Women can choose to work or not, the same as a man can choose. If the terms of employment, compensation or ownership of property are not agreeable or secure, there is little incentive to work. No father wants his daughter to be faced with either marriage or death, so he will fight to secure her rights over the fruits of her labor.
The problem comes in marriage and the imbalance of power. All partnerships, whether intimate or platonic are fragile. If all legal rights are held equal, the woman has more power in the relationship than the man, not only over her body but over the minds of the children and sympathy of the community. This is how it came to be that men's rights are seen superior to the woman's in a marriage. To maintain order, the woman must yield to the man. It is in his nature to preserve and provide for what is his. It is in his interest to defend his property, and if the woman siezes this through her wry ways, he loses his incentive to provide. Interfere with this 'sacred' institution then the family and subsequently the population will collapse as will women's rights.
I think he's missing the larger point that what wifely submission looks like, in practice, is largely up to the husband. She's supposed to be in submission to him, not to some bitter rando on the interwebs.
For a lot of men, their wife is their greatest confident and the person they trust most, so removing women from public life actually hurts those men. Wives are often business partners or stewards, after all. Or she helps him get business contacts or he uses her income to support his investments or business. Some local farmers have wives with day jobs because those jobs come along with family health-care plans, for example, and they can take out loans against that income to purchase machinery, etc.
If you hide all wives in the house, you take away his greatest economic asset.
Yeah, kids really change the dynamic, but kids don't stay small forever, and some couples can't have kids, so it's important that Christians remember that subsidiarity is a worthy goal. The decision should be made at the lowest-practical level, and that's the home, in this situation.
The whole idea, that we carve such rules into stone at a societal level, in order to keep husbands in their rightful place as the head of house, is schizophrenic. He can't be the head, if all he says is whatever someone has decided he will say. Then he's just a figurehead. He has to be free to make decisions and respond to the environment.
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