The Capable Wife and the Contentious Wife: [A two-for-one Guest Card Talk on “A quarrelsome and nagging wife” (Proverbs 21:19) & “A virtuous woman as defined by old Jewish men” (Proverbs 31) by *Pastor Alice Connor

The Capable Wife and the Contentious Wife. Hmmm. I think I’m both?

I mean, I’m the one who knows how to take the vacuum apart and fix it. I’m the one who makes homemade sandwich bread. I’m the one who hangs the laundry to dry, who calls the internet provider when the bill is wrong, who figures out where that god-awful smell is coming from. I sew, I grocery, I’ve occasionally been accused of speaking wisdom. I’m a damn catch in the capability department.

Also, I’m grumpy as hell. Not all the time, but I know what I like and what I want, and I reserve the right to not be meek and mild all the time. I will contend with my husband when it’s important to make a good decision. Or when I’m really tired and hungry. Or when I’m stressed.

I get that the writer of Proverbs is sharing his wisdom with a younger man (probably) and commending to him the inner beauty of compassion and thrift as opposed to a pretty face. That’s fair—a necessary corrective to pop songs and women’s magazines. As written, it’s also a bit of an unattainable standard.

These two wives are held up sort of in opposition. The bits of Proverbs from which they come are not back-to-back, but they’re part of an ongoing comparison between desirable qualities and undesirable. Sometimes these qualities are literally about a wife, sometimes they’re about the inner life of the man being addressed. In both cases, they present two women: Woman Wisdom and Woman Folly, the good wife and the bad wife.

Proverbs is advice—you already can tell, right? It’s poetic, but it’s kind of a random list of important things that the wise old men want to share. Some of it is helpful or pithy, some of it is only semi-comprehensible. I wrote something like Proverbs years ago when I was the head of the Home Décor department in a huge Jo-Ann store. We had special services like custom-made fake floral arrangements and custom-upholstered furniture. In my department, you had to take a special test, which had been outdated forever, to be certified to sell these things. I rewrote the test and went further (because I’m a giant dork) and wrote a whole new handbook. It had all kinds of helpful information about how to calculate how much to buy for different projects given the length of the fabric’s repeat, how to use the fancy cutting machine, and also where the bathroom was. See, I included a special section of Wisdom for the folks in my department that included things like, “Don’t try to get someone to break up with you. It doesn’t work. Just tell them.” And, “It’s better to drink more water than less to avoid the headache that will creep up just as that one guy asks the stupidest question.” It was our version of Proverbs.

Proverbs is helpful—it’s meant to give you some assistance. But like everything else in this world, it’s tied to its time. Women’s only usefulness for a long period of human history was in cheerfully giving birth and in running a home. And that’s not nothing! In my book Fierce, I talk about the women who have gone before us:

“The last year I worked Outdoor Adventure [Summer] Camp, I was enormously pregnant with my daughter. Like, so pregnant that when people walking behind me saw me turn around, they gasped and said “whoa.” I was not about to subject my lumbering self to a dubious air mattress, so I stayed just over the hill in the retreat center. Air- conditioning and a real bed: sign me up. One afternoon, I was down at the camp, sitting in one of those folding camp chairs which are meant to be comfortable but really, really aren’t. As I sat there, I watched campers and counselors chopping wood. It’s hard work, chopping wood. Even watching it made me tired. I said to the counselor nearby, “You know, in American pioneer days, pregnant women had to chop the wood, start the fires, cook the food, wash the clothes, fight off scavengers, and care for the other children. And I can barely stand up to get a cookie from the storage bins over there. Those pioneer women were damned fierce. And probably exhausted.” She felt my logic was sound and we decided to form the Women’s Pioneer League—the only requirement for membership was a deep awe for the women who’d gone before us and all they’d accomplished, pregnant or not” (Introduction).

These women were damned capable. And also they weren’t always cheerful about it, which is normal if you think about it. And they also couldn’t vote. And couldn’t inherit property. And had no legal standing to protect their children when needed. And, and, and...

My point is that they—and we, and I—are more than wives and mothers. We have desires and spiritual lives and interests outside what is expected of us.

Proverbs here holds up some aspects of the feminine—excellent cook, fine manager, brilliant conversationalist, etc.—and celebrates them. I am here for this. Absolutely, without any irony whatsoever. I am also here for the conversation about what it means to be contentious and why that’s thought of as bad. Some folks think a woman speaking her mind is threatening, but she’s allowed to have opinions. Many of us understand confrontation as necessarily angry or violent, but it doesn’t have to be. To be contentious is, like a lot of human experience, nuanced.

I don’t have a simple answer for what to do with these passages other than to question their assumptions and to wonder aloud how they resonate with our own lives, male or female. Regardless of your gender, what are your capabilities and how is God present as you go about them day after day? Regardless of your gender, when do you stand up for truth and justice and when are you just grumpy? How often do we contend to cover up you deeper wounds and how often do we do for others because it fills us with joy?

Perhaps, like many things, it is our motivations which determine how much we are the Contentious Spouse or the Capable Spouse.

* Alice Connor is an Episcopal priest and a chaplain on a college campus. She wrote Fortress Press bestselling book Fierce: Women of the Bible and their Stories of Violence, Mercy, Bravery, Wisdom, Sex, and Salvation. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband, two kids, a dog, and no cats.