In October, Baylor Professor Elizabeth Corey published an article in First Things, in which she argued that career and motherhood have “no happy harmony.” She invited me to write a response for the December issue, which you can read here.
Any thoughts?
Having All That Matters 
Bethany, I understand what you’re saying, but I have to agree with Elizabeth Corey’s take. I remember reading it last month and thinking, “finally someone has the gumption to say these things.” Corey is looking at the orientation toward career, which in actuality is different from the orientation toward work per se. I think that is the key! My two cents.
So would you say this is gender specific? (Haven’t men always – especially since the industrial revolution – been trying to intergrate career and fatherhood?)
The answer is three pronged:
a) No, men haven’t always tried to integrate career and fatherhood because cultural expectations and ideas concerning how a man related to his family and to his children in particular were different.
b) Again I stress there is a difference between career and work. And for that matter how different socioeconomic classes view career and a job. The idea of “work” is more theoretical. Intrinsic within career is investment of time in education and advancement in that career through long hours, extra education, experience, networking etc. All of these are time intensive and indeed self-culture oriented.
c) Yes, in some ways it is gender specific, if for no other reason than the hard reality that it is woman who has been vested with the ability to bear children. And this is something Protestants in particular find difficult, because fecundity makes us a little nervous.
Although women have worked in one form or another since the dawn of time, there has not always been this thing we call career. It is this, which I believe Corey addresses well.
I always appreciate your questions and sharpening, Bethany! Keep it up! :-)
Luma, Thank you for your kindness and thoughtfulness. I still think the most fundamental distinction in this discussion is between God’s original intention and sins’s distorting effect, not between motherhood and career. I’m going to email you a much longer email to discuss more thoroughly your *great* insights, but here I will say that I think it is important to distinguish between descriptive and normative. How you define career, I think, is descriptive; it is how things are and it includes the fallen nature of those things. That is definitely important to see. Yet that is not all there is to see. In the creation-fall-redemption framework, we have eyes to see what career might be like apart from fall. In other words, I don’t think how you define career is normative, that is, how it might be. Bethany (email coming)
Seems like you bull’seyed (sp?) it. The need for living Gospel- infused lives. Versus the seeking of some perfect self-fulfilling life, a pursuit of the dog chasing its tail.
I’ve been meaning to reach out to you and Andrew! Be looking for an email!
The term “career” is so loaded with secular (?), Western-centric baggage, I wonder whether that’s where this conversation gets so hung up. There seems to be a measure of human-directed choice in it, whereas words like “work” are far more neutral. As a single Christian woman who at the time felt guilty about having found success and meaning in the corporate world (while also feeling desperate to be a wife and mother because I was taught I wasn’t fully a woman without those things), I was careful to never describe what I did as my career. It was my job. Sadly, when I tried to return to it as a now married mother of three, I experienced the exact opposite of the environment you describe – a brutal workplace where motherhood was resented and round the clock work (regardless of impact) was rewarded. So I “retired” -a word here in Sillicon Valley that has some cache when you’re in your early forties, rather than “quit to stay home with my kids.” There are two sides to the balance Professor Carey describes – the side of the one needing it, and the side of the organization for which you work being willing to grant it.