The Feminist movement in our own day (5/5)
“Because that when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” Romans 1
Christians like to say “Believe in Jesus,” and “Jesus died for your sins. If you believe in him your sins can be forgiven” – but who is Jesus?
We read in John that “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”
This is confirmed and elaborated on in Colossians: “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth . . . all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.”
Not only did Jesus Christ create all things, but he is at this moment “upholding all things by the word of his power” (Hebrews). This “all things” includes the motion of the galaxies and of the planets and of every single atom and its constituent parts.
Jesus Christ in his earthly manifestation was, and in glory now is, “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians), and he that has seen Christ has seen God. As Christ said, “He that has seen me has seen the Father.”
Introduction
Having previously discussed some aspects of Feminism in the previous four parts, it is now possible to continue directly with the historical narrative without further delay.
This final essay will take us up through the 1960s, and on to our present day, with some speculations on possible future developments. The section headings are:
From the 1930s through the 1950s
The 1960s (in four paragraphs)
The Feminine Mystique
The larger problem
From the 1930s through the 1950s
Taking up where we left off, we resume our overview of Feminist history with a few comments on the several decades preceding the 1960s. During this period – in spite of the Great Depression and the Second World War – the spread of the belief in a greater social equality between men and women continued. It was possibly slowed somewhat by the Depression, but it was certainly accelerated by the Second World War.
The war not only accelerated the industrialization of women in numbers, but the boundaries were extended as well (welding is one obvious example). More importantly, there was also a greater expansion of women’s roles in the military than had been seen in World War I. This was to some extent due to wartime necessities, yet it was also due to an increasing acceptance of such expanded roles. There was a feeling that it was right and proper for women to be involved in a wider range of activities than previously – although the question of women in combat was not yet an option. Call me whatever you want, but somehow I do not accept the idea of battalions and brigades of women storming ashore on D-Day.
The expansion of the roles and rights of women in the decades following the First World War was not the result of an organized campaign that gained new ground in the face of intense opposition. There was no “patriarchy” that wanted to keep women systematically in subjection, and all of these changes were accepted as a matter of course, agreeable to most women and to most men.
This brings us to the 1950s, the era that has been called “The golden age of American materialism.” It was a time not only of material prosperity and political stability. It was also a time of moral conservatism – although the increasing licentiousness of Hollywood and the immoral degradation of the Beat Poets and their circle were harbingers of the coming storm.
One indication of the abiding conservatism of the America of that era is the fact that the majority of women were housewives. Once again – and this merits repeating – this was not because of a “false consciousness.” Neither was it the result of “strong social pressure” or of some sinister and malignant patriarchy that deliberately conspired to keep women in subjection so men could enjoy all of the power.
The ideas that life is essentially a struggle between oppressor and oppressed, or that it consists only of conflicting assertions of the will to power, are delusions such as were fostered by blind fools like Marx and Nietzsche. Their poverty-stricken, colorless and ugly worldviews knew nothing of love, of the real joys of family relationships, or of the many higher and natural feelings that normal people experience daily.
Many people in the 1950s got married and had children because that was what they wanted to do. It is a natural human instinct, given to us by God, our Creator, for men and women to fall in love, to marry and have children, to raise those children, and to find innumerable personal rewards in so doing. This is part of the way we were made and designed by the Lord Jesus Christ according to the will of God. True, there are always exceptions, and marriage is not biblically mandated for all people, but it is what most people naturally want to do.
However, while the 1950s my seem to some like an idyllic period, it was by no means a heaven on earth. We cannot have paradise on earth short of the return of Christ. This is because we have fallen and sinful human natures. Thus every age and era has its own evils, including the ever present realities of disease, old age, and death.
Yet, while we have fallen natures and hence often make wrong choices, we also have spiritual natures. Because of them we need much more than outwardly placid and prosperous lives. We need purpose. We need concepts of right and wrong. We need life and love and light, and above all we need truth, truth about God, our maker, and about the nature and destiny of our immortal souls.
These things, for whatever reason, were not sufficiently evident in the 1950s. Prosperity was accepted as our due. Stability was accepted as a given. The concepts of the importance of work and morality remained, but often more as customs and as habits than as the necessary results of a coherent worldview. These deficiencies became glaringly evident in the 1960s, when the failure of the so-called Greatest Generation to pass along moral values to their children became evident.
The 1960s (in four paragraphs)
Much has been written about this pivotal period, when the character of the United States, and of course of Western culture in general, underwent dramatic changes.
Rather than try to summarize that whole period, and to analyze the most basic causes behind a myriad of complex yet interrelated phenomena, it will be helpful I think to focus on one aspect, or on one area, draw some conclusions from that, and then try to relate those conclusions to our own time.
To do this, I would like to look at a truly significant book of that period – Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. First published in 1963, the book sold millions of copies, and – unlike most books – had a significant social impact. It sheds light on the deepest underlying flaw – spiritual emptiness – to which all of the other distinctive developments of the 60s can be related.
Betty Friedan was concerned about the status and plight of the typical American housewife. This may seem like a topic of limited interest, certainly less dramatic than other events of the 60s, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Wall, the ongoing Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction, the Vietnam War, the counterculture and the British Invasion – but are not a nation’s homes and families its basic social cells? And if all is not well there, are not symptoms sure to later manifest themselves?
The Feminine Mystique
The first chapter of Friedan’s book (“The Problem That Has No Name”) describes the problem of American housewives who had all that money could buy, but were not happy. They were living the American dream, yet felt empty and unfulfilled. Nice or even beautiful homes, husbands with good jobs, children that had been wanted and welcomed, fine clothes, plenty of good food, entertainments and diversions – all of these were not enough to satisfy the needs of the human heart.
Friedan did not emphasize any positive aspects of family life in this chapter. She did not relate any narratives of housewives who were happy in their position, and who loved their husbands and kids (and in turn were loved by them). What we are shown instead is women who feel useless, unfulfilled, depressed and bored.
This is by no means an unrealistic or merely propagandistic portrayal of a trivial problem. The author gave significant examples from various national media sources to show that this was a real and widely recognized problem. She also provided some illustrative quotes, such as, “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home” or, “Then you wake up one morning and there’s nothing to look forward to” or, “I just don’t feel alive.” [1]
The wisdom of the world had a medicine cabinet full of remedies. “Get a bigger house . . . buy a new car . . . try vitamins or maybe tranquillizers . . . take up a hobby, like bowling . . . what about just getting out of the house and going to a movie? Get more involved with your kids’ homework, redecorate the house, see a psychiatrist . . .”
In chapter two (“The Happy Housewife Heroine”), Friedan examines the stereotype of the ideal housewife. She was supposed to find happiness in the mere fact of being a mother and a wife, as if getting married and having kids were the sole meaning of life.
Chapter three (“The Crisis in Women’s Identity”) calls for women to break away from this stereotype of women as being nothing more than wives or mothers. To fulfil their potential as human beings, Friedan says women need to get out of the house and into the real world outside.
In chapter twelve (“Progressive Dehumanization: The Comfortable Concentration Camp”) Friedan argues that women’s spirits and identities have been destroyed, systematically dehumanized, by a false conception of life. She presents her solution in the chapter 14 (“A New Life Plan for Women”). It is, that women must be free to make their own choices. They need work that challenges them in whatever field they might choose, and they need to plan and lead their own lives. Obligations to husband and children should not stand in their way.
This was not a new idea, nor was it unique to the United States in the 1960s. For example, Henrik Ibsen’s play A Dolls’ House dealt with this issue, and it premiered in Copenhagen in 1879. A brief glance at the play is instructive, and shows that problems that emerged with greater intensity in the 1960s had long been in the making.
Nora, the main character in the play, wants to leave an unhappy and oppressive marriage. Her husband, Torvald, tries to persuade her not to leave. He reminds her of her duty to the children, but Nora responds that her sacred duty is to her self.
Torvald tells her she is a wife and mother before she is anything else, and she responds by saying, “I don’t believe that any longer. I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being just as you are – or, at all events, I must try to become one.”[2] She also rejects Torvald’s appeal to religion, and says she does not know what religion is.
In the end, Nora leaves, lamenting the eight years of her life wasted on a husband and children.
The real and significant problem identified by Friedan did not come out of nowhere. The difference between Friedan’s book and Ibsen’s play was that in the late 19th century the play was considered daring and radical. The Feminine Mystique however, resonated on a much deeper level and with a much wider and more sympathetic audience. The reason was that conventions which were much more well-entrenched in Ibsen’s day had been slowly, invisibly, and steadily weakened by generations of significant social and ideological change. Hence, what seemed new radical in the past now seemed self-evident to many.
Getting back to the last chapter of Friedan’s book (chapter 14 referred to above), Friedan stated that marriage, love, home and children are good, but that women need more than that. They need a lifelong commitment to something higher – science, politics, a profession, or the arts, for example. This commitment should be begun before and sustained throughout the course of marriage. This personal commitment is also to take precedence over husband, marriage and children, and such lesser considerations should not be allowed to hinder a woman’s work in this area.
The selfless devotion to others, and obedient service to God, which are two of the necessary elements of scriptural Christianity, are considered inadequate, and self is placed securely on the throne.
Friedan ended by speculating on the brave new world in which women will be truly independent and will not need to rely on others for a sense of self-worth. Everyone, men and women, will be equally enriched, and this great advance “may be the next step in human evolution”[3].
It is significant that The Feminine Mystique is a very secular book, and does not take any religious teachings into serious consideration. Friedan does not consider what a biblically Christian marriage might be like, where a woman finds her self-worth and identity not in her husband and children, but in the reality of Christ.
The Christian woman – married or single – is not exhorted by scripture to be fragile and stereotypically feminine, but to be sober, temperate and wise, with her mind set on the high prize of an eternity with Christ. She is thus called – like the Christian man – to die to self, take up the cross of Christ, and to walk in the straight and narrow way that leads to life everlasting. But women were not created by God to be identical to men, or to be imitations of them.
If a Christian woman is led by the Spirit of Christ into marriage, her husband and family become her calling in obedience to God’s specific and personal will for her life. This provides a higher motivation and a deeper basis for self-worth that the world cannot know. Her mind is to be concerned with the highest and weightiest concepts of wisdom, righteousness, holiness, sin, sanctification and judgment, and her highest inner fulfilment comes from knowing she is loved and accepted by God in Christ.
One wonders how many pastors in that period ever preached on this subject. How many of them merely preached words of sound doctrine that did not speak to the hurts and the needs that their parishioners were struggling with daily? Were any pastors or Christian writers or evangelists upholding God’s ideal for the home and the family in its biblical Christian context?
And how many men also lived their lives in that same period focusing on job, career, home and family with no thought for the God that made them? How many men were also not happy with their lives and families, and sought relief in alcohol, or the pursuit of power and status, or in extramarital affairs, or hobbies and entertainments?
Betty Friedan’s advice only steered women from one false and stereotypical view of life into another one, more interesting, but equally false at bottom. The meaning of life for men and for women does not lie in earthly achievements. It does not lie in a career, either for men or for women, and neither does it lie in just having a family and working to support it (whether by housework or by earning an income outside the home).
And in this advice is not Friedan really saying that women find their greatest value in imitating and copying men? But if women start to become more like men, what happens when men start to become more like women? Once the barriers of gender have been broken down, movement can take place in both directions. And is this really beneficial to society?
Is it really beneficial to society when literally millions of babies are tossed in the trash because many women have been taught to think that bringing new life into the world and loving it and cherishing it and raising it up is a drag and a waste of time? How many women are now trying to find happiness by pretending to be something they are not?
God in his wisdom created us male and female. There are real differences between the genders, yet also a great and deep area of commonality, of shared humanity (without which it would be possible to have meaningless relationships). This is part of a divine plan that has our happiness and our true fulfilment in mind. This is now being lost, and the result is not an increase but rather a decrease of human flourishing, one more instance of the profound spirit of lawlessness that is now permeating our entire culture from top to bottom.
The real meaning of life is not to do whatever we please. It is not to glorify the self and exalt the ego. It is find the reality of God manifest to us in Christ, and thus to know God and to serve him in whatever calling he has made us for. If this leads us to a common and ordinary life, doing nothing great in the eyes of the world, we can find happiness in that, knowing that our lives have a higher purpose that requires no human validation.
We read in Ephesians that “we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (2:10). Hard as it may be even for Christians to believe, we have been created by God to serve and to relate to him in this world, and it is in the will of God, in whatever area we are called to, that we find real meaning.
This may not be glorious in the world’s eyes, but the world at large is wrong, and groping in darkness, seeking what it does not know and turning away from the only real source of inner fulfilment.
The larger problem
The question of rejecting God and his laws and seeking happiness in our own way is fundamental to modern western secularism. We are strong, we are independent, we have no need of God’s laws, and now the fruits of such folly are becoming evident everywhere around us.
The secularists were confident that if we could reject the outdated superstitions of religion and rely on reason and science alone, we would have a more peaceful and a more rational world. They were completely deceived.
It has been rightly said, “People who do not believe in God do not believe in nothing, they believe in anything.” And what sort of ideas, ideologies, and philosophies have bubbled up out of the swamp of modern conceit and ignorance?
And what does the future hold in store for us? I do not have a crystal ball but I do predict with confidence that it is not a rational, secularist paradise that we are headed for.
Who knows? God in his anger may even give us what we as a society deserve, and allow our modern societies to pursue their own policies until they fall into the pit they have dug for themselves.
Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth (sows), that shall he also reap.
[1] Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Penguin Books, 1992), pp. 19 and 29.
[2] Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, Ed. Philip Smith (trans. anonymous) (New York: Dover, 1992), p. 68.
[3] Friedan, Feminine Mystique, p. 331.
Betty Friedan, like Gloria Steinem, Ayn Rand, Beyonce, and Cardi B, was a product of her environment. We are living through something often called THE FOURTH TURNING. Successful societies escape from nature and become perverted and aimless.
In time, if we have time, the pendulum will swing and families will become as important to Westerners as their telephones.