manhood and the problem of wealth

Excerpt from Proverb31Dad blog:

Sadly, Christian men seem to stay generally bored. Answering the call of consumerist society to realize your manhood by buying a motorcycle is not the answer, and honestly our evangelical self-help gurus are still missing the source of the problem. I think Chesterton may be on to at least one significant part of it in What’s Wrong with the World. He calls it “the problem of wealth.” I will quote at length because I can’t say it better:

There is a plutocratic assumption behind the phrase “Why should woman be economically dependent upon man?” The answer is that among poor and practical people she isn’t; except in the sense in which he is dependent upon her…it is surely quite clear that this modern notion that woman is a mere “pretty clinging parasite,” “a plaything,” etc., arose through the somber contemplation of some rich banking family, in which the banker at least went to the city to pretend to do something, while the banker’s wife went to the park and did not pretend to do anything at all. A poor man and his wife are a business partnership.[6]

The clincher is this, “of all the modern notions generated by mere wealth the worst is this: the notion that domesticity is dull and tame.”[7]

Advertisement