Whenever I teach women to be keepers at home, I undoubtedly receive many comments from women who believe that being a keeper at home doesn’t mean that women can’t be in the workforce. I checked out the commentaries of old to see what they had written about the phrase “keeper at home” in Titus 2:5.

“Home duties, cares, pleasures, sacrifices of self—these God-appointed duties ought to fill the mind and the heart of the young wife. There should be no desire, no attempt, to go round to the other houses, and so contracting idle, gossiping habits.” (Ellicot’s Commentary)

“Keepers at home—as ‘guardians of the house,’ as the Greek expresses. The oldest manuscripts read, ‘Workers at home’: active in household duties (Proverbs 7:11; 1 Timothy 5:13).” (Jamieson-Faussett-Brown Commentary)

“Keepers at home; house-wives, not spending their time in gadding abroad, but in looking to the affairs of their own families.” (Matthew Poole’s Commentary)

“Keepers at home: minding their own family affairs, not gadding abroad; and inspecting into, and busying themselves about other people’s matters. This is said in opposition to what women are prone unto. It is reckoned among the properties of women, by the Jews, that they are ‘gadders abroad’: they have some rules about women’s keeping at home; they say,

“A woman may go to her father’s house to visit him, and to the house of mourning, and to the house of feasting, to return a kindness to her friends, or to her near relations–but it is a reproach to a woman to go out daily; now she is without, now she is in the streets; and a husband ought to restrain his wife from it, and not suffer her to go abroad but about once a month, or twice a month, upon necessity; for there is nothing more beautiful for a woman, than to abide in the corner of her house; for so it is written, Psalm 45:15 ‘the king’s daughter is all glorious within.”’ (Gill’s Exposition)

“Mothers who work at home usually find it a more absorbing pleasure than ‘going about from house to house’ (1 Timothy 5:13). The practical worth of a religion is not unfairly estimated by its effects on the lives of those who profess it. If the observed effect of the Gospel were to make women worse wives, it would not commend it to the heathen; ‘for the Greeks judge not of doctrines by the doctrine itself, but they make the life and conduct the test of the doctrines.'” (Expositor’s Greek Testament)

“Keepers at home: Rather, we should read with R.V. workers at home.” (Cambridge Bible)

“But οἰκουρός, which is probably the true reading (Huther), is common in good classical Greek for ‘stayers at home.'”  (Pulpit Commentary)

“The mistress of the house is to add to her thrift, energy, and strict discipline, benign, gracious, heartily kind demeanor.” (Vincent’s Word Study)

“As long as we, our country’s women, continue to be good homemakers and fulfill every aspect of our responsibility, America will continue to be good. This is where God intended us to be. This is the task for which we were created. This task is second in importance to none.” (The Art of Homemaking, 1962)

It’s only our modern day age that it has even made it possible for women to have careers. Without birth control, day care centers, public school systems, hospitals, business buildings, factories, automobiles, and everything else, there’s just no way women would be leaving their homes all day, their children in the care of others, and work for a boss and a paycheck. This wasn’t even an issue in biblical times, but we can clearly see that women are to work at home, stay at home, and be keepers at home. This is God’s ordained will and work for women. There’s no denying it. Go home, dear women.

Young women…are to be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.
Titus 2:5