Complementary Responsibilities and Peace

Even this is a work of God’s generosity and wisdom: the one useful in greater matters is inferior and useless in smaller ones, so that the wife’s contribution becomes necessary. If God had made the man equally capable in both spheres, women would have seemed easy to disregard. On the other hand, if the greater and more publicly useful sphere had been entrusted to the woman, women might have been filled with excessive pride.

For this reason, he says, God did not give both spheres to one sex, lest the other be diminished and appear unnecessary. Nor did He distribute both equally to each, lest rivalry and conflict arise from equality of rank, with women competing to claim the same precedence as men. Instead, God both provided for peace and preserved the fitting order of each: dividing life into these two spheres, He gave the more necessary and useful sphere to the man and the lesser and inferior sphere to the woman, so that the man would be highly valued because his service is necessary, while the woman, because her service is lesser, would not rise up against her husband.

Knowing all this, let us seek one thing above all: virtue of soul and nobility of character, so that we may enjoy peace and live continually in harmony and love.

A man who marries a wealthy woman may find that he has taken a mistress rather than a wife. If women, even apart from wealth, are full of pride and easily fall into love of glory, he asks, how will they be bearable to their husbands if wealth adds still another cause for superiority? But a man who marries a woman of equal standing or poorer condition has received a helper and ally and brought good things into the household. Her own poverty forces her to care for her husband with great concern, to yield to him and obey him in everything. It removes every occasion for rivalry, conflict, arrogance, and insult, and becomes a bond of peace, harmony, love, and agreement.