Proverb's 31:13-15 The Powerful work of women

She selects diligently wool and flax,

and works with her glad palms.

She becomes like trading vessels;

she brings her food from afar;

and she arises [like a lioness] while it is still night,

and provides "prey" for her household,

and the quota [of food] for her servant girls.

I've always found it fascinating how the same behaviours in men and women are described in such different terms. When men bring food to their children they are providing, when women bring food they are nurturing. When men pick up a crying child they are protecting, women are comforting. When women do a million things at once they are multi-tasking when men do a million things at once they are doing a highly paid very technical and demanding job that requires good spacial awareness and that would be far too complicated for a women! 

These three verses essentially describe a woman sewing and getting the shopping and there must be thousand such descriptions in literature where such activities are penned in ways that function to suppress and oppress women. Indeed there are more than enough interpretations of this passage that do just that. Interpretation's that major on the type of work she does rather than how she does it or how profitable it is. There can be an emphasis on the fact that she is working 'from home' and therefore obviously fitting her work around her primary responsibilities. This is clearly un-true as she 'brings her food from afar' etc. but also misses the rather relevant bit of history that until the industrial revolution and indeed still in many parts of the world, work and home are not two distinct separate arenas. Her husband and indeed the whole household would have worked 'from home'. 

I'm also not sure that there would have been such a sharp contrast between work that was economically productive and work that was not. One of the things I love about this proverb is that it appears to make no distinction between the praise due whatever type of work is undertaken.

What I love about the way her work is described in these three verses is the sense of powerful purpose. I used to love sitting in the sail of a yacht, or dangling my feet off the front and soaking in the sense of the power driving the boat forward. The image of a lioness hunting prey also resonates deep in my soul. I regularly have an overwhelming urge to roar from the bottom of my lungs and could watch those scenes from Narnia when Aslan roars on loop!

I often tell women they are powerful, it is one of the things we are often taught not to be, and often we are fearful of embracing our own power because we have been at the other end of people's dominating use of power and become suspicious of power in general. We believe the lie that 'power corrupts'. Power does not corrupt, people's choice to sin does, the more power someone has the more people's lives they can impact with their sin.

And there are two approaches to power; power over and power for or to. This woman knew her power and was not afraid of it, but harnessed it and used it, not to rule over but to work for. Nor was Lemuel's mother afraid to describe a women's power in such terms. So today whatever you're doing do it powerfully.

A proverbs 31 community does not describe the work women do in diminutive, minimising, infantilising terms but values its contribution for what it is, equal to that of men's.