Ex Domo

It’s fashionable in some socially conservative circles to lament the dangers of mothers working outside the home. I’ve even seen one conservative SJW link milestones in American social decline to the precise year that the share of mothers working outside the home reached a majority. 

What about the dangers of fathers working outside the home? 

As Daniel Rodgers points out in The Work Ethic in Industrial America, up to the mid 1800s most manufacturing in America was done in home workshops, even within larger cities. And that doesn’t even touch on the farming work done by most American families at the time. 

Up until the last 150 years, even in the West, most fathers worked in or near the home most of the time, with children joining their fathers upon reaching an appropriate age. Even among the upper crust professionals, there wasn’t necessarily a hard line separating work and family.  Ron Chernow notes that Alexander Hamilton would often bring his older sons with him when traveling for work. 

The dangers of fathers working outside the home are largely the same as for mothers. First, it creates heavy pressure for the father to conform himself to the standards, values, habits, and even language of the people he spends most waking hours with, especially when those people are his source of income. Dante notes that Italians who began traveling to France for business in the late 1200s walked into all kinds of temptations, and brought those temptations home with them. 

Second, it is far harder to maintain a strong family unit when the head is largely absent, with his family time artificially restricted to nights and weekends. Is it coincidental that family dissolution and destruction of tradition in the West picked up steam in the generations immediately following the trend of fathers working in factories or offices away from the family? Or that this trend was exacerbated in the years following the interstate highway system and rise in lengthy commuting?

The norm of a father’s work being done exclusively in an environment distant from his family surrounded by people with no connection to his family is foreign to the human experience, with very limited exceptions throughout history. Even in the case of military action, few societies had standing armies that kept men stationed away from the family long-term. Most military service was sporadic or seasonal.

If there is one good thing to come from the covid madness, it is an opportunity to return to the healthier, traditional norm of fathers more often working in proximity to their families. “The office” is a construct of the industrial managerial mindset (often warned against and even condemned by the Church) that has not stood the test of time.