Notes: This article is written about homemaking wives of able-bodied, able-minded husbands who are seeking to live the Fascinating Womanhood lifestyle, not about widows and single mothers.

This article is not to be taken as meaning that a wife should do nothing, that she should be lazy and spend the day blowing her husband’s money and so forth.  A wife, mother, and homemaker who is a Fascinating Woman is extraordinarily busy and contributes greatly to her family’s economy in many ways.  To read more about this type of woman, click here to read “The New Women’s Movement: We’re Coming Home”; if you’ve never read it or are curious as to what type of homemaker I am referring to in this post, please do click the link and read the article.

There is information and a link at the end for women who work for others (a company, etc.) from home.

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        A lot of young homemakers (homemaker meaning a women who does not work outside) feel like to be real Proverbs Thirty-One women they must run a home business.  There are some very important things to consider before doing this…

        If a homemaker has younger children, an abundance of energy, and feels that she can successfully manage creating things from home to sell without falling behind in her duties as an outstanding wife, mother, and homemaker, then no problem; it would be wonderful if she created things and donated the money made from them to charity. But if she’s younger and just doesn’t feel like she can “do it all” as far as concerns keeping up a home, raising a family, and working from home, then she shouldn’t.  She should wait until she is older.  No where in Proverbs thirty-one does it mention her age when she sold things. No amount of money from any job inside or outside of the home can fix a neglected home life. It’s not worth it to covet after money or bragging rights for being a Proverbs thirty-one woman at the cost of family health, well-being, and a happy home.

A Damaging Trap

        It is not good to sell things from home because one’s family needs the money. This is a horrid trap! A woman can get trapped into working from home because the family grows dependent upon the money just like many women who feel trapped into working outside the home due to the need for the extra income.  Click here to learn about how a Fascinating Woman can be of real help to her husband if more money is needed in the family. 

        To have to count on a wife’s income from a home job does many detrimental things. It can easily lead to marital spats in the home of a woman who tries to live the Fascinating Womanhood lifestyle, because at some point a wife is going to feel like her husband isn’t pulling his whole share of the “provider” role that God has given him. It also easily leads the woman to take on masculine characteristics. It can easily make a wife see her husband as less of a man. It can and does make a husband see his wife in a co-provider, more male, role.  Role blurring in any amount, unless there’s an emergency, is detrimental to the Fascinating Marriage.  

Damage to Masculine Pride

        Worst of all, when a wife works from home and uses the money for her family, it chips away at a man’s very sensitive masculine pride, he feels like less of a man when he or his wife has to count on her income to make ends meet or to have things the family needs and even desires; like he’s just not man enough to provide for his family himself and needs his wife to come to his rescue, to protect him from working harder, rather than him being chivalrous and protecting and providing for her.  The loss of masculine pride leads to so many other marital losses and is the most important thing to avoid in marriage. 

        Another important consideration regarding the effects of a wife’s business income on a husband is that this can actually handicap his development as a man.  To be a successful financial provider for his family, a husband needs to assume this full responsibility and learn how to handle it well.  He simply can’t do this if his own wife is lifting this load for and from him.  Many wonder, in our day and age, why so many American men are so irresponsible, immature, and blow money – the answer is because women have let them know that they don’t need them as providers, that they can provide for themselves.  Thus, men fail to develop the skills, savvy, and even drive to fully provide for their families.  This is such a tremendous loss to the man, because nothing can compare to the feeling a man has who excels at fully providing for his family, and nothing compares to the masculine feelings and development that occurs when a man is driven to provide for the flesh of his own flesh and bone of his own bone – his family; this is how a man becomes a man. 

Damage to a Man’s Development

        The tremendous and sad losses to a man’s family when he fails to develop as their provider are many, as well.  His own wife and children may see him as weak, uncaring, irresponsible; as a cruel, unchivalrous man who doesn’t care if his wife is not holding-up well because she is trying to lovingly, devotedly care for her family while under stress to make money to provide for the family - children see their mother’s health and happiness deteriorating and their father doing nothing to help her.  A haggard wife is hardly one to be wholesomely proud of, and even harder for a man to look at, because he has to accept that he has had a part in doing this to her; seeing this can destroy many finer things in a husband and his wife, thus many marriages really suffer, and misery ensues.

Damage to Widowhood

        My husband has said for years that it is far better for a family to live on the husband’s income. He explains that if, God forbid, the male provider died, the wife can work (until she remarries – if she has no one to care for her, and her husband had no life insurance policy – it is definitely better to prepare for this so a wife doesn’t have to leave home to work, but that’s another article) as the family is accustomed to living on one income. If the wife has worked, even from home, while her husband is alive, and the family has counted on that money to make ends meet, then she will be much more handicapped and in a much rougher spot making up for two incomes if her husband dies. This is just one more very good reason not to count a wife’s at-home income as part of the bill-paying money! There are plenty of poor and needy people left on the earth, plenty of good, solid charities that could use a work-at-home wife’s money.  If a wife chooses to work from home, let the money she earns all go to charity.  Remember, the Proverbs thirty-one woman reached out her hands and stretched her arms out to the poor and needy.

Damage to Heartfelt Ministries 

        On this same subject, it’s easy for women take something that they are interested in and really have a heart to do, such as reach out to other women, then start selling things or making money through what was originally a heartfelt ministry or the sharing of information in love and care. At some point, many often get so interested in making money that their heartfelt desires to help turn into commercial efforts. This absolutely has an effect upon their message and what they are trying to share because even if only a little bit, the focus changes from God to money, from helping fellow womankind to coveting other people’s money.  To become greedy is like being diagnosed with an often impossible-to-cure case of cancer, it can and does easily consume and ruin many women. 

Damage to One’s Health

        Be aware that having a business isn’t all fun. There is a tremendous amount of mental work, figuring, and actual work to be done in working from home. To try to run a business lock, stock, and barrel, i.e. doing all or most of the labour, keeping the business books, dealing with customers, all takes a lot of time and often induces stress. If one is already a nervous woman, has depression or other mental health issues, or is already tired or has enough to do, then don’t do it. Wait until your health is radiant, your home is running like a top, and you’ve got abundant inner strength.

Legal Damage

        In today’s litigious society, there is a lot of business management and business law knowledge that a woman must know to keep herself and her business safe from lawsuits and even jail time.  For example, a woman could break a law unknowingly about safety in her state by selling little girls’ nightgowns that don’t have a warning label, a child could wear the gown to bed and, because the outfit didn’t state that it wasn’t flame retardant, get burned very badly in a house fire.  A woman’s husband won’t be able to protect her from going to jail or being sued if she is found to be at fault, and she very likely could be.  An ounce of caution is worth a pound of cure – a woman running her own business must take it very, very seriously or risk losing a great deal more than any income she will ever make.  Taking on this big responsibility does change a woman, and while her children are young, it can take quite a bit of fun and light-heartedness from her personality, which can be a real loss in interacting with her young ones.  Again, it is so much better to wait until one is older to be involved in making money from home.  By the time a woman’s children are grown or near grown, a woman will have naturally matured and become more responsible, making the transition into selling things much, much smoother and easier.

Damage to Homelife

        It’s also important to realize that in today’s day and age the majority of young women haven’t learned a great deal about running a home, being wives, and raising children. Many have to spend years studying, applying, and working hard to become good at this, the most important job, for any married woman – to have a rock-solid marriage, a happy healthy family (including her own health and happiness!), and to run a functional home. This is quite a job, and quite enough of a job for the majority of young women. Give yourself time, be solidly on your feet and firmly planted in the right spot before considering working from home. In so doing, you will most likely have the mental and physical health to successfully make money from home in your later years and be on solid enough financial footing that the money can be used to really make the world a better place rather than damaging your family.

Damage to Family Finances

        If a woman takes loans or goes into debt to finance her own business, she will have that burden on her plus the burden being stuck working if she decides that she doesn’t want to; she will feel like she has to work to pay-off the debt even if her family and her are suffering by her having made a decision that she regrets.  Expenses can easily get out of control and she can find herself suffering the ill-effects of having bills pile-up.

Damage from Working from Home

        Many women consider working from home, even part-time, for an outside employer, thinking that this will be like “having their cake and eating it, too” or easy money, but find that this employment brings with it many of the problems listed above, plus problems women who work outside of the home face, plus disruption to their households and that it makes their homes far less of an oasis from the workworld, makes their homes feel like the troubled workworld instead of their peaceful, family homes.  Click here to read a link about just some of the realities of working from home.  Many of these things would be applicable to running one’s own home business; as stated before, there’s a lot more to running a home business than just making things and making money from them.

The Twenty-Year Rule 

        Mrs. Andelin wrote of the ‘twenty year rule’ in Fascinating Womanhood.  This rule means that it takes a wife, mother, and homemaker, on average, about twenty-years of experience before she is mature and has enough experience to pursue adding anything other than a little bit of community service onto her life. 

In Conclusion

         It is commonplace now, even in many religious circles, to insist that every wife needs to bring in some sort of income by working from, or outside of, their homes, to help provide for her family.  This is erroneous teaching.  God created men to provide for their families and wives to be a grand investor of his part of his income through investing in their family’s total health, well-being, and future.

         A wife can actually make the family more money, as a homemaker, by carefully taking every penny her husband provides her, investing it, and multiplying it, than many women can through years, even decades, or their entire lives, of working outside or inside of the home for someone else’s money.  An example of this would be gardening.  The husband’s income is used by the wife to buy very carefully selected heirloom vegetable seeds; the wife doesn’t waste her husband’s money on a hodge podge of seeds that might work, but invests in the right kind of seeds with knowledge she has gained through studying gardening in their locale.  She then works with her husband to prepare a garden to grow the seeds in, plants and tends to them with non-toxic, healthy-for-her-family and healthy-for-the-garden fertilizers, and has food in the summer that is abundantly healthy and unique to her own family’s yard.  She has extra to share with neighbours and those who could use the healthy food, like the poor and widows in her community.  She has enough to preserve for the upcoming winter, and she has seeds to save for the years to come because she purchased non-GMO heirlooms.  She, her children, and her children’s children will have heirloom seeds in abundance, and if God so blesses them and their gardens, will never know hunger.  Her family’s health and dental bills are reduced because of the truth in the old saying “you are what you eat”, for the majority of us, our health is directly tied to what we put into our bodies; the better the food, the better one’s health (and energy).  Eating like this builds health, which is helpful and wonderful presently, but in the future, as well.  As she and her husband age, they do so in good health, as do their children.  This saves not only them, but often fellow taxpayers a lot of money on healthcare.

        Gardening is just one example, there are a whole lot more investments that are comparable in inestimable value.  A wife can’t, and shouldn’t, be expected to be such a wise, thoughful investor (it takes time to study and implement such investments),  as well as keep the home clean, be an outstanding and wholly devoted wife, oversee the children’s education, plan and prepare nutritious meals, give community service, raise well-mannered and well-behaved children who don’t lack attention, be the family nurse, and the many other things she is created for if she has to take on the role of providing the family’s income or even part of it.  To expect that of a wife or oneself is unfair.  Let the husbands provide the living for our families and let the wives keep the home – when both do this, both thrive, both grow, and both create a marvelous life together and for their children that is comparable in true riches, goodness, and love to heaven on earth.