176. 17. These activities, when done to help each other, also join the two together into one and make a unified home as well. In some respects a husband's activities join together with a wife's and a wife's attach to her husband's, and these connections and attachments are a mutual help and happen according to mutual help.
These are things the world knows. But the main thing that allies the souls and lives of two partners, makes them share, and brings them together, is their mutual concern for educating children. On this ground the husband's activities and the wife's activities are different, and at the same time they fit together. They differ because a wife's particular job is taking care of the breast-feeding and rearing of babies of either sex and also the instruction of girls up to the age of consent and the company of men. But a husband's particular job is seeing to the instruction of boys, after childhood up to puberty, and after that until they are in charge of themselves.
Yet these activities mesh through consulting and supporting one another and helping each other in many other ways.
It is well known that these activities — as united as they are different, or as much in common as they are individual — bring the partners' souls together into one, and that the love called parental love is what makes it happen. It is also well known that these activities, keeping their difference and their cooperation in view, make a united home.
