out and get a job and also have a career, because that hasn't really worked all that well for anybody.

[Angelina Stanford]

For anybody, exactly. No. I'm fascinated to see the whole society struggle with that industrial model. It pleases me to see it breaking down. It pleases me to see technology creating so much innovation for jobs and homes and what that's going to look like. And also what is that going to look like generationally? If you have a home based business, what's this retirement look like? What does the children's role in it look like? You're talking about a very different model. And it could be really interesting how this changes, changes the game for us, right?

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, absolutely. That's what my husband and I are asking ourselves. Maybe he won't have to work until he just drops over.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I think Dorothy Sayers also, you know, talks about what she perceives as the potential excesses of feminism. Right. Like she calls out. Rightly so she calls out look for a woman to go out and intentionally copy every stupid thing a man has done just to prove that women are like men. That's ridiculous, you know.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, she starts the essay out exactly, just distancing herself from feminism right in the very beginning. That is not what she's talking about here. She doesn't like that whole idea that we're women eat. We're not going to generalize that either. We're not going to, we're going to just be human. We're not going to be male or female.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, right.

[Thomas Banks]

Just a human, like not, not, you know, how can I be more womanly than I am? Or how, how can I be more feministic than I already am?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. And I Personally, deeply resonate with the idea of asking the question, not what is a woman's job, but what is my, my job?

[Thomas Banks]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And you know, you told, you told your story about how you copied Lynn Bruce, you know, I have a similar story, though. Like, I, I suffered for such a long part of my life because the question I was asking was not who am I called to be, but what is a woman called to be? And then I would look at what other women did with their lives and think, well, that must be what I'm supposed to do. And it wasn't right. And I killed myself trying to do that. And it was not good for anybody.

[Thomas Banks]

Right, right. And then when you found where you belonged, things started to blossom for you. And in a way, you kind of, you could almost say that you. And I know this is true with me. I'm uncomfortable being a woman out there talking to other women or whatever I'm doing. So I'm going to hide over here and top behind the men, you know, let the men talk, and I'll get behind them and talk. And coming out from behind that and being a woman outside of that, that is, it's been kind of interesting for me.

[Angelina Stanford]

That is interesting. And I think another, another way that that question played out for me, and I'm sure that this has been true of our listeners as well. The same thing I would say, well, what is, what is a mother supposed to be? Instead of asking, who am I supposed to be as a mother? And I tried to be a different kind of mother to my kids by copying other people. You know, well, this is, this is, moms cook cookies. Moms do this. So I'll be, this is what I'll do. But that was not, that was not who I'm made to be. When I finally figured out who I was supposed to be as a mother and realized I was never going to be some other kind of mother. I was only going to be me. And that came with good things and bad things, just like everybody else's did. And I finally had this moment where I realized that but who I am was the mother that my children needed. I needed to stop being the children, the mother to somebody else's children, essentially, if you catch my meaning.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, no, that's a really big deal. And I think we probably need to end here. But many mothers get to the end of their career as a mother, you know, the intense years before the intense adult years hit them, and they feel, I like to say that they feel a little demoralized by parenting, and they Feel like they didn't live up to this ideal that they had in their mind. And it's very, very hard to talk to women and say, it's okay, it's okay. You set yourself up as a mother to fail because you thought. You thought maybe you thought your children were that Victorian blob. And when they weren't, you didn't know what to do because that's the model you were following. And you haven't failed as a mother. You just haven't. It hasn't. Motherhood has not lived up to the fantasy that you were living under.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. The Victorian fantasy. Right. That we could be the spiritualizing, civilizing force if we were just the angel in the house and the perfect mother. Our husbands will be perfect men and our children will be perfect children. And that's not true.

[Thomas Banks]

And that is such a disservice to the mothers everywhere and to women everywhere and to men everywhere. And to me. I look at my role now as someone reaching out to the women, you know, kind of crawling to the end of their mothering years going, what happened? What went wrong? Why did. Why didn't this turn out? Why isn't this the beautiful picture? The thing is, it is a beautiful picture. It's just not the picture that we thought it was going to be.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. Well, I think one of the things we constantly are fighting against is this belief that we can go back to Eden.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

If we just. If I just. And I had the same thing. If I just had the perfect homeschool day, I just made all of our food from scratch. If I had chores, you know, it was always, if, if, if I can build heaven on earth in my home. And the answer is, you cannot.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. No. Utopianism is one of the biggest dangers that we face in our homes because it puts pressure on ourselves, it puts pressure on our children, and it puts pressure on our spouses.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I think that we need to be able to find the blessing in the days that don't go as planned. For me, I kept thinking my good days that I accomplished were the standard, and I should see that every day. And anytime I didn't see that, that was a failure in me. But that's not true. Once I realized that bad days is a normal and good part of the cycle of life, that changed everything for me.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I always feel like, you know, that's why it's a long haul. Maybe we're just dropping a drop of water in the bucket each day or maybe a piece of sand, and maybe sometimes the whole thing spills and we have to start all over. But it's just a slow. It's a slow movement towards something that in the end, it's God who has to give the increase.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

He's the one who does. You just drop your little pieces of sand in the bucket, and in the end, if you have a full bucket, you will know that. That there's no way you filled up that bucket. That something else happened entirely.

[Angelina Stanford]

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think, too, that we keep thinking our job as parents is to teach our children how to recraft Eden, but that is not the point. What we're trying to do is teach our children how to live with grace in a broken world. And that means the terrible days that you have where you failed, you are actually teaching something far more valuable.

[Thomas Banks]

Amen.

[Angelina Stanford]

I mean, and I have beaten myself up all over the place for those bad days and those hard seasons, but I look back and I think that my children actually learned something far more valuable.

[Thomas Banks]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

They learned that the days that beat you down, you can get back up again.

[Thomas Banks]

That's right. And I think that's what that. I think that's a good place to end. I think moms and dads and everyone who listens, you know that grace, the power of grace to overcome our failings is unlimited.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, amen to that. Well, we certainly appreciate you guys hanging in there with us today and want to remind you before we leave, though, to check out our Patreon and look into becoming one of our friends or fellows. And we thank our friends and fellows so much for their continued sponsorship of this podcast. We'd also like you to encourage you to subscribe, rate and review this podcast. So until next time, we will leave you with this poem by Thomas Banks. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Main Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[Cindy Rollins]

Vion by Siegfried Sassoon. They threw me from the gates. My matted hair was dank with dungeon wetness, my spent frame o'erlaid with marish agues everywhere, tortured by leaping pangs of frost and flame. So hideous was I that even Lazarus there in noisome rags arrayed and leprous shame beside me Set, had seemed full, sweet and fair, and looked on me with loathing. But one came who laid a cloak on me and brought me in tenderly to an hostel quiet and clean, used me with healing hands for all my needs. The mortal stain of my reputed sin, my state despised, and my defiled weeds he hath put by as though they had not been.