Finding Contentment: A Woman’s True Fulfillment
By Elizabeth Prata
SYNOPSIS
I highlight recurring themes of discontent among women throughout history. Citing examples from contemporary figures, the essay stresses the importance of accepting one’s roles and challenges the notion that fulfillment lies beyond traditional duties. True happiness is found in gratitude and contentment- in Christ.
I was destined for great things, my mother promised. Women can do anything, my mother said. We should be feminists, my mother urged. All in our family members are successful- entrepreneurs, professors, businessmen, doctors. So that was proof.
I was indeed on that trajectory when Christ interrupted my plans, humbled them, humbled me, and plucked me from the secular notion of success and began the long road of transforming my mind into acceptance of Christian success.
It took a long while of shaving, sharpening, and altering before I ceased to yearn for the worldly conception of fame, honor, and prosperity. Perhaps that is why I’m so sensitive to unsuitable female Christian yearning. Perhaps there are still vestiges of the old yearnings in me still. Likely both.
We read of so-called Bible teacher Beth Moore’s yearning for opportunities for leadership she lamented would never come her way, so she quit seminary.
1988:
“After a short time of making the trek across Houston while my kids were in school, of reading the environment and coming to the realization of what my opportunities would and would not be, I took a different route.” (source).
YOU SHALLNOT COVET what the Lord has not given you.
Yet the Bible says: And he said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” (Luke 12:15).
We read of author Sarah Young, author of Jesus Calling, and her yearning ‘for something more’ … because the Bible wasn’t enough.
2004:
“I knew that God communicated with me through the Bible, but I yearned for more. Increasingly, I wanted to hear what God had to say to me personally on a given day.” (Source)
Yet the Bible says: All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, (2 Timothy 3:16).
YIU SHALLNOT COVET what the Lord has not given you.
We read of Elizabeth Graham’s (now working for the ERLC) letter to the Southern Baptist Convention, and her yearning to be more than “just” a wife and mother, sent in 2009 and resurfaced a few years ago
2009
“I have aspirations of being a wife and mother, but I also desire to be more than that, and I see very few opportunities within the SBC to do so.”
Yet the Bible says: Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. (1 Thessalonians 5:18).
Discontent is a killer.
Satan whispers to women that being a wife and mother isn’t enough. That unless you are a leader, out there and in front, you’re behind. This Jen Wilkin’s mantra, incessantly talking about “closed doors” for women, and “not being at the table.”
We hear from satan that staying at home means you are missing all the opportunities, all of them! … for what, he doesn’t say. He just stirs up discontent with where women are, with what they have.
Now there is great gain in godliness with contentment, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content. (1 Timothy 6:6-8).
If there is great gain in contentment, there is great loss in discontentment. It’s safe to say this is a corollary.
How long has this discontent in women been present on earth? Since the beginning. Eve had a conversation with the serpent, and suddenly she was discontent because she wasn’t like God, she didn’t know good and evil, she was not wise enough. She yearned.
In researching for this essay, I discovered an incredible, hilarious, and bulls-eye essay about the poison of “Discontented Women”. It was written in 1896 in the height of the Suffragette movement of First Wave Feminism. Its author Amelia Barr (1831-1919) was a mother, widow, and novelist. The 10-page essay is found easily online in lots of places, and I am also going to quote liberally from it below. It was published in the North American Review in 1896.
Discontent is a vice six thousand years old, and it will be eternal; because it is in the race. Every human being has a complaining side, but discontent is bound up in the heart of woman; it is her original sin. For if the first woman had been satisfied with her conditions, if she had not aspired to be “as gods,” and hankered after unlawful knowledge, Satan would hardly have thought it worth his while to discuss her rights and wrongs with her. That unhappy controversy has never ceased; and, with or without reason, woman has been perpetually subject to discontent with her conditions and, according to her nature, has been moved by its influence. ~Amelia Barr, 1896
Puritan Thomas Boston argued that discontent is actually a violation of the Tenth Commandment, [You shall not covet] expressed in his monumental sermon “The Hellish Sin of Discontent.” He wrote:
Question: “What is forbidden in the Tenth Commandment?” Answer: “The Tenth Commandment forbiddeth all discontentment with our own estate, envying, or grieving at the good of our neighbor, and all inordinate motions and affections to anything that is his.” … [Discontent] is the hue of hell all over.
“But, but”, women say, “changing diapers and wiping noses is boring! Tedious! Monotonous! Being out in the world is better!” Mrs Barr replies,
In the van of these malcontents are the women dissatisfied with their home duties. One of the saddest domestic features of the day is the disrepute into which housekeeping has fallen; for that is a woman’s first natural duty and answers to the needs of her best nature.
It must be noted that this revolt of certain women against housekeeping is not a revolt against their husbands; it is simply a revolt against their duties. They consider house- work hard and monotonous and inferior, and confess with a cynical frankness that they prefer to engross paper, or dabble in art, or embroider pillow-shams, or sell goods, or in some way make money to pay servants who will cook their husband’s dinner and nurse their babies for them. And they believe that in this way they show themselves to have superior minds, and ask credit for a deed which ought to cover them with shame. For actions speak louder than words, and what does such action say?
Mrs Barr pulls no punches! Of these women who eye the world as their salvation and a salve for their discontent, I am reminded of one of the women of the She Reads Truth Bible study online organization. Diana Stone loves to write, so much so that at first she employed a nanny in the home part-time to help with her daughter, and subsequently decided to load her daughter to day care, so Diana could drop off the kids from the house completely, return home and write. And so, any stranger could and did substitute a poor ambition for love.
Mrs Barr continues:
Suppose even that housekeeping is hard and monotonous, it is not more so than men’s work in the city. The first lesson a business man has to learn is to do pleasantly what he does not like to do. All regular useful work must be monotonous, but love ought to make it easy; and at any rate, the tedium of housework is not any greater than the tedium of office work. … And as a wife holds the happiness of many in her hands, discontent with her destiny is peculiarly wicked.
Lest one think that Mrs Barr was writing from a catbird seat, she emigrated to New York from England with her husband, leaving her home country behind forever. Her husband’s business prospect failed, so they moved from New York to Texas, where her husband and four sons promptly died of yellow fever, she lost many other of her 12 children. She never remarried.
Don’t fail through defects of temper and over-sensitiveness at moments of trial. One of the great helps to success is to be cheerful; to go to work with a full sense of life; to be determined to put hindrances out of the way; to prevail over them and to get the mastery. Above all things else, be cheerful; there is no beatitude for the despairing. ~Words of Counsel: 9 Tips for Success, Amelia E. Barr.
Mrs Barr concludes her essay Discontented Women–
Unconscious Influence
In conclusion, it must be conceded that some of the modern discontent of women must be laid to unconscious influence. In every age there is a kind of atmosphere which we call “the spirit of the times,” and which, while it lasts, deceives as to the importance and truth of its dominant opinions.
Many women have doubtless thus caught the fever of discontent by mere contact, but such have only to reflect a little, and discover that, on the whole, they have done quite as well in life as they have any right to expect.
Happy is the woman who unashamedly says “I am a wife.” “I am a mother.” If we are not ashamed of the Gospel, we are not ashamed of any element within it, including the role He has given us to reflect His glory and image. ‘Just a mom’? Might as well say ‘Just a Christian’ when in fact being a woman, a wife, or a mother is all, because we have all, in Christ.
Further Reading
I heartily recommend the full Amelia Barr essay Discontented Women. And these other items as well
Some Puritan works on dis/contentment
The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment by Jeremiah Burroughs,
The Art of Divine Contentment by Thomas Watson
The Crook in the Lot by Thomas Boston,
Thomas Boston sermon titled The Hellish Sin of Discontent.
The Art and Grace of Contentment compiles several Puritan books, sermons, and articles on contentment into an eBook on Amazon.
Modern essays on dis/contentment-
Destroy Her with Discontent: Satan’s Aim for Every Woman
