Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

pression of a refined family culture; working in the garden, tinkering as a hobby, music and
social life, as well as family celebrations are all examples.
3. Employment of Married Women Outside the Home
This is connected with the loss of function of the family, partly as its effect, partly as its
cause. Even in the pre-industrial age, the woman in no way stood only under the model of
wife and mother. Rather, she also collaborated in the agricultural, handcrafting, or commercial
family business (cf. Prov 31:10-31). Today equality of rights between the genders in the
school and the professional training system and the liberation of man from heavy physical
drudgery brought about by technical progress, as well as the continual increase of jobs suited
especially for women in the 'tertiary realm' of services, has led to the fact that the incorporation
of women and girls into professional and working life is almost taken for granted. Even if
many things indicate that in the professional life of women outside the home two centers of
gravity seem to be developing -one before marriage, the other after age forty-five -numerous
married women are still gainfully employed in the actual years of motherhood also (from age
twenty-two to age forty). From the United States it is reported that it was once the custom to
give up one's position upon marrying. Today the boss asks: „Are you taking a honeymoon, or
will you be here again on Monday?“ In 1972, there were 15.5 million married women of fifteen
years of age or more in the Federal Republic of Germany. Of these, 2.6 million without
children were gainfully employed, and the number of married women with children under
eighteen years of age who were gainfully employed came to 3.1 million. Although comparable
numbers of married women had changed only slightly by 1981 and remained at the same
order, the number of married women without children who were gainfully employed rose to
2.9 million and those with children to 3.2 mil- lion. The fact that in the year 1981, 1.4 million
married women who were gainfully employed and living together with their families worked
forty hours a week and more is not without harmful consequence. The wife is very much
overtaxed when her work place is far away from the family residence and she is put under
time pressure because of her duties as housewife and mother. In numerous families, the married
woman who is gainfully employed performs an amount of work, particularly if she has to
take care of children, that far exceeds the exertion of husbands on behalf of profession and
family.
The most recent investigations make clear that even today many married women, particularly
younger ones, who have to contribute to the family income for the procurement (contribution
to the building cost) and furnishing of a home, go to work out of necessity. Others do so for a
variety of reasons: because they wish to complete the dowry and to make the home more
comfortable, because the car has been costing too much money, because they want to do more
in the holidays they have together, because they like their job, because they got used to earning
their own money before they were married, and because those women who are not employed
but raise their children as housewives ruin their old-age pension by doing so. On October
21, 1945, Pope Pius XII warned that, when the mother goes to work, the home, which
was „perhaps already dark and cramped in its- elf... becomes perhaps even more miserable
through the lack of care.“ The family is not together for meals nor for common prayer. „What
is left of family life here? And what appeal can it still have for the children?“ How can the
wish come alive in a growing daughter „to become someday herself a lady of the house, i.e. a
housewife in a happy, blooming, and worthy family?“
Pope John Paul II declared: „The true advancement of women requires that clear recognition
be given to the value of their maternal and family role, by comparison with all other public
roles and all other professions.“ The Church will therefore tirelessly demand „that the work of
women in the home be recognized and respected by all in its irreplaceable value.“ The opinion
that „honors women more for their work outside the home than for their work within the
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