The United Nations has created a super agency for feminists, but one female leader thinks it's unnecessary.
The U.N. General Assembly recently voted to consolidate four different groups into a single one that could eventually be fueled by a $1 billion a year, and many of those dollars would come from the U.S.
Continue reading at U.S. to fund radical feminist group (OneNewsNow.com)
Showing posts with label Feminism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Feminism. Show all posts
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Monday, June 28, 2010
The Core of Femininity
Leslie Basham: Nancy Leigh DeMoss says all women, whether married or single, are called to display femininity.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Now that doesn’t mean that we have to wear ruffles and pink, okay? It does mean we have to have a feminine heart, to exhibit a distinctively feminine spirit.
Leslie: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss for Monday, June 28. No one likes being stereotyped. God created you as an individual and has called you to live out biblical femininity in a unique way. Here’s Nancy to help you get to the heart of femininity.
Nancy: Now we come today to a statement, an affirmation in the True Woman Manifesto that addresses women in every season of life. The Manifesto says,
God’s plan for gender is wider than marriage; all women, whether married or single, are to model femininity in your various relationships, by exhibiting a distinctive modesty, responsiveness, and gentleness of spirit.
Every Christian woman, regardless of our season of life is called to glorify God and to reflect Christ to our world and to edify both men and women around us by living out our distinctive femininity. Now that’s a bit of a hard word to say. It’s not an easy word to spell for some.
The word carries with it a lot of baggage today. There are a lot of misperceptions about femininity, a lot of confusion in people’s minds about what that means. In fact, I would venture to say that if we took a poll today and people in this room would be really honest, that even many of you who have come here for a Revive Our Hearts radio recording session might say that that word, femininity, conjures up negative thoughts in your mind. Now, not every woman would say that, but I bet some would. Negative connotations of what femininity is.
I sometimes in preparation for teaching sessions will get on a conference call or together with a group of women from different seasons of life just to pick their brains and to get input and insights about different things we’re going to be talking about. So I had a conference call a couple of weeks ago for this section of the Manifesto that we’re teaching right now. When this thing came up about femininity, it’s interesting how the opinions started to fly.
But it was interesting to hear the things they were honest about in terms of their past or present perception of femininity. One younger woman, still in her late 20s, said, “That word just has a negative connotation.” She said, “In my flesh when I hear that word I think weak; walk all over me; it’s okay, I’m nothing.”
And then she said, “When I knew we were going to be talking about this, I started asking myself what is femininity? I don’t have a clue what it is,” she said. And here’s a woman who is serving the Lord in a ministry. Now, she does have a clue what it is, but she’s realized that it’s a tough thing to really understand and there is some negative baggage that she has associated with this term.
There’s some today who define femininity in terms of a specific look, certain clothing or hairstyles, or specific activities. It’s interesting, when we touch on the issue of femininity on our teenage girls' blog, Lies Young Women Believe, oh, do the comments start to fly. These girls have opinions! If you want an education about what teenage girls are thinking, from Christian homes most of them, go on to that blog.
One girl commented on that blog, and she said,
When I was little, I think I beat up every guy at my school. LOL [laugh out loud]. So basically I’m just not that feminine. I don’t collect hundreds of lipstick colors. I think I have two. I don’t look through Southern Living décor books. I look through Sports Illustrated instead. I, like, only go to the mall maybe three times a year. I’m not trying to be manly or a guy (and I haven’t beat up any guys for a few years now, LOL). But I’m just not that feminine.
Now she has reduced femininity, as have a lot of us subconsciously perhaps, to things you do, certain activities, certain ways of looking or dressing, or certain demographics—married, mother. Are these things that define our femininity? It would be a mistake to say that femininity has nothing to do with marriage or motherhood or with the way that women dress or appear or the activities they enjoy, but these things are not the essence of what it means to be a woman.
They are simply expressions of what is in our hearts. And some of those expressions may look different for different women in different seasons of life, in different eras, and in different cultures that may look different. If you make these things—your marital status, how many children you do or don’t have, your wardrobe, your activities—if you make those things the essence of femininity, you can totally miss the real heart of the matter.
As someone said on our conference call a couple weeks ago, "You can dress like a church lady but have the heart of a prostitute." Now, I will confess that this session on femininity is the most difficult one for me that I have tackled thus far in the True Woman Manifesto, not because I don’t like the subject, not because I don’t care about it, but because trying to really define what is the essence of femininity I found was much harder than I would have anticipated.
I found myself grappling with questions. What is cultural? What is biblical? I am just going to teach this session based on the insights the Lord has given me to this point. If I were to teach this a year from now or ten years from now, I’m sure there are additional insights that the Lord would give to me because I’m growing in my understanding of the essence of my womanhood.
Elisabeth Elliot said, “In order to learn what it means to be a woman, we must start with the One who made her.” And she’s absolutely right. The Designer and Architect of life is the One we need to look to to help us understand who we are and how we’re wired, and what that means, and how we are the same as men and how we are different from men.
Scripture, thankfully, reveals God’s original pattern for male and female. Now it doesn’t fill in all the details, and some of us are list makers. That’s what we want. But it does give us a sketch, a picture that God’s Holy Spirit will help make application to our lives as to what this looks like for us.
But let me again just go back to the book of Genesis—Genesis 1 and 2. That’s where so much of this started—male and female—and it helps us to get a grasp of what it means to be a woman. Genesis 1, verse 27, we’ve talked about this verse in this series.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
So we see that from the outset male and female are distinct. They are not interchangeable parts. Together they were created to reflect what God is like. Man and woman together in their complementary relationships represent the image of God in a way that neither male nor female can fully do alone.
Now, we need to be careful in saying that because it doesn’t mean that as a woman you cannot reflect the image of God or that you are not fully human or you are not complete because God may not give you a husband. But God created male and female together to reflect His image in a way that cannot be done as magnificently if there were just male or just female.
In Genesis 2 we have a little bit more detailed account of the creation of male and female. Let me just read it to you. It’s so familiar and the problem is some of us have been around this stuff too long and we start to get glazed eyes when we look at these familiar passages. We need the wonder of what these Scriptures say to us and how they speak to us in our season of life.
Genesis 2, verse 18:
Then the LORD God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him."
Now that helper fit for him is made by God for a man who is not complete by himself. That says a whole lot about what it means to be a woman. Our femininity—so much of it is found in that concept of why God made the woman in the first place. Verse 19:
Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was it’s name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.
So the LORD God [I think it’s after Adam realized there is not anyone on this planet who corresponds to me. After he realized that, that not one of these animals would do, God] caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. [So different from the way God created other living creatures.]And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man He made into a woman and brought her to the man (verses 19-22).
What an incredible picture this is. The first woman fashioned by God. Now for starters, that’s breathtaking, that we were made by God. And the way God designed us is best. It’s good. It’s holy. It’s beautiful. It’s sacred. God designed us. He made us.
The first woman was fashioned by God for the man. She was designed to be a helper fit for him, suitable for him, corresponding to him, complementing him. Again, we’ve done whole series on Revive Our Hearts on different aspects of this True Woman Manifesto, so I’m just picking on highlights of each of these points in this series. You can go back to our archives and get a lot more teaching on each of these points.
She was fashioned by God for the man. She was made from the man, not out of the ground or the dust as the man and the animals were, but out of Adam’s very bone. Bone of his bone. Flesh of his flesh. She was made for the man. She was made from the man, and she was given by God to the man. Given by God to the man.
And when the man received that gift, he had a celebration. He was thrilled. He was effusive. You can’t tell that in the English translation here, but you get just a sense.
Then the man said, “This at last [at last what I have needed] is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man (verse 23).
Now by naming the woman, Adam was taking responsibility to be her husband, to protect her, to care for her, to provide for her. And in verse 23 we have a marvelous play on words that you can tell best in the Hebrew language. “She shall be called Woman,” the Hebrew word Ishsha, “because she was taken out of Man,” the Hebrew word Ish.
These two Hebrew words sound almost identical, but their meanings are different and they reflect the complementary relationship between the woman and the man. Ish, the word for man, comes from a root that means "strength." You add a feminine ending to the word Ish and you get Ishsha, almost identical sounding word. That word comes from a root that means "soft." Ish for man comes from a word that means strength. Ishsha, the word for woman, comes from a word that means soft.
Mary Kassian is one of the bloggers on the True Woman blog, a dear friend, an incredible intellect. She’s a theologian. She’s a scholar, and she has provided such a service to the body of Christ with many of the things that she has written, including her newer book, Girls Gone Wise in a World Gone Wild. If you don’t have that book, you want to get a hold of that.
She has written this about that difference between Ish and Ishsha, strength and soft. She says, “The implication becomes clearer when we observe the biblical meaning of a man’s 'strength.'" She gives several Scripture references where it speaks of a man’s strength. Then she draws this conclusion from those Scriptures.
Strength refers to a man’s manhood, his potency, virility, and procreative power. By contrast, a woman’s "softness" has to do with her pregnability, penetrability, and vulnerability (in a very positive sense).
Another writer, Stu Weber, has said it this way.
The ancient Hebrew word for man is Ish, [which he says, relates to the word] "piercer." The term for a woman is Ishsha, "pierced one." While the anatomical or sexual elements are clear, the force of the words is much larger in scope.
Biology, physiology bears this out. One is the initiator. One is the receiver. But he says the meaning here is far more significant than the obvious physical. He says,
The physical is a parable of the spiritual. At his core, a man is an initiator—a piercer, one who penetrates, moves forward, advances toward the horizon, leads. At the core of masculinity is initiation—the provision of direction, security, stability, and connection.1
Now if that’s true and I believe that it is; there are many other parts of Scripture that would bear this out. If at the core of masculinity is initiation, then at the core of femininity is responsiveness, receptivity.
Now when I talk about all this, we need to remember that we are dealing with a mystery. That’s what Paul says in Ephesians, chapter 5, that our human sexuality, manhood, womanhood, marriage, that’s all a mystery that represents the even deeper, more profound mystery of the relationship of Christ with His Church. There’s no way to fully fathom or grasp the significance or the meaning of manhood or womanhood any more than we can fully grasp the mystery, the significance of Christ’s relationship with His Church.
There is a danger of trying to reduce our manhood, our womanhood to a set of lists, to a set of bullet points. This is feminine, this is masculine. But in spite of the fact that we don’t want to reduce it to a set of lists, we still need to recognize it’s importance and to remember that all women, whether married or single, are to model femininity—distinctive womanhood—in their various relationships by exhibiting a distinctive modesty, responsiveness, and gentleness of spirit.
I think when I say those things you can picture some of the opposite of those characteristics. A woman who is using her body, her feminine wiles, to lure in men. That’s not distinctively feminine. Now that may be the world’s view of femininity but that is not a biblical type of femininity.
Aggressive women have this attitude. They’re in your face. There’s a harshness, a brazenness, a hardness in so many women today, and I look at this and I sense it, and you know what I’m talking about, and you feel she’s missing so much of what God created her to do and to be. Women who are controlling, who are manipulative, who are stubborn. This is the opposite of this modest, responsive femininity, this gentleness of spirit.
Now that doesn’t mean that we have to wear ruffles and pink, okay? It does mean we have to have a feminine heart, to exhibit a distinctively feminine spirit. It does not mean that we have to have a timid personality, to be sedate, to be a wallflower type of person. In fact, to the contrary, we are called to be bold, courageous, women of faith.
But there’s a courageous femininity that is distinct from courageous masculinity. It looks different. It feels different. You may not be able to explain it fully, and I’ve struggled to explain it myself. But you know it when you see it. You know it when you experience it or its opposite.
This femininity doesn’t mean that we never speak. It does mean that we say the right thing at the right time in the right way. It’s distinctively fulfilling what God has made us to be as women that is different from men.
Now I realize that it is a fallen world and there are a lot of women today who have never married, are widowed, divorced, single moms, and they’re forced to step into some of those roles of provider, protector for themselves and their children. Women in this room who are carrying those responsibilities. But let me say you can do those things and still have a feminine spirit.
Unfortunately for most of us, there are very few positive role models today when it comes to the matter of femininity. In fact, as you look around in our culture, you’re hard pressed to point to really great models of womanhood. We have quite the opposite in so many women who are well known. Some of you are raising daughters, you’ve got teenage daughters, daughters in their 20s and they’re looking to these icons of the world and that’s what they’re basing their understanding of womanhood on, and it’s taking them in all kinds of wrong directions, unhealthy directions.
I want to encourage you to look to the Scripture rather than to culture for your role models. That’s something that I have done over the years that has been a huge help. My flesh as much as anybody else’s needs to be sanctified when it comes to living out my biblical womanhood. There is a lot in me, in my flesh, that does not represent Christ-like, biblical femininity.
So I go to women of the Scripture, and I’m helped to see their lives. Sometimes by their negative role models. Who comes to mind? Jezebel. Not someone you want to follow. But you look at the traits in her life and you realize there’s a Jezebel in all of us. But thank God, there’s some wonderful, positive role models in the Scripture and some women who were some of both.
I think of Sarah. There are a lot of positive things to emulate about her, some not so positive things. Miriam. We’ve done whole series on some of these women on Revive Our Hearts. A lot of positive things to emulate about Miriam, some not so positive things. Other women: Ruth, Esther, Deborah, Mary of Bethany, Mary of Nazareth, Elizabeth, Dorcas, and Lydia. As you study the lives of these women, you see how did God use them, how did they glorify God, how were they distinctively womanly? It gives us some positive role models and some help from their examples.
Now why does this all matter? Does it all really matter? Is the loss of femininity in our culture such a serious thing? There are a lot of other truths we could focus on. We do talk about a lot of other things on Revive Our Hearts. But is it really important to keep coming back to this one point? Biblical womanhood. Femininity.
Let me just give you two quick reasons why it does matter a lot. Number one, it matters because what God made is good. It’s beautiful. It’s best and it brings blessing to those who align their lives with it. When we reject God’s pattern, God’s plan for our lives, as women or as men, we experience pain and consequences. So it’s the way to fullness. It’s the way to blessing. It’s the way to life, to live out our womanhood as women of God.
Number two, it matters supremely because it is part of a bigger picture. Our womanhood, manhood, masculinity, femininity and how we interact with each other and how we complement each other tells an incredible story. Our manhood and womanhood, male, female. It’s the vehicle that God has chosen to reflect His image and to display His glory and to show the world His great redemptive plan.
Male and female. It’s so much bigger than gender. It’s a picture that God has designed to portray the gospel. As men reflect, we read this again in Ephesians 5, the sacrificial, covenant-keeping love of Christ who laid down His life for His Bride. As women reflect the responsiveness of Christ to her Lord to His salvation, as we reflect with men and women together the roles within the Trinity.
Again, we’ve done whole series that talk about these things, but just to stay here. This is a lot at stake. There’s a bigger picture here. The picture that God has designed of manhood and womanhood to display the gospel for the fame of His Name so that the world may praise Him, may rejoice in Him, may turn to Christ, may love Him, may pursue Him and may understand His incredible covenant-keeping love and redemptive plan. That’s the biggest reason that I want to be and I want you to be a true woman of God. It really does matter.
Leslie: When you embrace biblical womanhood, the purpose isn’t to be fulfilled or to forward a social program or fit a stereotype. Nancy Leigh DeMoss has been taking us to the heart of this issue. Will you embrace God’s calling on your life to show a picture of the gospel?
Thousands of women are coming together to learn how to do that more effectively. At a True Woman conference you’ll study God’s Word alongside others hungry to know God’s call on their lives. The speakers have a passion not just for telling funny stories or amusing a crowd. They want you to know God’s Word and God’s truth. Those speakers, like Nancy, Joni Eareckson Tada, Kay Arthur, Janet Parshall, Karen Loritts and many others will help you explore the Scriptures and learn to be God’s true woman in our day.
Would you get more information on the True Woman conferences coming to Indianapolis in September or Fort Worth in October? Just get the details on the speaker lineup at each location and make your plans to take part in an event that will send you home a different woman. The details are at ReviveOurHearts.com. You can also call our special True Woman number at 877-966-2608.
Here’s some sobering news. Everyone is going to go through suffering in this life. The good news is that your suffering can serve an important purpose. Learn to find the meaning in suffering when Nancy’s back tomorrow for Revive Our Hearts.
Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.
All Scripture is taken from the English Standard Version.
1 Stu Weber. Tender Warrior: God's Intention for a Man. p. 45.
Leslie Basham: Nancy Leigh DeMoss says all women, whether married or single, are called to display femininity.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Now that doesn’t mean that we have to wear ruffles and pink, okay? It does mean we have to have a feminine heart, to exhibit a distinctively feminine spirit.
Leslie: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss for Monday, June 28. No one likes being stereotyped. God created you as an individual and has called you to live out biblical femininity in a unique way. Here’s Nancy to help you get to the heart of femininity.
Nancy: Now we come today to a statement, an affirmation in the True Woman Manifesto that addresses women in every season of life. The Manifesto says,
God’s plan for gender is wider than marriage; all women, whether married or single, are to model femininity in your various relationships, by exhibiting a distinctive modesty, responsiveness, and gentleness of spirit.
Every Christian woman, regardless of our season of life is called to glorify God and to reflect Christ to our world and to edify both men and women around us by living out our distinctive femininity. Now that’s a bit of a hard word to say. It’s not an easy word to spell for some.
The word carries with it a lot of baggage today. There are a lot of misperceptions about femininity, a lot of confusion in people’s minds about what that means. In fact, I would venture to say that if we took a poll today and people in this room would be really honest, that even many of you who have come here for a Revive Our Hearts radio recording session might say that that word, femininity, conjures up negative thoughts in your mind. Now, not every woman would say that, but I bet some would. Negative connotations of what femininity is.
I sometimes in preparation for teaching sessions will get on a conference call or together with a group of women from different seasons of life just to pick their brains and to get input and insights about different things we’re going to be talking about. So I had a conference call a couple of weeks ago for this section of the Manifesto that we’re teaching right now. When this thing came up about femininity, it’s interesting how the opinions started to fly.
But it was interesting to hear the things they were honest about in terms of their past or present perception of femininity. One younger woman, still in her late 20s, said, “That word just has a negative connotation.” She said, “In my flesh when I hear that word I think weak; walk all over me; it’s okay, I’m nothing.”
And then she said, “When I knew we were going to be talking about this, I started asking myself what is femininity? I don’t have a clue what it is,” she said. And here’s a woman who is serving the Lord in a ministry. Now, she does have a clue what it is, but she’s realized that it’s a tough thing to really understand and there is some negative baggage that she has associated with this term.
There’s some today who define femininity in terms of a specific look, certain clothing or hairstyles, or specific activities. It’s interesting, when we touch on the issue of femininity on our teenage girls' blog, Lies Young Women Believe, oh, do the comments start to fly. These girls have opinions! If you want an education about what teenage girls are thinking, from Christian homes most of them, go on to that blog.
One girl commented on that blog, and she said,
When I was little, I think I beat up every guy at my school. LOL [laugh out loud]. So basically I’m just not that feminine. I don’t collect hundreds of lipstick colors. I think I have two. I don’t look through Southern Living décor books. I look through Sports Illustrated instead. I, like, only go to the mall maybe three times a year. I’m not trying to be manly or a guy (and I haven’t beat up any guys for a few years now, LOL). But I’m just not that feminine.
Now she has reduced femininity, as have a lot of us subconsciously perhaps, to things you do, certain activities, certain ways of looking or dressing, or certain demographics—married, mother. Are these things that define our femininity? It would be a mistake to say that femininity has nothing to do with marriage or motherhood or with the way that women dress or appear or the activities they enjoy, but these things are not the essence of what it means to be a woman.
They are simply expressions of what is in our hearts. And some of those expressions may look different for different women in different seasons of life, in different eras, and in different cultures that may look different. If you make these things—your marital status, how many children you do or don’t have, your wardrobe, your activities—if you make those things the essence of femininity, you can totally miss the real heart of the matter.
As someone said on our conference call a couple weeks ago, "You can dress like a church lady but have the heart of a prostitute." Now, I will confess that this session on femininity is the most difficult one for me that I have tackled thus far in the True Woman Manifesto, not because I don’t like the subject, not because I don’t care about it, but because trying to really define what is the essence of femininity I found was much harder than I would have anticipated.
I found myself grappling with questions. What is cultural? What is biblical? I am just going to teach this session based on the insights the Lord has given me to this point. If I were to teach this a year from now or ten years from now, I’m sure there are additional insights that the Lord would give to me because I’m growing in my understanding of the essence of my womanhood.
Elisabeth Elliot said, “In order to learn what it means to be a woman, we must start with the One who made her.” And she’s absolutely right. The Designer and Architect of life is the One we need to look to to help us understand who we are and how we’re wired, and what that means, and how we are the same as men and how we are different from men.
Scripture, thankfully, reveals God’s original pattern for male and female. Now it doesn’t fill in all the details, and some of us are list makers. That’s what we want. But it does give us a sketch, a picture that God’s Holy Spirit will help make application to our lives as to what this looks like for us.
But let me again just go back to the book of Genesis—Genesis 1 and 2. That’s where so much of this started—male and female—and it helps us to get a grasp of what it means to be a woman. Genesis 1, verse 27, we’ve talked about this verse in this series.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
So we see that from the outset male and female are distinct. They are not interchangeable parts. Together they were created to reflect what God is like. Man and woman together in their complementary relationships represent the image of God in a way that neither male nor female can fully do alone.
Now, we need to be careful in saying that because it doesn’t mean that as a woman you cannot reflect the image of God or that you are not fully human or you are not complete because God may not give you a husband. But God created male and female together to reflect His image in a way that cannot be done as magnificently if there were just male or just female.
In Genesis 2 we have a little bit more detailed account of the creation of male and female. Let me just read it to you. It’s so familiar and the problem is some of us have been around this stuff too long and we start to get glazed eyes when we look at these familiar passages. We need the wonder of what these Scriptures say to us and how they speak to us in our season of life.
Genesis 2, verse 18:
Then the LORD God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him."
Now that helper fit for him is made by God for a man who is not complete by himself. That says a whole lot about what it means to be a woman. Our femininity—so much of it is found in that concept of why God made the woman in the first place. Verse 19:
Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was it’s name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.
So the LORD God [I think it’s after Adam realized there is not anyone on this planet who corresponds to me. After he realized that, that not one of these animals would do, God] caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. [So different from the way God created other living creatures.]And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man He made into a woman and brought her to the man (verses 19-22).
What an incredible picture this is. The first woman fashioned by God. Now for starters, that’s breathtaking, that we were made by God. And the way God designed us is best. It’s good. It’s holy. It’s beautiful. It’s sacred. God designed us. He made us.
The first woman was fashioned by God for the man. She was designed to be a helper fit for him, suitable for him, corresponding to him, complementing him. Again, we’ve done whole series on Revive Our Hearts on different aspects of this True Woman Manifesto, so I’m just picking on highlights of each of these points in this series. You can go back to our archives and get a lot more teaching on each of these points.
She was fashioned by God for the man. She was made from the man, not out of the ground or the dust as the man and the animals were, but out of Adam’s very bone. Bone of his bone. Flesh of his flesh. She was made for the man. She was made from the man, and she was given by God to the man. Given by God to the man.
And when the man received that gift, he had a celebration. He was thrilled. He was effusive. You can’t tell that in the English translation here, but you get just a sense.
Then the man said, “This at last [at last what I have needed] is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man (verse 23).
Now by naming the woman, Adam was taking responsibility to be her husband, to protect her, to care for her, to provide for her. And in verse 23 we have a marvelous play on words that you can tell best in the Hebrew language. “She shall be called Woman,” the Hebrew word Ishsha, “because she was taken out of Man,” the Hebrew word Ish.
These two Hebrew words sound almost identical, but their meanings are different and they reflect the complementary relationship between the woman and the man. Ish, the word for man, comes from a root that means "strength." You add a feminine ending to the word Ish and you get Ishsha, almost identical sounding word. That word comes from a root that means "soft." Ish for man comes from a word that means strength. Ishsha, the word for woman, comes from a word that means soft.
Mary Kassian is one of the bloggers on the True Woman blog, a dear friend, an incredible intellect. She’s a theologian. She’s a scholar, and she has provided such a service to the body of Christ with many of the things that she has written, including her newer book, Girls Gone Wise in a World Gone Wild. If you don’t have that book, you want to get a hold of that.
She has written this about that difference between Ish and Ishsha, strength and soft. She says, “The implication becomes clearer when we observe the biblical meaning of a man’s 'strength.'" She gives several Scripture references where it speaks of a man’s strength. Then she draws this conclusion from those Scriptures.
Strength refers to a man’s manhood, his potency, virility, and procreative power. By contrast, a woman’s "softness" has to do with her pregnability, penetrability, and vulnerability (in a very positive sense).
Another writer, Stu Weber, has said it this way.
The ancient Hebrew word for man is Ish, [which he says, relates to the word] "piercer." The term for a woman is Ishsha, "pierced one." While the anatomical or sexual elements are clear, the force of the words is much larger in scope.
Biology, physiology bears this out. One is the initiator. One is the receiver. But he says the meaning here is far more significant than the obvious physical. He says,
The physical is a parable of the spiritual. At his core, a man is an initiator—a piercer, one who penetrates, moves forward, advances toward the horizon, leads. At the core of masculinity is initiation—the provision of direction, security, stability, and connection.1
Now if that’s true and I believe that it is; there are many other parts of Scripture that would bear this out. If at the core of masculinity is initiation, then at the core of femininity is responsiveness, receptivity.
Now when I talk about all this, we need to remember that we are dealing with a mystery. That’s what Paul says in Ephesians, chapter 5, that our human sexuality, manhood, womanhood, marriage, that’s all a mystery that represents the even deeper, more profound mystery of the relationship of Christ with His Church. There’s no way to fully fathom or grasp the significance or the meaning of manhood or womanhood any more than we can fully grasp the mystery, the significance of Christ’s relationship with His Church.
There is a danger of trying to reduce our manhood, our womanhood to a set of lists, to a set of bullet points. This is feminine, this is masculine. But in spite of the fact that we don’t want to reduce it to a set of lists, we still need to recognize it’s importance and to remember that all women, whether married or single, are to model femininity—distinctive womanhood—in their various relationships by exhibiting a distinctive modesty, responsiveness, and gentleness of spirit.
I think when I say those things you can picture some of the opposite of those characteristics. A woman who is using her body, her feminine wiles, to lure in men. That’s not distinctively feminine. Now that may be the world’s view of femininity but that is not a biblical type of femininity.
Aggressive women have this attitude. They’re in your face. There’s a harshness, a brazenness, a hardness in so many women today, and I look at this and I sense it, and you know what I’m talking about, and you feel she’s missing so much of what God created her to do and to be. Women who are controlling, who are manipulative, who are stubborn. This is the opposite of this modest, responsive femininity, this gentleness of spirit.
Now that doesn’t mean that we have to wear ruffles and pink, okay? It does mean we have to have a feminine heart, to exhibit a distinctively feminine spirit. It does not mean that we have to have a timid personality, to be sedate, to be a wallflower type of person. In fact, to the contrary, we are called to be bold, courageous, women of faith.
But there’s a courageous femininity that is distinct from courageous masculinity. It looks different. It feels different. You may not be able to explain it fully, and I’ve struggled to explain it myself. But you know it when you see it. You know it when you experience it or its opposite.
This femininity doesn’t mean that we never speak. It does mean that we say the right thing at the right time in the right way. It’s distinctively fulfilling what God has made us to be as women that is different from men.
Now I realize that it is a fallen world and there are a lot of women today who have never married, are widowed, divorced, single moms, and they’re forced to step into some of those roles of provider, protector for themselves and their children. Women in this room who are carrying those responsibilities. But let me say you can do those things and still have a feminine spirit.
Unfortunately for most of us, there are very few positive role models today when it comes to the matter of femininity. In fact, as you look around in our culture, you’re hard pressed to point to really great models of womanhood. We have quite the opposite in so many women who are well known. Some of you are raising daughters, you’ve got teenage daughters, daughters in their 20s and they’re looking to these icons of the world and that’s what they’re basing their understanding of womanhood on, and it’s taking them in all kinds of wrong directions, unhealthy directions.
I want to encourage you to look to the Scripture rather than to culture for your role models. That’s something that I have done over the years that has been a huge help. My flesh as much as anybody else’s needs to be sanctified when it comes to living out my biblical womanhood. There is a lot in me, in my flesh, that does not represent Christ-like, biblical femininity.
So I go to women of the Scripture, and I’m helped to see their lives. Sometimes by their negative role models. Who comes to mind? Jezebel. Not someone you want to follow. But you look at the traits in her life and you realize there’s a Jezebel in all of us. But thank God, there’s some wonderful, positive role models in the Scripture and some women who were some of both.
I think of Sarah. There are a lot of positive things to emulate about her, some not so positive things. Miriam. We’ve done whole series on some of these women on Revive Our Hearts. A lot of positive things to emulate about Miriam, some not so positive things. Other women: Ruth, Esther, Deborah, Mary of Bethany, Mary of Nazareth, Elizabeth, Dorcas, and Lydia. As you study the lives of these women, you see how did God use them, how did they glorify God, how were they distinctively womanly? It gives us some positive role models and some help from their examples.
Now why does this all matter? Does it all really matter? Is the loss of femininity in our culture such a serious thing? There are a lot of other truths we could focus on. We do talk about a lot of other things on Revive Our Hearts. But is it really important to keep coming back to this one point? Biblical womanhood. Femininity.
Let me just give you two quick reasons why it does matter a lot. Number one, it matters because what God made is good. It’s beautiful. It’s best and it brings blessing to those who align their lives with it. When we reject God’s pattern, God’s plan for our lives, as women or as men, we experience pain and consequences. So it’s the way to fullness. It’s the way to blessing. It’s the way to life, to live out our womanhood as women of God.
Number two, it matters supremely because it is part of a bigger picture. Our womanhood, manhood, masculinity, femininity and how we interact with each other and how we complement each other tells an incredible story. Our manhood and womanhood, male, female. It’s the vehicle that God has chosen to reflect His image and to display His glory and to show the world His great redemptive plan.
Male and female. It’s so much bigger than gender. It’s a picture that God has designed to portray the gospel. As men reflect, we read this again in Ephesians 5, the sacrificial, covenant-keeping love of Christ who laid down His life for His Bride. As women reflect the responsiveness of Christ to her Lord to His salvation, as we reflect with men and women together the roles within the Trinity.
Again, we’ve done whole series that talk about these things, but just to stay here. This is a lot at stake. There’s a bigger picture here. The picture that God has designed of manhood and womanhood to display the gospel for the fame of His Name so that the world may praise Him, may rejoice in Him, may turn to Christ, may love Him, may pursue Him and may understand His incredible covenant-keeping love and redemptive plan. That’s the biggest reason that I want to be and I want you to be a true woman of God. It really does matter.
Leslie: When you embrace biblical womanhood, the purpose isn’t to be fulfilled or to forward a social program or fit a stereotype. Nancy Leigh DeMoss has been taking us to the heart of this issue. Will you embrace God’s calling on your life to show a picture of the gospel?
Thousands of women are coming together to learn how to do that more effectively. At a True Woman conference you’ll study God’s Word alongside others hungry to know God’s call on their lives. The speakers have a passion not just for telling funny stories or amusing a crowd. They want you to know God’s Word and God’s truth. Those speakers, like Nancy, Joni Eareckson Tada, Kay Arthur, Janet Parshall, Karen Loritts and many others will help you explore the Scriptures and learn to be God’s true woman in our day.
Would you get more information on the True Woman conferences coming to Indianapolis in September or Fort Worth in October? Just get the details on the speaker lineup at each location and make your plans to take part in an event that will send you home a different woman. The details are at ReviveOurHearts.com. You can also call our special True Woman number at 877-966-2608.
Here’s some sobering news. Everyone is going to go through suffering in this life. The good news is that your suffering can serve an important purpose. Learn to find the meaning in suffering when Nancy’s back tomorrow for Revive Our Hearts.
Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.
All Scripture is taken from the English Standard Version.
1 Stu Weber. Tender Warrior: God's Intention for a Man. p. 45.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
The Oppression of Women
When I attended a chapel during my Christian university’s week of gender reconciliation chapels, I found that many of the women on the panel had begun to consider the question of whether or not they experience oppression as women in their daily lives. One woman’s comment was particularly intriguing. She said, “Before coming to this university, I’d never really even thought about the fact that I was a woman or that women were oppressed in the church.”
I was interested in what this woman had to say because of all the women on the panel, she was surprisingly the least “feminist,” while having the most reasons to hate men, after suffering through an abusive early marriage, a gang-rape, and an abduction to be a sex-slave.
She continued on to say, “Before I learned about how women are oppressed in the church, I was just happy to be saved and to serve in all sorts of ministries in the church. I didn’t think about women not being able to preach.” In other words, before coming to work at our university, and meeting the hardened feminist professors, she was rejoicing in her salvation and content to pursue serving the church in the variety of ways that were legitimately open to her as a woman.
In addition to this woman (who was only a clerk at the university), there were several female professors who sat on the panel as well. These women spoke of oppression and discrimination, but failed to give any concrete examples that I could buy into. For all their use of these words, I had to wonder if most of the female oppression that they spoke about came simply from the books they’d read.
When the women spoke of oppression, they gave examples such as their male coworkers asking if they would be staying home after they gave birth to their babies. Then they expressed their indignation at being asked the same thing by multitudes of people at church.
I’m sorry, but this is not oppression, folks! It’s an honest question, and probably something that most people would ask just to make conversation! However, the women on the panel seemed to feel that by merely asking such questions, people were making judgments about what they should be doing with their lives once they had children. I don’t think this is the case (especially in today’s world, where most mothers don’t stay home with their children), and honestly, I have to wonder if they women are just letting the guilt that they feel in leaving their children seep into the conversations they have with others.
This same goes for the way that they interact with their male co-workers. Because feminism is so popular in modern America, women seem to actually be on the lookout for oppression, and I have to wonder if a lot of the things they take as insulting or “anti-women” are caused merely by their insecurity or sensitivity to such issues. In a lot of cases—not all, of course—discrimination is found when you go looking for it.
I, personally, have never felt oppressed as a woman, and perhaps that’s why I react with surprise when other women express these kinds of feelings. I’ve never felt that being a woman was something to apologize or fight against. I’ve never envied men for the supposed “privileges” they have as males in America. I love the realm of women and femininity, and frankly, I’m glad I’m not a man. Feminists confuse me for pushing for special rights and privileges that will “liberate” them from the things that make them distinctly female. Logically, I’d think that those who promoted the cause of women would not push to make women more like men, but would whole-heartedly embrace their uniquely-female abilities, like childbearing and mothering, instead of finding ways to extricate themselves from the “burden” by promoting abortion and the like.
As I listened to the women on the panel speak, I couldn’t help but feel that they were just complaining about small, insignificant issues. As they sat discussing a joke that their male coworkers had made, my mind began to wander, and I thought of the women in China who were having abortions forced upon them, women being beaten in Iraq, and the little girls being forced into prostitution in Thailand. You know, those real kinds of female oppression and subjugation.
Yes, female oppression really does exist. It exists across the globe–as well as in America, in select cases–and it probably always will as long as we have naturally weaker bodies than men. But, I don’t think feminism (aka: pushing for our rights—which isn’t a very Christian thing to do in the first place) is the answer to the ills and grievances of women—neither physically nor emotionally. Christ is the only answer, both for the sin that causes men to hurt and oppress women, and for the emotional insecurity that women feel about their roles in society. I think Christian feminists have forgotten what Christ said about taking a supportive, background, or serving role:
“The greatest among you will be your servant.” ~Matthew 23:11
Amen.
As long as we can be servants, there is no need to become angry with God, bend Scriptures to fit the sentiments of the time, or shake our fists at the universe because we can’t be pastors or preach. Our quest to be like Christ by being a servant should be more than enough to fulfill us, and if it isn’t, we probably should be examining our hearts and minds to figure out just who we’re really working for when we push for the ability to gain recognition and more prominent roles.
This article originally appeared on Tiffany’s blog True Femininity
When I attended a chapel during my Christian university’s week of gender reconciliation chapels, I found that many of the women on the panel had begun to consider the question of whether or not they experience oppression as women in their daily lives. One woman’s comment was particularly intriguing. She said, “Before coming to this university, I’d never really even thought about the fact that I was a woman or that women were oppressed in the church.”
I was interested in what this woman had to say because of all the women on the panel, she was surprisingly the least “feminist,” while having the most reasons to hate men, after suffering through an abusive early marriage, a gang-rape, and an abduction to be a sex-slave.
She continued on to say, “Before I learned about how women are oppressed in the church, I was just happy to be saved and to serve in all sorts of ministries in the church. I didn’t think about women not being able to preach.” In other words, before coming to work at our university, and meeting the hardened feminist professors, she was rejoicing in her salvation and content to pursue serving the church in the variety of ways that were legitimately open to her as a woman.
In addition to this woman (who was only a clerk at the university), there were several female professors who sat on the panel as well. These women spoke of oppression and discrimination, but failed to give any concrete examples that I could buy into. For all their use of these words, I had to wonder if most of the female oppression that they spoke about came simply from the books they’d read.
When the women spoke of oppression, they gave examples such as their male coworkers asking if they would be staying home after they gave birth to their babies. Then they expressed their indignation at being asked the same thing by multitudes of people at church.
I’m sorry, but this is not oppression, folks! It’s an honest question, and probably something that most people would ask just to make conversation! However, the women on the panel seemed to feel that by merely asking such questions, people were making judgments about what they should be doing with their lives once they had children. I don’t think this is the case (especially in today’s world, where most mothers don’t stay home with their children), and honestly, I have to wonder if they women are just letting the guilt that they feel in leaving their children seep into the conversations they have with others.
This same goes for the way that they interact with their male co-workers. Because feminism is so popular in modern America, women seem to actually be on the lookout for oppression, and I have to wonder if a lot of the things they take as insulting or “anti-women” are caused merely by their insecurity or sensitivity to such issues. In a lot of cases—not all, of course—discrimination is found when you go looking for it.
I, personally, have never felt oppressed as a woman, and perhaps that’s why I react with surprise when other women express these kinds of feelings. I’ve never felt that being a woman was something to apologize or fight against. I’ve never envied men for the supposed “privileges” they have as males in America. I love the realm of women and femininity, and frankly, I’m glad I’m not a man. Feminists confuse me for pushing for special rights and privileges that will “liberate” them from the things that make them distinctly female. Logically, I’d think that those who promoted the cause of women would not push to make women more like men, but would whole-heartedly embrace their uniquely-female abilities, like childbearing and mothering, instead of finding ways to extricate themselves from the “burden” by promoting abortion and the like.
As I listened to the women on the panel speak, I couldn’t help but feel that they were just complaining about small, insignificant issues. As they sat discussing a joke that their male coworkers had made, my mind began to wander, and I thought of the women in China who were having abortions forced upon them, women being beaten in Iraq, and the little girls being forced into prostitution in Thailand. You know, those real kinds of female oppression and subjugation.
Yes, female oppression really does exist. It exists across the globe–as well as in America, in select cases–and it probably always will as long as we have naturally weaker bodies than men. But, I don’t think feminism (aka: pushing for our rights—which isn’t a very Christian thing to do in the first place) is the answer to the ills and grievances of women—neither physically nor emotionally. Christ is the only answer, both for the sin that causes men to hurt and oppress women, and for the emotional insecurity that women feel about their roles in society. I think Christian feminists have forgotten what Christ said about taking a supportive, background, or serving role:
“The greatest among you will be your servant.” ~Matthew 23:11
Amen.
As long as we can be servants, there is no need to become angry with God, bend Scriptures to fit the sentiments of the time, or shake our fists at the universe because we can’t be pastors or preach. Our quest to be like Christ by being a servant should be more than enough to fulfill us, and if it isn’t, we probably should be examining our hearts and minds to figure out just who we’re really working for when we push for the ability to gain recognition and more prominent roles.
This article originally appeared on Tiffany’s blog True Femininity
Friday, June 25, 2010
Is It OK for Moms to Have Jobs Outside of the Home?
The following is an edited transcript of the audio.
Is it biblically acceptable for a mother to hold a full time job outside of the home?
It can be. It is like the alcohol question, it can be.
In fact I would say, outside of the home is a complex statement. Only after the industrial revolution was home and work separated, by and large. Everywhere there is an agrarian kind of culture, home and work are together. If all the kids are weaving the baskets that you sell to make a living, are you home? If the garden around the house is what supports the family and the husband is out there building a barn, and you're doing this, are you home?
All that is to say the very question is ambiguous, and it is today. My niece has a full time job, and her office is in her home. She works for a company three states away.
Having said it can be, I want to discourage it because mothering and homemaking are huge and glorious jobs. What children need at age one, five, six, fourteen, eighteen is simply amazing, and so is what those needs call forth from a woman's creativity and heart and mind, personally for each one of these little ones that are coming along.
And, just being able to focus on the home where ministry can happen—not being enslaved by anybody's clock—you can say, "I want to work my tail off for king Jesus, but I don't want anybody to pay me for it. I'm going to do it right here in this neighborhood with my husband's connections and my connections. We're going to lavish grace on people's lives."
So, I'm calling for ministry full-time when I say "don't work full-time if you have a family." Turn your family into ministry. Turn your family into a global dream for what this family might become, or what this man might be, or what we might be together as we are home.
Those are the kind of dreams I want to offer the younger women that are coming along so that they don't think, "If I don't get a career and make lots of money and be equal with men in pay and time and everything, I've somehow sold out to something small or something that doesn't require intellectual capabilities."
It is a great and glorious calling to be a mother and a homemaker and a wife and a neighborhood make-it-happen kind of person and a church minister. Who knows what God might be pleased to do.
The following is an edited transcript of the audio.
Is it biblically acceptable for a mother to hold a full time job outside of the home?
It can be. It is like the alcohol question, it can be.
In fact I would say, outside of the home is a complex statement. Only after the industrial revolution was home and work separated, by and large. Everywhere there is an agrarian kind of culture, home and work are together. If all the kids are weaving the baskets that you sell to make a living, are you home? If the garden around the house is what supports the family and the husband is out there building a barn, and you're doing this, are you home?
All that is to say the very question is ambiguous, and it is today. My niece has a full time job, and her office is in her home. She works for a company three states away.
Having said it can be, I want to discourage it because mothering and homemaking are huge and glorious jobs. What children need at age one, five, six, fourteen, eighteen is simply amazing, and so is what those needs call forth from a woman's creativity and heart and mind, personally for each one of these little ones that are coming along.
And, just being able to focus on the home where ministry can happen—not being enslaved by anybody's clock—you can say, "I want to work my tail off for king Jesus, but I don't want anybody to pay me for it. I'm going to do it right here in this neighborhood with my husband's connections and my connections. We're going to lavish grace on people's lives."
So, I'm calling for ministry full-time when I say "don't work full-time if you have a family." Turn your family into ministry. Turn your family into a global dream for what this family might become, or what this man might be, or what we might be together as we are home.
Those are the kind of dreams I want to offer the younger women that are coming along so that they don't think, "If I don't get a career and make lots of money and be equal with men in pay and time and everything, I've somehow sold out to something small or something that doesn't require intellectual capabilities."
It is a great and glorious calling to be a mother and a homemaker and a wife and a neighborhood make-it-happen kind of person and a church minister. Who knows what God might be pleased to do.
Are You a Feminist?
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Author Mary Kassian says worldly thinking has permeated the church.
Mary Kassian: I think we have all been influenced by feminism—all of us. Some of the ideas that we accept as truth and as standard ideas have not come to us through our study of Scripture but have just come to us through culture.
Nancy: My friend Kim admits this was true the first 15 years of her marriage.
Kim: I exemplified feminism, and I did not even realize it. I would have said I was not a feminist. I was submissive to my husband. If he told me to do something, I would do it. But I did not honor and respect my husband in my treatment of him.
Nancy: Perhaps you’d never call yourself a feminist either. But what do your words and actions communicate? A desire to control your husband? Or a heart for supporting and encouraging his leadership?
With Seeking Him, I’m Nancy Leigh DeMoss.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Author Mary Kassian says worldly thinking has permeated the church.
Mary Kassian: I think we have all been influenced by feminism—all of us. Some of the ideas that we accept as truth and as standard ideas have not come to us through our study of Scripture but have just come to us through culture.
Nancy: My friend Kim admits this was true the first 15 years of her marriage.
Kim: I exemplified feminism, and I did not even realize it. I would have said I was not a feminist. I was submissive to my husband. If he told me to do something, I would do it. But I did not honor and respect my husband in my treatment of him.
Nancy: Perhaps you’d never call yourself a feminist either. But what do your words and actions communicate? A desire to control your husband? Or a heart for supporting and encouraging his leadership?
With Seeking Him, I’m Nancy Leigh DeMoss.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
How can ‘mother’ be a sexist stereotype?
Carolyn Moynihan
4 Jun 2010
While most Europeans worry their heads off about what is happening to the euro and the economy, certain members of the European political bureaucracy are getting on with more important things. Like drafting long resolutions about how to combat gender stereotypes in the media and having even longer meetings to get their ideas endorsed.
Let me say, straight off, that there are media stereotypes that undermine women’s dignity and in some cases are downright insulting. Why, for example, does the weather girl -- I should say female weather person -- on my local television network always, always, summer and winter, appear with half her chest exposed, unless it is to add sex appeal to what is an intrinsically boring segment of the news hour? Since her male counterpart is always well covered up (and still more interesting to listen to) we have to conclude that the value of a woman announcer is her sexuality, not her personality, let alone her expertise.
Read the rest of the article here.
Carolyn Moynihan
4 Jun 2010
While most Europeans worry their heads off about what is happening to the euro and the economy, certain members of the European political bureaucracy are getting on with more important things. Like drafting long resolutions about how to combat gender stereotypes in the media and having even longer meetings to get their ideas endorsed.
Let me say, straight off, that there are media stereotypes that undermine women’s dignity and in some cases are downright insulting. Why, for example, does the weather girl -- I should say female weather person -- on my local television network always, always, summer and winter, appear with half her chest exposed, unless it is to add sex appeal to what is an intrinsically boring segment of the news hour? Since her male counterpart is always well covered up (and still more interesting to listen to) we have to conclude that the value of a woman announcer is her sexuality, not her personality, let alone her expertise.
Read the rest of the article here.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
The Truth About Women That Feminists Don’t Want You to Know
This article is from Ladies Against Feminism.
Posted By Anna Sofia & Elizabeth Botkin on April 9, 2010
The recent naming of Nancy Pelosi as the “most powerful woman in American history” has sparked national discussion on both the history of women in America and the nature of woman’s power. As Speaker of the House, Mrs. Pelosi holds the highest civic position any American woman has held to date, and her hand in putting through the recent Health Care Bill will have huge historic implications. Though we don’t see it as a great advance for women to finally be oppressed by one of our own, this is undeniably a kind of power.
But behind this recent tribute to Mrs. Pelosi is this presupposition: “Women find their power in holding the positions of men – the traditional women’s role has no power. The power traditional women exercised in the past doesn’t count.”
Americans are ready to believe this because they long ago adopted a feminist view of history. Before feminism led women from the kitchen to the boardroom, we are told, women’s minds withered in the confines of a “comfortable concentration camp,” their talents never developed or given room to benefit society. Before feminism bought women the positions of men, woman’s influence was hushed and smothered beneath the oppression of male dominance. Before feminism invented justice, equality, and rights for women, women were deprived of education, opportunities, property, and power.
All thanks to feminism, we are now surely the strongest, smartest, most capable, most valued, best educated generation of women the West has ever seen. So we are to believe.
But despite feminism’s revisions of history, the truth is impossible to fully conceal when the light of strong, brilliant women glimmers through from supposedly dark eras. The general response, when a particularly intelligent and spirited woman appears in a Christian, patriarchal society, is to quickly recruit her as a proto-feminist, an anomaly of her time. Consider this typical approach to Abigail Adams, from the feminist biography Dearest Friend: “Abigail Adams was, in many ways, a prisoner of the times in which she lived, and her views on women’s role in society and on politics reflect that fact.” [1]
Were the Abigail Adamses flukes of history, born out of a void? Or did they come out of societies that were all about producing women like Abigail Adams? In this article we would like to let the women and facts speak for themselves. We will see that the reason feminism must reinterpret the facts is because it cannot stand on the legs of real history.
Our Forgotten Mothers
America has a rich legacy of powerful womanhood, integral to its very foundation and strength. Consider the inscription on the Monument to the Pilgrim Mothers in Plymouth, Massachusetts: “They brought up their families in sturdy virtue and a living faith in God without which nations perish.” As America was fighting to establish herself as an independent nation, their foe British general Lord Cornwallis despaired, “We may destroy all the men in America, and we shall still have all we can do to defeat the women.” [2]
After 200 years of cultivated feminine strength in America, French journalist Alexis de Tocqueville concluded his great work Democracy in America: “[I]f I were asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.”[3]
There is a great heritage of strength and even power that should be our birthright as American daughters. But how many of us are making good on that birthright? How many of us could claim to be as selflessly intrepid as the pilgrim women? How many of us are as brave as the wives of the signers? How many as enterprising and resourceful as those who helped build colonial culture and economy? How many as unflappable and capable as the women who civilized the Wild West? How many as poised and gracious as the White House hostesses and army wives whose savoir faire helped advance their husbands? How many as wise and educated as our founding mothers?
In many ways, our pajama-wearing, text-messaging, Me-generation is America’s weak generation of women. To paraphrase de Tocqueville’s quote, if you were to ask us now to what we would attribute the singular weakness and growing apostasy of America, we might say, to the selfishness and pettiness of their women. We’ve forgotten how to build strength into a nation; our idea of “power” is to leave the next generation for others to raise, ramrod through Health Care Bills most Americans don’t want, and put men out of a job.
But we will continue to feel good about where we are now as long as we continue to be ignorant about where we came from. It’s certainly easier to be excited about how “intelligent,” “educated,” and “valued” women are when we lose the historical point of comparison.
Examining Feminism’s Inheritance
“I disagree with the ideas behind radical feminism,” people sometimes write to us, “but you have to admit feminism has brought womanhood some good things.” [4] Some warn us against throwing the baby out with the bathwater, hating political feminism while refusing to be grateful for the strengths it has infused into us and our peers. If we examine four of the most popular claims people make, though, we may begin to be grateful for something completely different.
Claim 1: “Before feminism, women were not as valued and did not have as many rights.”
Before feminism, the Bible declared men’s and women’s equal standing and value before God – and in fact teaches this more consistently than any other religious or secular doctrine. In Scripture, man’s work and woman’s work are equally valid – wifehood, motherhood, homemaking, and femininity are not belittled, and women are not guilt-manipulated into living and acting like men. On the contrary; woman’s distinctiveness from man is praised and honored, and her unique role is held vital. Women were to be protected and cherished, to “attain honor” (Prov. 11:16) and be “praised in the gates” (Prov. 31:31). It wasn’t until the advent of women’s “liberation” that women were told, “Your value as a woman is determined by how well you can perform as a man. Being a woman is no longer enough.” And it wasn’t until feminism had raised up “an epidemic of thugs, dolts, and cads”[5] that women as a mass began to be “valued” as objects to be used and discarded.
As for our new rights – where did these rights come from? All rights must be bestowed by some Higher Source, which Susan B. Anthony was not. God is the author of our rights, as our founders recognized – not feminism – and it was He who gave women property rights, marital rights, and divorce rights (for example). The Bible was there first.
Millennia before feminism, the Bible also gave the world strict laws to protect women from abuse, rape, incest, abandonment, injustice, and more. Moreover, it gave women something our legal system doesn’t: a whole system of provisions for women who end up in hard circumstances.[6]
And there were societies long before suffrage-era America, attempting to construct themselves along biblical lines, which put these rights, laws, and provisions into action. One of these societies was Reformation-era Geneva, which “came to be known as ‘the paradise of women.’ There were good reasons for this. John Calvin was strongly protective of “women’s rights.” Under his guidance, church consistories went after wife abusers. They prosecuted guardians who had misappropriated trust funds of widows and orphans. …Rules were published to protect both men and women in marriage… Deserted wives were protected, and so on.” [7]
Yes, we will always be able to find single examples of women being mistreated in any era. But speaking historically as well as theologically, Christianity is the only social, spiritual, and political force that gives women true value and rights. It is the anti-Christian religions (including Marxism, Islam, and feminism) that demean, undervalue, and exploit women; throughout history, it was the Christian societies that truly valued women, protected women, and honored women (insofar as those societies were faithful to the Bible’s actual teachings).
Claim 2: Women are better educated today, thanks to feminism.
Women have more educational opportunities today, thanks to the cheap and almost-instant accessibility of information. So do men. But women are not necessarily making better use of their opportunities than they ever did (and feminism did not help Al Gore invent the Internet.)
There have never been enough deeply wise and learned women, and, certainly, some societies produced fewer than others, but we believe, historically, the chief barrier between a woman and her education is her own apathy and mental laziness.
Hannah More, regarded by Britain’s intelligentsia as one of the most learned people of her time (1745 – 1833), chided: “She who regrets being doomed to a state of dark and gloomy ignorance, by the injustice, or tyranny of the men, complains of an evil which does not exist.”[8]
The Bible offers as much praise for women who are intelligent, wise, capable, prudent, gifted, well-spoken, prolific, and diplomatic, as it does men – and casts an intimidating vision for all that godly womanhood requires. Once again, the Bible was there long before feminism, telling girls not to be ignorant, foolish, lazy, myopic, or easily led (Prov. 9:13, Prov. 31:27, Lam. 1:9, 2 Tim. 3:6).
And history is replete with examples of Christian men who knew they needed to educate their daughters thoroughly. The Lady Jane Greys, Anne Bradstreets, Mercy Otis Warrens, Abigail Adamses, Hannah Mores, and others from the panoply of educated women in history did not come out of a vacuum. They were the products of Christian families that understood the importance of learned women to a Christian society.
In 1688, Francois Fenelon wrote an entire book to rebut those who “exclaim, ‘Why make them learned? Curiosity renders them vain and conceited: it is sufficient if they be one day able to govern their families, and implicitly obey their husbands!’”[9] (an excuse he attributed mainly to “maternal caprice.”) His central thesis: “Great reservoirs of intellect can and must be cultivated in daughters. This will sustain them as well as equip them for the challenges of productive womanhood.”
Granted, there have always been boorish men who preferred stupid women, and there have always been women eager to accommodate them. Our society is no enlightened exception. And people who want to complain about the devaluation of female intellect in the past should consider that feminism’s sons are hardly known for valuing women’s brains over women’s bodies.
Feminism hasn’t stemmed the tide of boors and bimbos in society, or stopped girls from being too undisciplined to educate themselves. What feminism has done, chiefly, is change the goal of a woman’s education – for which we will decline to thank it.
Education expert John Taylor Gatto writes about the actual decline of education over the last 200 years, for men and women, through government schooling: “Anyone who reads can compare what the American present does in isolating children from their natural sources of education, modeling them on a niggardly last, to what the American past proved about human capabilities. The magnitude of the forced schooling institution’s strange accomplishment has been monumental. No wonder history has been outlawed.”[10]
Claim 3: Thanks to feminism, women can now work and earn money.
Woman’s work has moved into a different sphere since feminism started creeping into American thinking, but so has industry in general. Part of the reason we are confused about woman’s relation to “work” today is because economy, industry, and work were redefined during the industrial revolution, when biblical domestic economy was moved into workstations and factories. Woman’s work at home, which had previously included broad opportunities for gainful employment in the family endeavors, dwindled to household chores and caring for children…until that last, too, was removed from the sphere of the home. The women’s movement was enlisted as an important player in this change, helping to bury the family economy by equating “real” work with jobs outside the home.
Anthropologist Allan Carlson notes: “Industrialization tore asunder this settled, family-oriented European world. In historian John Demos’ words: ‘Family life was wrenched apart from the world of work — a veritable sea-change in social history.’ …The reciprocal, complementary tasks of husbands and wives in household production were quickly leveled, and questions grew about gender roles in the new order. …In the industrial milieu, the inward-looking, autonomous, cooperative family changed into a collection of individuals in potential, and often real, competition with each other.”[11]
Prior to both of these social movements, women worked. Their work was carried on in the household workplace (which could include fields, vineyards, family storefronts or offices, workshops, etc.), but was not limited to household chores. Women were productive members of society, producing goods of tangible value, bringing in money, and expanding the family holdings. In Scripture (just look at Proverbs 31), and in Christian societies in history, woman’s work included business transactions, production of goods, making investments, developing skills in diverse fields, and earning money – from home.
One such example is Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who at age 16 (in 1739) not only accepted the work of maintaining her family’s three plantations in her father’s absence, but used the fields to experiment with crops to strengthen the fledgling nation’s economy, including oaks for lumber when American would need fleets. According to Cokie Roberts, “Among her many accomplishments was the successful cultivation of indigo in South Carolina, which provided a source of income to the Mother Country that one historian of the era judged more important than the silver mines of Peru or Mexico to Spain. When Eliza Pinckney died, George Washington insisted on acting as a pallbearer at her funeral.”[12] Though Cokie Roberts’ comments between the lines try to revise feminism into Eliza’s motives, Eliza’s own words breathe a focus on home and family; a desire to stay in her “proper province,” submitted to her father and then her husband. It would take a feminist to see a contradiction in her words and actions.[13]
It would also take a feminist to think that Eliza and her contemporaries needed liberation.
Claim 4: Feminism gives us power.
Woman’s power is innate. Women are hugely influential, and always have been – for better or for worse. We have always had the power to build up or to destroy (Prov. 14:1). Much of the power we’re seeing women wield today, from the house to the House, is more of the latter – of course, the power to destroy generally makes itself more obvious, giving women the impression of being stronger.
We really should consider, as well, how much women have influenced every society, and when looking at cultures which marginalized women, to consider how much their women played a part in that.
We don’t mean to downplay the fact that there is real oppression and exploitation in this world, and there are real victims. But often, women are the ones who perpetuate their own exploitation and oppression. This is one case where “it takes two to tango”; it takes both to perpetuate pornography, unhealthy fashion trends, a sexually exploitive culture, and endless other harms to women. Male-female inter-connectivity and inter-dependency make it impossible for men to get away with much that women don’t allow. Women have always known, as Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, “…notwithstanding all your wise Laws and Maxims we have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our Masters, and without violence throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet.”[14] And she wasn’t talking about feminist insurrections.
Up From Liberation
The good news is this: we have God-given strength that we can use to rebuild and restore what feminism has taken away from us.
In muffling the truth and cutting us off from our heritage of strong, intelligent womanhood, they have defrauded even those of us who wanted no part of feminism. In exchange, they gave us “Women’s Studies” – a faulty concept, because it divorces “woman” from her context and tries to study her as an individual entity, as if “woman” can be understood apart from “human” and extracted from her environment. Avoiding what the best women in history have done, focusing on victims overcoming victimhood, “women’s studies” largely consists of erecting imaginary glass ceilings, planting territorial flags on discoveries feminism did not make, and recruiting spokeswomen from among its antithesis.
Thankfully, the Bible is our source of vision and inspiration. Even when we seem to have no good examples before us, Scripture is always there. Even when society is in shambles, the blueprint for rebuilding it is in front of us.
We have been given the opportunity to rebuild a culture of femininity from scratch. Let us be thankful that we have examples from previous generations of women to learn from, but let’s not restrict ourselves to copying the past. A biblical culture of femininity must be built on the right foundations – not Regency or Victorian England, not enlightenment romanticism, not fantasy lore, not 1st, 2nd, or 3rd wave feminism, and not Nancy Pelosi.
Feminists, hands off our heroines and our history. Because we have more coming.
———
Footnotes:
1. Lynne Withey, Founding Mothers, Simon and Schuster, 2001) p. xiii)
2. Cited in Founding Mothers, by Cokie Roberts, (William Morrow, 2004) p. xix
3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1956), p. 246, emphasis added
4. We occasionally get comments like this even from conservative Christians, including one from a young lady thankful to feminism for the right to drive; supposedly she was concerned that, had she lived a few hundred years ago, she might not have been allowed to drive a car. We would point out to this young lady that she might also have been denied access to a cell phone or the internet — but not by an oppressive patriarchy. She can thank progress in general–increased mobility and communication technology do bring new opportunities for everyone, but that has nothing to do with feminism.
5. “The Myth About Boys,” by David Burnett, TIME Magazine, 2007
6. This system of provisions includes the gleaning system, the kinsman redeemer system, the family provision system, the poor-tithe system, the handmaid system, and more. Biblical Law presupposed that there will be sin and irresponsibility in every society, and that the true victims must be protected.
7. R.J. Rushdoony, Roots of Reconstruction (Ross House Books, 1991), p. 407, emphasis added
8. Hannah More, Essays on Various Subjects Principally Designed for Young Ladies, emphasis added
9. Franois de Salignac de La Mothe Fenelon, De l’ Education des Filles (The Education of Daughters), written 1688, published in English by Backus and Whiting, 1806
10. John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education (Oxford Village Press, 2001) p. 33. He notes: “Ninty-six and a half percent of the American population is mediocre to illiterate where deciphering print is concerned. This is no commentary on their intelligence, but without ability to take in primary information from print and to interpret it they are at the mercy of commentators who tell them what things mean. A working definition of immaturity might include those who excessively require others to tell them what things mean.” Ibid, p. 62
11. Allan B. Carlson, From Cottage to Workstation, from the Introduction
12. Cokie Roberts, Founding Mothers (William Morrow, 2004) p. xvii
13. In Dearest Friend, Lynne Withey takes a similar approach with Abigail Adams: “She was contradictory in other ways too. She argued for improved legal rights and education for women long before they became popular issues; but she always believed that a woman’s place was in the home…Although she never actually stepped outside her role as wife and mother, she carried it to its limits. She managed all the family property and investments – including buying land, planning additions, to houses and farm buildings, hiring and firing laborers, contracting with tenants, and supervising far work. … She also served as John’s unofficial, unpaid, but most influential political advisor.” p. ix (History and Scripture teach us that none of this is “contradictory” – only feminists paint it as such. Buying land, hiring and firing, supervising work, and advising husbands with wise counsel is all there in Proverbs 31.)
14. The Quotable Abigail Adams, edited by John P. Kaminskiz (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009) p. 358
About The Author
Anna Sofia & Elizabeth Botkin
Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin are the only daughters of Geoffrey and Victoria Botkin. They and their five brothers share their family’s vision for cultural reformation, and enjoy working with their father on projects affecting family, church, and state. They delight in discovering new things every day about the beauty and power of the biblical home and family unit, and in investigating the glorious and diverse opportunities open to young women at home. At 24 and 22 years of age, respectively, their interests include film making, orchestral harp, history, music theory and composition, theology, the reconstruction of the West, hospitality, classical piano, the persecuted church, and home-making. They’d be delighted to hear your questions or comments regarding So Much More or Visionary Daughters. Email them at damsels (AT) visionarydaughters (DOT) com
Posted By Anna Sofia & Elizabeth Botkin on April 9, 2010
The recent naming of Nancy Pelosi as the “most powerful woman in American history” has sparked national discussion on both the history of women in America and the nature of woman’s power. As Speaker of the House, Mrs. Pelosi holds the highest civic position any American woman has held to date, and her hand in putting through the recent Health Care Bill will have huge historic implications. Though we don’t see it as a great advance for women to finally be oppressed by one of our own, this is undeniably a kind of power.
But behind this recent tribute to Mrs. Pelosi is this presupposition: “Women find their power in holding the positions of men – the traditional women’s role has no power. The power traditional women exercised in the past doesn’t count.”
Americans are ready to believe this because they long ago adopted a feminist view of history. Before feminism led women from the kitchen to the boardroom, we are told, women’s minds withered in the confines of a “comfortable concentration camp,” their talents never developed or given room to benefit society. Before feminism bought women the positions of men, woman’s influence was hushed and smothered beneath the oppression of male dominance. Before feminism invented justice, equality, and rights for women, women were deprived of education, opportunities, property, and power.
All thanks to feminism, we are now surely the strongest, smartest, most capable, most valued, best educated generation of women the West has ever seen. So we are to believe.
But despite feminism’s revisions of history, the truth is impossible to fully conceal when the light of strong, brilliant women glimmers through from supposedly dark eras. The general response, when a particularly intelligent and spirited woman appears in a Christian, patriarchal society, is to quickly recruit her as a proto-feminist, an anomaly of her time. Consider this typical approach to Abigail Adams, from the feminist biography Dearest Friend: “Abigail Adams was, in many ways, a prisoner of the times in which she lived, and her views on women’s role in society and on politics reflect that fact.” [1]
Were the Abigail Adamses flukes of history, born out of a void? Or did they come out of societies that were all about producing women like Abigail Adams? In this article we would like to let the women and facts speak for themselves. We will see that the reason feminism must reinterpret the facts is because it cannot stand on the legs of real history.
Our Forgotten Mothers
America has a rich legacy of powerful womanhood, integral to its very foundation and strength. Consider the inscription on the Monument to the Pilgrim Mothers in Plymouth, Massachusetts: “They brought up their families in sturdy virtue and a living faith in God without which nations perish.” As America was fighting to establish herself as an independent nation, their foe British general Lord Cornwallis despaired, “We may destroy all the men in America, and we shall still have all we can do to defeat the women.” [2]
After 200 years of cultivated feminine strength in America, French journalist Alexis de Tocqueville concluded his great work Democracy in America: “[I]f I were asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.”[3]
There is a great heritage of strength and even power that should be our birthright as American daughters. But how many of us are making good on that birthright? How many of us could claim to be as selflessly intrepid as the pilgrim women? How many of us are as brave as the wives of the signers? How many as enterprising and resourceful as those who helped build colonial culture and economy? How many as unflappable and capable as the women who civilized the Wild West? How many as poised and gracious as the White House hostesses and army wives whose savoir faire helped advance their husbands? How many as wise and educated as our founding mothers?
In many ways, our pajama-wearing, text-messaging, Me-generation is America’s weak generation of women. To paraphrase de Tocqueville’s quote, if you were to ask us now to what we would attribute the singular weakness and growing apostasy of America, we might say, to the selfishness and pettiness of their women. We’ve forgotten how to build strength into a nation; our idea of “power” is to leave the next generation for others to raise, ramrod through Health Care Bills most Americans don’t want, and put men out of a job.
But we will continue to feel good about where we are now as long as we continue to be ignorant about where we came from. It’s certainly easier to be excited about how “intelligent,” “educated,” and “valued” women are when we lose the historical point of comparison.
Examining Feminism’s Inheritance
“I disagree with the ideas behind radical feminism,” people sometimes write to us, “but you have to admit feminism has brought womanhood some good things.” [4] Some warn us against throwing the baby out with the bathwater, hating political feminism while refusing to be grateful for the strengths it has infused into us and our peers. If we examine four of the most popular claims people make, though, we may begin to be grateful for something completely different.
Claim 1: “Before feminism, women were not as valued and did not have as many rights.”
Before feminism, the Bible declared men’s and women’s equal standing and value before God – and in fact teaches this more consistently than any other religious or secular doctrine. In Scripture, man’s work and woman’s work are equally valid – wifehood, motherhood, homemaking, and femininity are not belittled, and women are not guilt-manipulated into living and acting like men. On the contrary; woman’s distinctiveness from man is praised and honored, and her unique role is held vital. Women were to be protected and cherished, to “attain honor” (Prov. 11:16) and be “praised in the gates” (Prov. 31:31). It wasn’t until the advent of women’s “liberation” that women were told, “Your value as a woman is determined by how well you can perform as a man. Being a woman is no longer enough.” And it wasn’t until feminism had raised up “an epidemic of thugs, dolts, and cads”[5] that women as a mass began to be “valued” as objects to be used and discarded.
As for our new rights – where did these rights come from? All rights must be bestowed by some Higher Source, which Susan B. Anthony was not. God is the author of our rights, as our founders recognized – not feminism – and it was He who gave women property rights, marital rights, and divorce rights (for example). The Bible was there first.
Millennia before feminism, the Bible also gave the world strict laws to protect women from abuse, rape, incest, abandonment, injustice, and more. Moreover, it gave women something our legal system doesn’t: a whole system of provisions for women who end up in hard circumstances.[6]
And there were societies long before suffrage-era America, attempting to construct themselves along biblical lines, which put these rights, laws, and provisions into action. One of these societies was Reformation-era Geneva, which “came to be known as ‘the paradise of women.’ There were good reasons for this. John Calvin was strongly protective of “women’s rights.” Under his guidance, church consistories went after wife abusers. They prosecuted guardians who had misappropriated trust funds of widows and orphans. …Rules were published to protect both men and women in marriage… Deserted wives were protected, and so on.” [7]
Yes, we will always be able to find single examples of women being mistreated in any era. But speaking historically as well as theologically, Christianity is the only social, spiritual, and political force that gives women true value and rights. It is the anti-Christian religions (including Marxism, Islam, and feminism) that demean, undervalue, and exploit women; throughout history, it was the Christian societies that truly valued women, protected women, and honored women (insofar as those societies were faithful to the Bible’s actual teachings).
Claim 2: Women are better educated today, thanks to feminism.
Women have more educational opportunities today, thanks to the cheap and almost-instant accessibility of information. So do men. But women are not necessarily making better use of their opportunities than they ever did (and feminism did not help Al Gore invent the Internet.)
There have never been enough deeply wise and learned women, and, certainly, some societies produced fewer than others, but we believe, historically, the chief barrier between a woman and her education is her own apathy and mental laziness.
Hannah More, regarded by Britain’s intelligentsia as one of the most learned people of her time (1745 – 1833), chided: “She who regrets being doomed to a state of dark and gloomy ignorance, by the injustice, or tyranny of the men, complains of an evil which does not exist.”[8]
The Bible offers as much praise for women who are intelligent, wise, capable, prudent, gifted, well-spoken, prolific, and diplomatic, as it does men – and casts an intimidating vision for all that godly womanhood requires. Once again, the Bible was there long before feminism, telling girls not to be ignorant, foolish, lazy, myopic, or easily led (Prov. 9:13, Prov. 31:27, Lam. 1:9, 2 Tim. 3:6).
And history is replete with examples of Christian men who knew they needed to educate their daughters thoroughly. The Lady Jane Greys, Anne Bradstreets, Mercy Otis Warrens, Abigail Adamses, Hannah Mores, and others from the panoply of educated women in history did not come out of a vacuum. They were the products of Christian families that understood the importance of learned women to a Christian society.
In 1688, Francois Fenelon wrote an entire book to rebut those who “exclaim, ‘Why make them learned? Curiosity renders them vain and conceited: it is sufficient if they be one day able to govern their families, and implicitly obey their husbands!’”[9] (an excuse he attributed mainly to “maternal caprice.”) His central thesis: “Great reservoirs of intellect can and must be cultivated in daughters. This will sustain them as well as equip them for the challenges of productive womanhood.”
Granted, there have always been boorish men who preferred stupid women, and there have always been women eager to accommodate them. Our society is no enlightened exception. And people who want to complain about the devaluation of female intellect in the past should consider that feminism’s sons are hardly known for valuing women’s brains over women’s bodies.
Feminism hasn’t stemmed the tide of boors and bimbos in society, or stopped girls from being too undisciplined to educate themselves. What feminism has done, chiefly, is change the goal of a woman’s education – for which we will decline to thank it.
Education expert John Taylor Gatto writes about the actual decline of education over the last 200 years, for men and women, through government schooling: “Anyone who reads can compare what the American present does in isolating children from their natural sources of education, modeling them on a niggardly last, to what the American past proved about human capabilities. The magnitude of the forced schooling institution’s strange accomplishment has been monumental. No wonder history has been outlawed.”[10]
Claim 3: Thanks to feminism, women can now work and earn money.
Woman’s work has moved into a different sphere since feminism started creeping into American thinking, but so has industry in general. Part of the reason we are confused about woman’s relation to “work” today is because economy, industry, and work were redefined during the industrial revolution, when biblical domestic economy was moved into workstations and factories. Woman’s work at home, which had previously included broad opportunities for gainful employment in the family endeavors, dwindled to household chores and caring for children…until that last, too, was removed from the sphere of the home. The women’s movement was enlisted as an important player in this change, helping to bury the family economy by equating “real” work with jobs outside the home.
Anthropologist Allan Carlson notes: “Industrialization tore asunder this settled, family-oriented European world. In historian John Demos’ words: ‘Family life was wrenched apart from the world of work — a veritable sea-change in social history.’ …The reciprocal, complementary tasks of husbands and wives in household production were quickly leveled, and questions grew about gender roles in the new order. …In the industrial milieu, the inward-looking, autonomous, cooperative family changed into a collection of individuals in potential, and often real, competition with each other.”[11]
Prior to both of these social movements, women worked. Their work was carried on in the household workplace (which could include fields, vineyards, family storefronts or offices, workshops, etc.), but was not limited to household chores. Women were productive members of society, producing goods of tangible value, bringing in money, and expanding the family holdings. In Scripture (just look at Proverbs 31), and in Christian societies in history, woman’s work included business transactions, production of goods, making investments, developing skills in diverse fields, and earning money – from home.
One such example is Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who at age 16 (in 1739) not only accepted the work of maintaining her family’s three plantations in her father’s absence, but used the fields to experiment with crops to strengthen the fledgling nation’s economy, including oaks for lumber when American would need fleets. According to Cokie Roberts, “Among her many accomplishments was the successful cultivation of indigo in South Carolina, which provided a source of income to the Mother Country that one historian of the era judged more important than the silver mines of Peru or Mexico to Spain. When Eliza Pinckney died, George Washington insisted on acting as a pallbearer at her funeral.”[12] Though Cokie Roberts’ comments between the lines try to revise feminism into Eliza’s motives, Eliza’s own words breathe a focus on home and family; a desire to stay in her “proper province,” submitted to her father and then her husband. It would take a feminist to see a contradiction in her words and actions.[13]
It would also take a feminist to think that Eliza and her contemporaries needed liberation.
Claim 4: Feminism gives us power.
Woman’s power is innate. Women are hugely influential, and always have been – for better or for worse. We have always had the power to build up or to destroy (Prov. 14:1). Much of the power we’re seeing women wield today, from the house to the House, is more of the latter – of course, the power to destroy generally makes itself more obvious, giving women the impression of being stronger.
We really should consider, as well, how much women have influenced every society, and when looking at cultures which marginalized women, to consider how much their women played a part in that.
We don’t mean to downplay the fact that there is real oppression and exploitation in this world, and there are real victims. But often, women are the ones who perpetuate their own exploitation and oppression. This is one case where “it takes two to tango”; it takes both to perpetuate pornography, unhealthy fashion trends, a sexually exploitive culture, and endless other harms to women. Male-female inter-connectivity and inter-dependency make it impossible for men to get away with much that women don’t allow. Women have always known, as Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, “…notwithstanding all your wise Laws and Maxims we have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our Masters, and without violence throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet.”[14] And she wasn’t talking about feminist insurrections.
Up From Liberation
The good news is this: we have God-given strength that we can use to rebuild and restore what feminism has taken away from us.
In muffling the truth and cutting us off from our heritage of strong, intelligent womanhood, they have defrauded even those of us who wanted no part of feminism. In exchange, they gave us “Women’s Studies” – a faulty concept, because it divorces “woman” from her context and tries to study her as an individual entity, as if “woman” can be understood apart from “human” and extracted from her environment. Avoiding what the best women in history have done, focusing on victims overcoming victimhood, “women’s studies” largely consists of erecting imaginary glass ceilings, planting territorial flags on discoveries feminism did not make, and recruiting spokeswomen from among its antithesis.
Thankfully, the Bible is our source of vision and inspiration. Even when we seem to have no good examples before us, Scripture is always there. Even when society is in shambles, the blueprint for rebuilding it is in front of us.
We have been given the opportunity to rebuild a culture of femininity from scratch. Let us be thankful that we have examples from previous generations of women to learn from, but let’s not restrict ourselves to copying the past. A biblical culture of femininity must be built on the right foundations – not Regency or Victorian England, not enlightenment romanticism, not fantasy lore, not 1st, 2nd, or 3rd wave feminism, and not Nancy Pelosi.
Feminists, hands off our heroines and our history. Because we have more coming.
———
Footnotes:
1. Lynne Withey, Founding Mothers, Simon and Schuster, 2001) p. xiii)
2. Cited in Founding Mothers, by Cokie Roberts, (William Morrow, 2004) p. xix
3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1956), p. 246, emphasis added
4. We occasionally get comments like this even from conservative Christians, including one from a young lady thankful to feminism for the right to drive; supposedly she was concerned that, had she lived a few hundred years ago, she might not have been allowed to drive a car. We would point out to this young lady that she might also have been denied access to a cell phone or the internet — but not by an oppressive patriarchy. She can thank progress in general–increased mobility and communication technology do bring new opportunities for everyone, but that has nothing to do with feminism.
5. “The Myth About Boys,” by David Burnett, TIME Magazine, 2007
6. This system of provisions includes the gleaning system, the kinsman redeemer system, the family provision system, the poor-tithe system, the handmaid system, and more. Biblical Law presupposed that there will be sin and irresponsibility in every society, and that the true victims must be protected.
7. R.J. Rushdoony, Roots of Reconstruction (Ross House Books, 1991), p. 407, emphasis added
8. Hannah More, Essays on Various Subjects Principally Designed for Young Ladies, emphasis added
9. Franois de Salignac de La Mothe Fenelon, De l’ Education des Filles (The Education of Daughters), written 1688, published in English by Backus and Whiting, 1806
10. John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education (Oxford Village Press, 2001) p. 33. He notes: “Ninty-six and a half percent of the American population is mediocre to illiterate where deciphering print is concerned. This is no commentary on their intelligence, but without ability to take in primary information from print and to interpret it they are at the mercy of commentators who tell them what things mean. A working definition of immaturity might include those who excessively require others to tell them what things mean.” Ibid, p. 62
11. Allan B. Carlson, From Cottage to Workstation, from the Introduction
12. Cokie Roberts, Founding Mothers (William Morrow, 2004) p. xvii
13. In Dearest Friend, Lynne Withey takes a similar approach with Abigail Adams: “She was contradictory in other ways too. She argued for improved legal rights and education for women long before they became popular issues; but she always believed that a woman’s place was in the home…Although she never actually stepped outside her role as wife and mother, she carried it to its limits. She managed all the family property and investments – including buying land, planning additions, to houses and farm buildings, hiring and firing laborers, contracting with tenants, and supervising far work. … She also served as John’s unofficial, unpaid, but most influential political advisor.” p. ix (History and Scripture teach us that none of this is “contradictory” – only feminists paint it as such. Buying land, hiring and firing, supervising work, and advising husbands with wise counsel is all there in Proverbs 31.)
14. The Quotable Abigail Adams, edited by John P. Kaminskiz (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009) p. 358
About The Author
Anna Sofia & Elizabeth Botkin
Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin are the only daughters of Geoffrey and Victoria Botkin. They and their five brothers share their family’s vision for cultural reformation, and enjoy working with their father on projects affecting family, church, and state. They delight in discovering new things every day about the beauty and power of the biblical home and family unit, and in investigating the glorious and diverse opportunities open to young women at home. At 24 and 22 years of age, respectively, their interests include film making, orchestral harp, history, music theory and composition, theology, the reconstruction of the West, hospitality, classical piano, the persecuted church, and home-making. They’d be delighted to hear your questions or comments regarding So Much More or Visionary Daughters. Email them at damsels (AT) visionarydaughters (DOT) com
Friday, April 2, 2010
God's Glory is Displayed Through GENDER
This post from Ladies Against Feminism
Posted By Kelly Crawford on March 28, 2010
I almost had to leave the auditorium, retreat to a quiet place, and process the profound revelation I had never seen that Mary Kassian revealed from that familiar passage in Genesis:
“She shall be called ‘woman’ because she was taken out of man.” Genesis 2:23
We skip right over it and miss what God is revealing here. Some of us even desecrate His very nature in our misunderstanding.
Paint it any way you like, champion the “philanthropic” nature of feminism, but, underneath, it is rooted in the rebellion against God’s perfect, created design.
That verse in Genesis is not just about a man and woman being created to live together. It was God’s crowning work with which He announced to the world all the fullness of His glory. He’s too big to be revealed in one human being. It is VERY important that we understand that without the distinct characteristics in man and woman, meant to reveal Himself through the union of the two in marriage, we only see a part of who God is.
“She shall be called ISHA, for she was taken out of ISH.”
Now here it is:
“Isha” comes from a Hebrew word meaning “soft“, while “Ish” comes from the word meaning “strength“. Now remember, God had said, “Let us make man in our image”. Adam at first embodied the whole image of God. (Even the word translated “man” in the first part of the verse has a different meaning than what we see after Eve was created.) Literally, God took the feminine softness out of Adam and embodied that in a new creation, woman. God was screaming to Adam, and to us:
“You can only fully understand Me by looking at the totality of Who I am through gender.”
The reason marriage is the illustrated picture of Christ and His bride is because it is the only way two distinctly different beings can come together and join as one flesh, representing the completed picture of who God is.
Is that not mind-blowing?
And when we embrace this uniqueness, celebrating our differences, we say to God, “It is very good”.
But when we bristle at and blur these differences we raise a fist and say, “It is not good”.
And the picture gets clearer…man reflects God’s “going out” power (even in the basic anatomy and events of reproduction), while woman reflects His “receiving” power in her anatomy and her ability to house and nourish life.
This is why homosexuality is an abomination to Him. This is why a rejection of the gift of reproduction fails to display His glory. This is why an egalitarian view of marriage makes a mockery of Him. This is why when we balk at the “warrior” nature of man and the “nurture” nature of woman we act foolishly. It’s all Him!
Do you get this?
Makes me want to shout.
Speak well of God with your femininity.
Posted By Kelly Crawford on March 28, 2010
I almost had to leave the auditorium, retreat to a quiet place, and process the profound revelation I had never seen that Mary Kassian revealed from that familiar passage in Genesis:
“She shall be called ‘woman’ because she was taken out of man.” Genesis 2:23
We skip right over it and miss what God is revealing here. Some of us even desecrate His very nature in our misunderstanding.
Paint it any way you like, champion the “philanthropic” nature of feminism, but, underneath, it is rooted in the rebellion against God’s perfect, created design.
That verse in Genesis is not just about a man and woman being created to live together. It was God’s crowning work with which He announced to the world all the fullness of His glory. He’s too big to be revealed in one human being. It is VERY important that we understand that without the distinct characteristics in man and woman, meant to reveal Himself through the union of the two in marriage, we only see a part of who God is.
“She shall be called ISHA, for she was taken out of ISH.”
Now here it is:
“Isha” comes from a Hebrew word meaning “soft“, while “Ish” comes from the word meaning “strength“. Now remember, God had said, “Let us make man in our image”. Adam at first embodied the whole image of God. (Even the word translated “man” in the first part of the verse has a different meaning than what we see after Eve was created.) Literally, God took the feminine softness out of Adam and embodied that in a new creation, woman. God was screaming to Adam, and to us:
“You can only fully understand Me by looking at the totality of Who I am through gender.”
The reason marriage is the illustrated picture of Christ and His bride is because it is the only way two distinctly different beings can come together and join as one flesh, representing the completed picture of who God is.
Is that not mind-blowing?
And when we embrace this uniqueness, celebrating our differences, we say to God, “It is very good”.
But when we bristle at and blur these differences we raise a fist and say, “It is not good”.
And the picture gets clearer…man reflects God’s “going out” power (even in the basic anatomy and events of reproduction), while woman reflects His “receiving” power in her anatomy and her ability to house and nourish life.
This is why homosexuality is an abomination to Him. This is why a rejection of the gift of reproduction fails to display His glory. This is why an egalitarian view of marriage makes a mockery of Him. This is why when we balk at the “warrior” nature of man and the “nurture” nature of woman we act foolishly. It’s all Him!
Do you get this?
Makes me want to shout.
Speak well of God with your femininity.
Ladies Against Feminism
I want to share with you a relaunch of a site entitled Ladies Against Feminism. As it states, "LAF has refuted the follies of feminism and promoted a strong, intelligent, biblical view of womanhood. We love femininity and are delighted to share the beauties of the womanly virtues with women all over the world." I'm totally anything that does that! Visit LAF to see what I'm talking about!
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
CEDAW and Homeschooling Families
(From www.hslda.org)
July 16, 2009
William A. Estrada, Esq.
William A. Estrada, Esq.
Director of Federal Relations
Introduction
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has been at the forefront of HSLDA’s lobbying efforts recently, but there is another UN convention that may also be sent to the United States Senate for ratification, and would also threaten home educating families: the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).1
CEDAW calls for sweeping changes in law and policy to eliminate “all forms” of discrimination against women. It was drafted around the time that the Equal Rights Amendment movement was at its zenith. If ratified (requiring two-thirds of the Senate or 67 senators to approve it), CEDAW would become the supreme law of the land under the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause in Article VI, thus trumping state laws and being used as binding precedent by state and federal judges.
Adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979, CEDAW was signed by President Carter’s administration in 1980. Now that the women’s treaty has a favorable majority in the U.S. Senate and supporters in the Obama administration, proponents of CEDAW are pushing to have it ratified.
Why is CEDAW Dangerous to Homeschooling Families?
The greatest danger posed by CEDAW is its requirement that curricula be revised to ensure that there is no differentiation made on the basis of gender. CEDAW’s Article 10 gives the government the power to make these revisions: “States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women … and in particular to ensure … the elimination of any stereotyped concept of the roles of men and women at all levels and in all forms of education by encouraging coeducation and other types of education which will help to achieve this aim and, in particular, by the revision of textbooks and school programmes and the adaptation of teaching methods.” Under the guise of eliminating bias against women, CEDAW attempts to eliminate any differentiation between the sexes.
CEDAW prohibits making distinctions between the roles of mother and father, and teaching a traditional understanding of the family. Children are to be taught that they can get along just as well with two mothers or two fathers, and any attempt to show otherwise could be considered discrimination against women.
If CEDAW is ratified, Congress will not only acquire the duty to implement the treaty, but it will also acquire the jurisdiction necessary to pass legislation to comply. Such necessarily far-reaching legislation will impact the education of all children, including those who attend homeschools and private Christian schools.
Another danger posed by CEDAW, just like the CRC, is that a committee of “experts” on gender issues from 23 foreign nations has the power to supervise all nations that ratify CEDAW, to ensure that they are taking steps to enforce the convention’s requirements. This strikes at the heart of our system of representative government, where elected officials represent us in state legislatures and in Washington, D.C. No one on this committee has ever been elected by a U.S. voter, yet the committee would make rulings that could affect the lives of all U.S. residents.
Possibly most shocking of all, under the Optional Protocol to CEDAW passed by the UN General Assembly in 1999, individuals or groups who disagree with how the treaty is enforced by Congress and the U.S. judicial system can take claims alleging violations of CEDAW directly to the CEDAW Committee. The CEDAW Committee has an “inquiry procedure” whereby it can directly investigate possible CEDAW violations.
Conclusion
It is possible that CEDAW will be sent to the U.S. Senate for a ratification vote this year, even before the CRC. Regardless of which treaty is sent first, it is imperative that homeschoolers and other freedom-loving Americans work together to defeat both.
We will continue to monitor this treaty, as well as the CRC, and provide updates.
Endnotes
1. All references are from the text of CEDAW, located on the United Nations website at http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/text/econvention.htm
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Why Women Are Unhappy
by Phyllis Schlafly
June 19, 2009
The National Bureau of Economic Research released a study to be published soon in the American Economic Journal that shows women's happiness has measurably declined since 1970. It's no surprise that this has stimulated much comment.
This study covers the same time period as the rise of the so-called women's liberation or feminist movement. The correlation demands an explanation.
One theory advanced by the authors, University of Pennsylvania economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, is that the women's liberation movement "raised women's expectations" (sold them a bill of goods), making them feel inadequate when they fail to have it all. A second theory is that the demands on women who are both mothers and jobholders in the labor force are overwhelming.
I'm neither an economist nor a psychologist, but I'll join the conversation with my own armchair analysis. Another theory could be that the feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach.
Feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women held consciousness-raising sessions where they exchanged tales of how badly some man had treated them. Grievances are like flowers; if you water them, they will grow, and self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.
Another theory could be the increase in easy divorce and illegitimacy (now 40 percent of American births are to single moms), which means that millions of women are raising kids without a husband and therefore expect Big Brother government to substitute as provider. The 2008 election returns showed that 70 percent of unmarried women voted for Barack Obama, perhaps hoping to be beneficiaries of his "spread the wealth" policies.
In the pre-1970 era, when surveys showed women with higher levels of happiness, most men held jobs that enabled their wives to be fulltime homemakers. The private enterprise system constantly produces goods that make household work and kiddie care easier (such as dryers, dishwashers and paper diapers).
Betty Friedan started the feminist movement in the late 1960s with her book The Feminine Mystique, which created the myth that suburban housewives were suffering from "a sense of dissatisfaction" with their alleged-to-be-boring lives. To liberate women from the home that Friedan labeled "a comfortable concentration camp," the feminist movement worked tirelessly to make the role of fulltime homemaker socially disdained.
Economic need played no role in the feminist argument that marriage is archaic and oppressive to women. A job in the labor force was upheld as so much more fulfilling than tending babies and preparing dinner for a hard-working husband.
Women's studies courses require students to accept as an article of faith the silly notion that gender differences are not natural or biological but are social constructs created by the patriarchy and ancient stereotypes. This leads feminists to seek legislative corrections for problems that don't exist.
A former editor of the Ladies' Home Journal wrote in her book Spin Sisters that the anorexic blondes on television are every day selling the falsehood that women's lives are full of misery and threats from men. Bernard Goldberg calls the mainstream media "one of America's most pro-feminist institutions."
According to feminist ideology, the only gender-specific characteristic is that men are naturally batterers who make all women victims. On that theory, the feminists conned Congress into passing the Violence Against Women Act (note the sex discriminatory title), which includes a handout of a billion dollars a year to finance their political, legislative and judicial goals.
The feminists whine endlessly using their favorite word "choice" in matters of abortion, but they reject choice in gender roles. The Big Mama of feminist studies, Simone de Beauvoir, said, "We don't believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children . . . precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one."
The feminists have carried on a long-running campaign to make husbands and fathers unnecessary and irrelevant. Most divorces are initiated by women, and more women than men request same-sex marriage licenses in Massachusetts so that, with two affirmative-action jobs plus in vitro fertilization, they can create a "family" without husbands or fathers.
Despite the false messages of the colleges and the media, most American women are smart enough to reject the label feminist, and only 20 percent of mothers say they want full-time work in the labor force. I suggest that women suffering from unhappiness should look into how women are treated in the rest of the world, and then maybe American women would realize they are the most fortunate people on earth.
by Phyllis Schlafly
June 19, 2009
The National Bureau of Economic Research released a study to be published soon in the American Economic Journal that shows women's happiness has measurably declined since 1970. It's no surprise that this has stimulated much comment.
This study covers the same time period as the rise of the so-called women's liberation or feminist movement. The correlation demands an explanation.
One theory advanced by the authors, University of Pennsylvania economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, is that the women's liberation movement "raised women's expectations" (sold them a bill of goods), making them feel inadequate when they fail to have it all. A second theory is that the demands on women who are both mothers and jobholders in the labor force are overwhelming.
I'm neither an economist nor a psychologist, but I'll join the conversation with my own armchair analysis. Another theory could be that the feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach.
Feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women held consciousness-raising sessions where they exchanged tales of how badly some man had treated them. Grievances are like flowers; if you water them, they will grow, and self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.
Another theory could be the increase in easy divorce and illegitimacy (now 40 percent of American births are to single moms), which means that millions of women are raising kids without a husband and therefore expect Big Brother government to substitute as provider. The 2008 election returns showed that 70 percent of unmarried women voted for Barack Obama, perhaps hoping to be beneficiaries of his "spread the wealth" policies.
In the pre-1970 era, when surveys showed women with higher levels of happiness, most men held jobs that enabled their wives to be fulltime homemakers. The private enterprise system constantly produces goods that make household work and kiddie care easier (such as dryers, dishwashers and paper diapers).
Betty Friedan started the feminist movement in the late 1960s with her book The Feminine Mystique, which created the myth that suburban housewives were suffering from "a sense of dissatisfaction" with their alleged-to-be-boring lives. To liberate women from the home that Friedan labeled "a comfortable concentration camp," the feminist movement worked tirelessly to make the role of fulltime homemaker socially disdained.
Economic need played no role in the feminist argument that marriage is archaic and oppressive to women. A job in the labor force was upheld as so much more fulfilling than tending babies and preparing dinner for a hard-working husband.
Women's studies courses require students to accept as an article of faith the silly notion that gender differences are not natural or biological but are social constructs created by the patriarchy and ancient stereotypes. This leads feminists to seek legislative corrections for problems that don't exist.
A former editor of the Ladies' Home Journal wrote in her book Spin Sisters that the anorexic blondes on television are every day selling the falsehood that women's lives are full of misery and threats from men. Bernard Goldberg calls the mainstream media "one of America's most pro-feminist institutions."
According to feminist ideology, the only gender-specific characteristic is that men are naturally batterers who make all women victims. On that theory, the feminists conned Congress into passing the Violence Against Women Act (note the sex discriminatory title), which includes a handout of a billion dollars a year to finance their political, legislative and judicial goals.
The feminists whine endlessly using their favorite word "choice" in matters of abortion, but they reject choice in gender roles. The Big Mama of feminist studies, Simone de Beauvoir, said, "We don't believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children . . . precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one."
The feminists have carried on a long-running campaign to make husbands and fathers unnecessary and irrelevant. Most divorces are initiated by women, and more women than men request same-sex marriage licenses in Massachusetts so that, with two affirmative-action jobs plus in vitro fertilization, they can create a "family" without husbands or fathers.
Despite the false messages of the colleges and the media, most American women are smart enough to reject the label feminist, and only 20 percent of mothers say they want full-time work in the labor force. I suggest that women suffering from unhappiness should look into how women are treated in the rest of the world, and then maybe American women would realize they are the most fortunate people on earth.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)