Q:
How come in Eishes Chayil it alludes to a woman who makes good business when you just said that the woman should be in the home raising children?
A:
This gentleman asks a good question. In the chapter of Eishes Chayil he praises a woman who sells certain things that she made.
And the answer is domestic arts are certainly praised. In those days, almost everyone manufactured in the home thread by spinning and they wove textiles. And that’s what the woman is praised for, for selling.
So she did these things in the privacy of her home. But when a woman has to go into an office, we have to realize the mixing of men and women, even though we’re accustomed to the idea, is a perilous thing. It won’t work!
Where women and men are together in an office it’s not going to work because nature will assert itself.
There was a certain yeshivah where they had a gentile bookkeeper in one office and there was a Jewish stenographer in another office. And the end was that they got married. And the shidduch took place in the office of the mesivta.
Now, so you say well had they both been Jews there’s no harm in getting married. But there are preludes to getting married and these preludes take place in the office.
The mixing of the sexes is a curse for humanity.
Now, as I said I realize that people are so acclimated to present day standards that some of them have lost the ability to sense this. But there’s no question from so many reports that come in, so many divorce proceedings, so many newspaper reports, so many trials, we see what happens in the office. When men have females working in their office then there are very frequently bound to be some bad results.
The institution of a private secretary in an office when a man is alone with a woman or even not alone – things take place all the time.
And therefore that’s a big objection, the mixing of the sexes. If women want to work in factories then you would remove this concern – the factories where only women work. But then she’s taken out of the home.
If a woman wants to go to school and she leaves her children with some babysitter, it’s not beneficial to the child. The best babysitter is not equivalent to the mother. Psychologically it’s the mother that has the most interest in protecting her baby. You know babies fall out of windows? Babies do all kinds of dangerous things. It’s the mother’s instinct that protects her children and the mother’s love that causes a child to develop with an even character. Otherwise there is a certain sourness in his nature because you don’t react to a strange woman as you do to your own mother.
There are many wrongs that result from the mother being away from the home.
And then of course the great problem of not wanting to have children. And they get a heter and they dodge the responsibilities and they end up by not having children. And that’s one of the biggest failures in life.
So when women deny themselves the career that was made for them, the career that will satisfy them most, the career that’s natural for them, then these people are just building up a future of unhappiness. For the moment they might deceive themselves, they are carried away by the current. There are a lot of such foolish people today who live an anti-social life, but eventually they are going to discover, these people, that you have to have your own home, your own husband and your own children and your own grandchildren.
Now life is never perfectly happy but if we follow the natural system that the Creator ordained for us, we have more opportunities, more chances to succeed in getting happiness than otherwise.
TAPE # 333 (October 9, 1980)
