I think women can and should help in many things, thus "helpmeet."  Sitting around all day isn't my idea of what a woman should do.  However, things have swung far to the other side of the overproteced time of the Victorians and now women are expected to do everything.

Women who are UPS drivers or beverage delivery drivers or highway workers ... all seem to be very stocky in build and very masculine in features .. They're hands and faces are rough and rugged, just like the men that work these jobs.

My SIL has worked with horses for the last 25 years.  That means hours out in the elements, baking in the sun and doing the rough work of breaking and training horses.  She is now 43 and she looks far older.

I do get really tired of reading about how little an older woman offers to a man and how unattractive she becomes and how all men want to marry a 20 year old.  And this from the Catholic crowd.  It's the same message that is in our secular culture, the one that puts a premium on youth and looks and denigrates the value of older people in every way.  

In the past, it seemed that while a woman's looks diminished as she grew older, she was highly esteemed and cherished due to her goodness and her love and nurturance of her family.  If her H had matured along with her, he was able to adore her for all the other traits she had, plus the fact that she'd stood by him through thick and thin and they had the years together as their bond.  

A mature Christian man should be able to say that while youthful beauty will always carry some attraction, he would never consider for a minute wishing to exchange the value and "beauty" of his mature wife for some unformed, ignorant girl.

Mrs. Z said:
I don't think anyone here said, by the way, that they WANTED to exchange their forty-something wife for a spry gamine of 19.  However, men and probably women as well can recognize that young women are very pleasing to behold.  A mature man would probably not even have a twinge of regret that his wife was no longer that young, while recognizing the glories of youth; some men would pine away

Agreed.  I didn't communicate what I was trying to say very effectively.  My post was written from the perspective of having read a variety of threads on this site and elsewhere over the last few months.  What I was trying to say was that while I understood that a never married, younger man would prefer to marry someone his own age .. there were also the threads about an older man also wishing to marry a younger, sometimes much younger woman.  This was defended on three levels, 1) more appealing 2) more fertile and 3) less likely to have an impure "past."  

My thought about this was that while a man has a right to prefer this 20 year old over an older woman, it isn't in and of itself the more virtuous of the man to isolate his prospects this way.  A good Christian man would be kinder and more willing to consider that God's will for his life and his wife may include someone a little older, maybe someone who fell in her past and has repented.  Maybe God's will is that a man marry a chaste 30 year old and have as many children as God allows during that time.

St. Therese's mother wasn't married until her late 20's.  She proceeded to have 10 children over the next decade.  How cruel it would have been had St. Louis Martin would have overlooked her as a bride because she was "too old" and past her "sell by" date.  

It's the constant harping on how older women are unattractive and useless in the marriage game that gets really tiresome.  It's unkind and it's untrue.  Women are human beings that are more than their youth or beauty or functionality as baby providers.  Your responses may be the backlash against feminism.  However even with cloaking your opinions under the auspices of marriage and family, you are still degrading women by discussing them as though they are things to use to serve your baser passions.  It might be better to marry than to burn ... but it is still better yet to treat others with dignity and respect as becoming a Christian.