Jessica Valenti has the story of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary's plans to start offering a degree in homemaking. It seems that the "biblical model for the home and family" will be on the agenda.
« The Money Train | Main | Credit and Class War »
The Prestigious MRS Degree
21 Aug 2007 12:02 pm
Comments (50)
Could everyone please stop sniggering? That's not nice.
no tim, it's the "following Paul more closely than Jesus" category.
Again.
Talk about good money after bad.
But this employer will not be swayed. I'm restricting my applicant pool to those with a Master's or higher.
Undergrads, however, are free to intern.
This only becomes a worry when graduates with this degree end up with law degrees from Regent University or some other right-wing eduplex and then get hired at DOJ and other spots in the federal beauracracy.
I must say that it is shocking to see how many people from ideological warehouses like Regent and Patrick Henry wind up with plum jobs. Check the register. We don't need a right-wing parallel education system. The system we have is bad enough. Look, for example, at the folks who right for TNR. How many are from Harvard? It seems like Chait sticks out because he had the temerity to attend Michigan.
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary + degree in homemaking = revenue generation
Jesus, Tim, the problem should be obvious. There's nothing wrong with women who choose to be homemakers. The problem is that a university feels the need to issue degrees in the subject, so that they can generate a supply of prospective housewives for their male students without going to the trouble of actually educating women in the process.
You, too, can pay to send your daughter to school for an MRS Degree that gives her no actual career options!
Pretty funny: an academic degree covering material I expect that the average 18-year-old woman in the 19th century had a complete mastery over.
"Following Paul more closely than Jesus", what does that mean?
I guess this story is another excuse to feel superior to the rubes. Look, this isn't about 12 year olds being forced into arranged marriages. If a girl is 18, she's old enough to make the decision on whether to go to college or join the Army or move to Seattle and take up softball.
Its a free country, and people make their own choices. If this is the path a consenting adults choose to find happiness, then I say, let your freak flag fly ladies of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary!
> "Following Paul more closely than Jesus",
> what does that mean?
Paul preached submission of wife to husband, whereas Jesus said no such thing (and perhaps the opposite).
Cranky
. The problem is that a university feels the need to issue degrees in the subject, so that they can generate a supply of prospective housewives for their male students without going to the trouble of actually educating women in the process.
Great. If women are being forced into these programs, we should totally stop it. Then we'll send the troops on to kill the plastic surgeons and destroy the the lingerie stores. Viva the whatever.
Or we could accept that there are people who piss their money away on things that are worse than useless, and that's just going to be true in a free society.
"Biblical model for home and family..."
Like when Delilah cut off Samson's hair and rendered him powerless.
Sure, it's a free society, and these young women are free to attend Homemaker University.
And I'm free to call the people who promote this a bunch of cro-magnon fuckwits. Ain't freedom grand?
People really need to learn the distinction between "X is weird and problematic" and "people should be prevented from doing X." No one thinks we should stop universities from offering these degrees, SCMT, we just think in a better world they probably wouldn't.
So what? If people want to do that with their lives, that would seem to be their right.
As Linda Hirshman points out (and Matthew, IIRC, agrees), such a choice is a betrayal of progressive feminism and ought to be condemned. A woman's place is in the office, not in the home.
Beowulf & Tim,
I'm no longer allowed to find these sorts of stories hilarious?
Well you'll take my bemused contempt for the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary when you pry it from my cold dead hands!
Do they offer remedial classes? I'm thinking of sending my wife there.
LaFollette Progressive: Couldn't such a degree lend some support to the progressive cause of legitimating, valuing, and compensating women for otherwise unpaid work?
BTW: In super-prosperous communities like the one I live in, women ditching careers to raise the kids and keep the home has been in vogue for some time. It's an income thing: If you can afford it, it's quite desirable.
"Home ec" was a college major at least as late as the 40s.
Sure, "Home ec" was a degree. But at least it included economics.
> "Home ec" was a college major at least as
> late as the 40s.
Home Economics was still a department at the University of [Big State] in 1983. Although it was transforming into Food Science and Hotel/Restaurant Management programs, the enrollment was still 95% women. Which worked out quite nicely for one shy and somewhat geeky guy I knew who figured this out...
Cranky
This means the Extreme Right has cashed in its "liberal arts degrees are worthless" chips.
Economy comes from the Greek word oikonomia, which means "house management". It originally applied to the efficient management of a home, business, or community. Home Economics is simply a return to Greek origins.
Laugh away -- I'm laughing too -- but also remember that being a housewife in the sense they have in mind really is complicated, difficult work, especially once children enter the picture.
And I'm free to call the people who promote this a bunch of cro-magnon fuckwits.
And the wingers are free to use that kind of self-indulgence to promote the characterization of liberals as elitist pricks who despise "real Americans" and are enemies of traditional values. And round and around we go....
Matt seems to have ignored his neo-con like brown nosing swipe at Glenn problem. Having baked himself into a corner maybe he shouldn't make fun of his soon to be rightist employers because i now look at him as a future tool.
It is unclear from the press releases, but I assume this is through the College at Southwestern, the liberal arts arm of SBTS. The other schools are all ministry related and accredited through Association of Theological Seminaries.
The College at Southwestern is accredited through SACS (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools) to award bachelor's degrees. This is not a fake accreditation agency. All of the major southern schools (e.g. Duke) get their accreditation from this agency. They are all reviewed every ten years, and SACS takes its job very seriously. Any student who enrolls in this will have to meet the general degree requirements of the bachelors (e.g. they could fail out because they cannot pass a math course).
What this means is that, if you are pro-liberal arts education in general (because it "teaches you to think", etc...) then this program will offer that (modulo whatever you think of the quality of SBTS). There are many employers that just want a general college degree, and do not care what it is. So this degree will probably be no more worthless than many other terminal bachelors degrees (i.e. not continuing on to graduate school) in the liberal arts.
This is news? Such degrees have been around forever.
The Germans even invented a fancy word for it :)
Ökotrophology
Yeah, I know I should express some liberal outrage at this article, but it actually reminds me just how much this whole model of barefooted, stay-at-home motherhood has been relegated to nothingness. I remember when folks like Pat Buchanan used to be talking about mothers returning to the kitchen. These days, none of the top GOP candidates would be caught dead saying things like that for a few reasons, not the least of which is because the one breadwinner model doesn't work any more, considering how parents are struggling to make ends meet.
Although I do believe that adults need to spend a lot of time with their children, I also believe that a society in which men are the breadwinners is going to be one in which men have most of the clout and women aren't going to be in control of their own destinies. Some might read this article and see Christianists trying to roll back the clock. I see the last gasp of an idea that has fallen big time from the mainstream, and I'm not that sad to see it go.
it's
Ökotrophologie
of course :~)
"Ökotrophologie"
I suppose that's from the Greek, öko for "wife" and troph for "trophy."
Couldn't such a degree lend some support to the progressive cause of legitimating, valuing, and compensating women for otherwise unpaid work?
Hmmm.
Interesting.
If such a degree were issued from a campus with a neutral or even liberal track record, I might be inclined to stow my snark and concede this wasn't an attempt to roll back the clock.
The question is, would a prospective "employer" truly be more inclined to "hire" said baccalaureate over another, "less educated" applicant. My sources say no. These things run deeper. (Unless they're also offering degrees in marriage as well.)
If such a degree were available to men, how cool is the first male grad to get his MRS Degree? That's some serious gender equality there, homes. (Literally.) Talk about your Lieutenant Feminist Third Class.
I have a feeling that my grandmother, who was considered "the educated one" in her town for having made it to 7th grade, or so, could have gone toe-to-toe in homemaking skills with anyone with a B.A. in homemaking from this school.
what does "homemaking" even mean these days? What would one teach in a major like that? I like to tease my husband about the Little House on the Prairie books, and how Ma and Pa did so much by hand (it sounds back-breaking, actually) and why can't he just whittle pegs to build things instead of using power tools etc. But even that was mostly a lot of repetitive work--the sort of thing you started learning as a young child and perfected through practice.
But we have a lot of options for the "home" these days. As has always been the case, if you have enough money, you can hire people to do all the work for you, while you direct things. Or you could be a "back to the lander" and do as much as possible by hand (speaking of which, I just tried making my own butter recently--easy and yummy). In some families the husband tracks finances, in others it's the wife. In some families the wife does most of the cooking, in others the husband, and others rely on take-out. etc.
I suppose we're meant to laugh--and anyway, such an institution probably has a pretty rigid model of who does what in a marriage and maybe THAT is what they are teaching, but still...
Sleeping with one of those girls would probably be boring enough that they think they have to get this degree. Either that or it would be all anal, all the time.
"And I'm free to call the people who promote this a bunch of cro-magnon fuckwits. Ain't freedom grand?"
LaFollette, that doesn't sound very progressive of you. A couple of questions:
1) Aren't we Cro-Magnons, essentially? This is why folks usually use the name of their extinct contemporaries, the Neanderthals, as an epithet to connote stupidity or primitiveness.
2) Is a bachelors in homemaking so bad? It sounds like it would be a lot more useful than a degree in English. A hundred years ago, an educated woman wouldn't need to get a degree in either -- she'd already know how how to be a homemaker, and she would have already been familiar with great works of English literature (though perhaps not some of the useless theorizing that hadn't been invented yet).
Maybe you should reconsider your disdain for homemaking. There's nothing trivial about it: for much of American history, it was a matter of life and death knowing how to feed your family during lean times. If you read The Millionaire Next Door, you'd know the key role many wives have played in the accumulation of wealth among America's millions of everyday millionaires (i.e., the ones for whom the most common car is the F-150). According to the authors' extensive surveys, it was usually the wives who handled the family budgeting, which is an aspect of homemaking.
Homemaking: valuable
Degree in homemaking from Southern Baptist Degree Mill: not so much.
I can't understand anyone paying money to attend such a class. Even if you believe everything that'll be taught there is essential information, why not just join a southern baptist congregation and get all the info for free? Is acreditation in homemaking really that valuable? Are there potential husbands who'd be impressed by such a degree but not by avid participation in "young women" groups at your local church?
When I was at Vanderbilt (not a religious school) in the late-1990s, it was widely understood on campus that women in certain education-related majors were really pursuing their MRS degree. (Even though they were in the ed school, they all studied in the BioMedical, law, and business school libraries in order to meet men in those professional schools--the divinity school, by that point, having been taken over wholly by lesbians.)
There's also a history among some conservative Protestant denominations of sending women to seminary for a Master's degree in Christian Education (or sometimes in music), with the express purpose of marrying a man who was pursuing a divinity degree in preparation for the ministry. Many of these denominations essentially restricted the ministry to married (and widowed) men, based on the belief that the ministry required a commitment of the whole family, and the wife needed training for ministry as much as the husband did (but of course she couldn't actually be a minister!). In light of that history (which, for all the double standards, did reflect a certain level of respect for women's intelligence and value in ministry), the idea that Southern Baptist Theological Seminary thinks even an education or Christian education degree (both of which have some practical use if it turns out "God's plan" for the woman doesn't include marriage to a man who can support her and their children) isn't sufficiently respectful of "biblical gender roles," is one of the more depressing things I've heard on this front in a long time.
Sort of reminds me how all the sorority girls at an unnamed state college major in "journalism", "mass communications", or "art history" while looking for a would-be doctor or lawyer-in-the-making to hook up with.
And really, what is this set of courses going to teach that one wouldn't already have learned from participating in 4-H or getting taught at home by Mom? I had to endure 1/3 of a school year in high school in the mandated "Home Economics" class and was bored silly.
Is it really THAT bad to major in something that might possibly end up provide one with a paying job if a) you don't manage to catch that all-important MRS degree, or b) your husband decides to run off with a hot-blooded wench from the other side of the tracks?
Hey, people. This is Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary we are talking about. At least vacuums, dishwashers, washing machines, and irons actually exist. That's more than you can say about 98% of what they are teaching.
Religion is what dumb people do when the NASCAR's not on the TV. Hyuck hyuck. Where's my sister? Oh well, better settle for a possum.
Every. Inch. Deserved. Fuck your Christ, redneck scum.
While hip urban lefties are having their chuckles at the expense of the ladies majoring in homemaking, these women will have 3-4 children each while lefty women will have an abortion or two, and maybe one live child. So get ready for a more religious, more conservative America when their kids become old enough to vote.
Since white urban lefties barely reproduce (and become conservative half the time when the do), and the plagues of AIDS, incarceration, and homicide constrain black population growth, the only hope for a lefty majority in the future is to import more Mexicans. But the country is clearly against that now.
On the scale of requisite intellectual rigor, I'm guessing the homemaking degree at issue is likely to place no worse than present-day Poli Sci, English, Education, Communications, Journalism and Ethnic/Women's Studies degrees. And, unlike the recipients of the aforementioned academic wastepaper, there's at least a decent chance the freshly minted B.A. Humanities (Homemaking) grads will know how to cook.
Susie, political views are not inherited. If they were, I'd own slaves.
Anyone who needs four years to learn how to not starve to death in their own kitchen is probably a fuckwit.
Running a home is difficult, time consuming, and physically exhausting (w/kids), but it isn't exactly mentally taxing.
"Susie, political views are not inherited."
Actually, they are, about 80% of the time:
Political scientists have long found that 4 out of 5 people with a party preference grow up to vote the way their parents voted. In fact, while many people experience a temporary rejection of their parents' politics in very early adulthood, virtually nothing is more predictive of your political ideology than that of your parents -- it's more of a determining factor than income, education or any other societal yardstick.
"Domestic Engineering" 101
Let's talk texts: _Home Comforts_ by Cheryl Mendelson - too intellectually rigorous (she quotes Auden!) for SBTS's program?
Or profs: despite her white-collar criminal past, Martha Stewart should have tenure in no time with her publication record.
white urban lefties barely reproduce (and become conservative half the time when the do)
Fascinating. Combine this with the 80% of kids who follow in their parents political footsteps, and it seems that your inexorable logic dictates that liberals would have gone extinct a long time ago.
The SFGate article linked is clearly a riff off of this Arthur Brooks WSJ op-ed (click my name for the link).
Brooks writes
Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents
He does not cite this (he refers to a giant data set but no actual calculations or studies), but of course we should realize that at about a third of voters do not actually have an identifiable party preference (I would cite this but don't know how to embed links). Other points off the top of my head are (1) that some voters change their minds from election to election, not many but they are the ones who swing elections; (2) people's parents do not always vote alike; (3) American conservative attitudes on, say, race are considerably more "liberal" than they were 40 or 60 or 100 years ago, and this has nothing to do with fertility rates or parental party identification whatsoever; and (4) is there any reason to think that the 20% who defect do so in a symmetric way.
Given that Brooks is the same guy who's argued that far lefties are nastier than far righties and that conservatives are more generous than liberals, I'm not inclined to give him too much benefit of the doubt.
jxflpkbn zgpyic uyzhtxe ximl ourjvys lxnt oybaiwtjq
Comments closed September 04, 2007.
| 
Heads in the Sand
So what? If people want to do that with their lives, that would seem to be their right. Are these stories supposed to fall into the "oh, the barbarians!" category?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | August 21, 2007 12:17 PM