Are working women failures at home?

 To begin with, we all know that Islam permits a woman to go out to work and has restricted this right only by what preserves her dignity and protects her from degradation. Here we are not examining the lawfulness of a woman going out to work; rather we are raising a question about what follows once she does, and what consequences this has for the members of her household, her husband and her children.

Psychologists attribute a woman going out to work to two causes. The first is material necessity: a woman may be in urgent need of work in order to support the members of her family because of her poor economic situation or because the family's breadwinner has been lost. The second is her wish for self-fulfilment and for building an independent personality through which she achieves self-satisfaction and psychological happiness in being an active person with a presence of her own.

 The question raised is this: will that woman, burdened with duties and commitments, succeed in achieving a kind of balance with her home without the slightest neglect of the rights of her husband and children, while at the same time proving her success at work? Or will she fail, on the assumption that she is a weak being of limited energy and ability, as some classify her?

In my own view the matter is relative and differs from one woman to another. We have met and heard a great deal about women who hold posts in civil society organisations or even in the private sector and who have achieved tangible success in raising their children and managing their private lives alongside the achievements they have made in their working lives, without the slightest neglect. By contrast, there are women who do not work and yet we find them neglectful and even failing in their family lives, if the expression is right, despite being entirely free. The reason here is a lack of awareness of how to manage the affairs of the home and an absence of any sense of organisation, so that burdens and duties pile up on her and she falls into a cycle of blaming herself at one moment and those around her at another.

 Society is full of examples of working women who have gone on for a decade or two and are successful and effective both in family life and at work, and who are of benefit to society in the services they provide, alongside raising a cultured and successful generation of children, which calls on us to take pride in this group for what they have achieved at the level of the family and of society.

From this we conclude that failure is tied to the woman herself and to the way she looks at things, and not to whether she works or not. It is not inevitable that a working woman fails because she works, or that another succeeds because she is a homemaker. Rather, the matter depends on awareness, sound thinking and planning in advance to find alternative solutions in order to organise her life once she has taken the decision to go out to work.

 Finally, my working sister, do not hesitate to set a timetable recording the daily tasks in a practical and organised way in order to manage the affairs of your home, setting aside time for housework and time for your children and your husband. You will gain a share of rest alongside a sense of satisfaction, for order will always remain one of the foundations of a person's daily life.