Religion

Do sewing and cooking make you pious?

Apparently Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary thinks so.

Southwestern Baptist, one of the nation’s largest Southern Baptist seminaries, is introducing a new academic program in homemaking as part of an effort to establish what its president calls biblical family and gender roles.

It will offer a bachelor of arts in humanities degree with a 23-hour concentration in homemaking. The program is only open to women.

Coursework will include seven hours of nutrition and meal preparation, seven hours of textile design and “clothing construction,” three hours of general homemaking, three hours on “the value of a child,” and three hours on the “biblical model for the home and family.”

Apparently they think a woman’s place is in the home, making meatloaf and sewing lacy curtains. Is barefoot and pregnant the next suggestion?

If anyone wants to sign up for the job without taking the seminary classes, you can buy a 50s housewife uniform from Costume-Shop.com.

Please don’t tell them that I knit, sew, garden, make jam, cook potroast, do laundry, and sometimes I even clean my house. I may be a Domestic Goddess, but I still don’t believe in God.

Writerdd

Donna Druchunas is a freelance technical writer and editor and a knitwear designer. When she's not working, she blogs, studies Lithuanian, reads science and sci-fi books, mouths off on atheist forums, and checks her email every three minutes. (She does that when she's working, too.) Although she loves to chat, she can't keep an IM program open or she'd never get anything else done.

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8 Comments

  1. If not for the cleaning your house part, I too could be a domestic godess :(

    But alas, I like my clutter scattered around the house.

  2. I don't think it'd be legal in Norway to offer a course only to women. Well unless the course _actually_ required you to be a woman, like "know your vagina".

  3. Bjornar… you'd probably get a lot more guys protesting to be allowed into a women-only "know-your vagina" course than a women-only "housewife" course.

    And, writerdd, you CHOOSE to be a domestic goddess – you aren't being forced into it as your only rightful place by scary religious types. So in that case, I say kudos to you!

  4. I like it when fundamentalists argue that the "biblical model of the home and family" just happens to be the post-16th century, capitalist, nuclear household — even though families in the Old and New Testaments appear to be neither nuclear nor capitalist (since those two concepts didn't exactly *exist* yet).

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