Homemaking is at the heart of biblical womanhood. It is the very essence of a woman's role, her domain. But why is is that homemaking doesn't seem all that fulfilling?
Fallacy # 4 Homemaking
Dorothy Parker is one of the few women essayists in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and she writes, predictably, about homemaking. But trying to create an image of a glorious role that makes every woman happy, she contradicts herself.
She first describes the glories of homemaking:
"Homemaking, if pursued with energy, imagination,
and skills, has as much challenge and opportunity, success and failure, growth
and expansion, perks and incentives as any corporation… Homemaking – being a
full-time wife and mother – is not a destructive drought of usefulness but an
overflowing oasis of opportunity; it is not a dreary cell to contain one’s
talents and skills but a brilliant catalyst to channel creativity and energies
into meaningful work."
Yet, she writes also:
“The best way to make homemaking a joyous task
is to offer it as unto to the Lord; the only way to avoid the drudgery in such
mundane tasks is to bathe the task with prayer and catch a vision of the divine
challenge in making and nurturing a home.”
Which one is it?
Find it
Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood:
Dorothy Parker: p 377, 367
The
division of the mind and the body is the traditional method of assigning women
into the domestic sphere, found already in antiquity, the woman being
considered suited only for procreation, not intellectual exertion. However, the
Roman matron, whom we find in the
Bible, would not recognize herself in the modern homemaker.
The
wealthy Roman woman played a different role as wife and mother than her
counterpart in Classical Athens. The fortunes of Romans were far greater, and
they had not only more but more competent slaves. The tasks enumerated by
Xenophon for the well-to-do Athenians wife were, even among the
traditional-minded Romans, relegated to a slave, the chief steward’s wife (vilica). Nevertheless, the Roman matron
bore sole responsibility for the management of her town house, and although her
work was mainly the supervision of slaves, she was expected to be able to
perform such chores as spinning and weaving.
Household duties did not hold a prominent place in a woman’s public
image: the Roman matron could never be considered a housewife as could the
Athenian. .. Freed from household routines, virtuous women could visit, go
shopping, attend festivals and recitals, and supervise their children’s
education.
Neither
could the Proverbs 31 woman be considered a modern homemaker who is only
concerned with the processing but not the producing of materials, for she
bought fields, planted vineyards, produced clothing and food items, and considered
her merchandise good. The twentieth-century homemaker was essentially a product
of the nineteenth century, which changed the attitude towards work performed by
women. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, the work done traditionally by
women, such as the making of cloth, medicine and, foods, was taken over by
factories, and the wealth extracted from the underpaid working class began to
accumulate into the hands of upper class man who displayed their wealth by
having an “ornamental” wife who did not work as her ancestors had; instead she
supervised the work done by others.
The middle class housewife of the early twentieth century, no longer needed
servants, for she had electricity and machines which greatly reduced the labor
involved, but what was she supposed to do with her time? The
“woman question” was partially answered by Helen Cambell: to keep the world
clean was the one great task for women. With
little else to do, women set out to eradicate the dreaded germs with a passion
and by the 1950s women spent nearly eighty hours a week cleaning their homes.
(Women who worked outside the home, did the same housework in half the time.) Although
home economics had attempted to make homemaking a career in which the housewife
was the manager by offering scientific advice how to effectively manage a home,
in the end, the manager and the worker were one and the same, and the time
gained by efficiency only raised the standard which created more work in an
endless cycle.
Cleaning
one’s home is not a fulfilling career, and Betty Freidan described the problem
that had no name in the 1950s.
The
problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It
was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered
in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife
struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched
slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured
Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night - she was afraid to ask even of herself the
silent question – “Is this all?” For over fifteen years there was no word of
this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all
the columns, book and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek
fulfillment as wives and mothers.
Yet,
the illusion that the scientific approach to homemaking would make it a career
worth pursuing has not been eradicated from the popular mind, as
seen in Dorothy Patterson’s essay The
High Calling of Wife and Mother in Biblical Perspective.
Homemaking,
if pursued with energy, imagination, and skills, has as much challenge and
opportunity, success and failure, growth and expansion, perks and incentives as
any corporation… Homemaking – being a full-time wife and mother – is not a
destructive drought of usefulness but an overflowing oasis of opportunity; it
is not a dreary cell to contain one’s talents and skills but a brilliant
catalyst to channel creativity and energies into meaningful work.
Sheila
Wray Gregoire is more honest in her book
To Love, Honor and Vacuum.
Having
to do less housework will probably make you happier all on its own, as long as
you maintain a reasonable level of order in your home. Why? Because studies
show that housework can be one of the most depressing jobs, whether you’re
doing a whole day of it or just fifteen minutes of dishes. There are reasons
for this: you usually do it alone, nobody thanks you when you finish something,
and besides that, it’s never really done!
Domestic
science failed to provide an answer to the “woman question” because of the inherent
boredom of housekeeping, which was not a fulfilling vocation for the average
well-educated woman, who had nearly equal opportunities outside the home. Most
societies relegate domestic work to uneducated slaves or servants, but the
disappearance of slaves and domestic servants, and the increased standard of
cleanliness, made it necessary for the well-educated woman to do the work; an
arrangement necessary lest every man would find himself in front of the dish
sink.
***
No one argued in the fifties
whether women were inferior or superior to men, for they were “simply
different.” The “woman question” had vanished, having been replaced with the
happy housewife – or so it was thought. In 1960 the bubble burst. Newspapers
and television reported about the unhappiness of the American housewife, and
education was blamed for making them dissatisfied with the domestic life. It
was even suggested that women should no longer be admitted to the four-year
colleges and universities, or be allowed to vote. The
educators and newspaper columnists had accurately identified the source of the
problem - education and political rights - for it was no longer possible to
squeeze the educated and legally equal woman into the old mold of the
uneducated legal minor.
A
solution was sought high and low, but they consisted mostly of age-old panaceas
such as handing one’s self to God. A decade later, Christenson echoed the
earlier suggestions but he conceded that being solely a homemaker would not
make a woman happy.
A wife
is more than a mother, housekeeper, cook, counselor, and chauffeur. She will
not find the deep places of her heart satisfied with bowling, bridge, PTA
meetings, or even church work. On the other hand, if her sole source of
happiness lies in her husband or her children, she is also doomed to
disappointment. God did not intend us to find satisfaction apart from Himself.
A wife who puts Jesus first will be a joy to her ‘lord’ and to her Lord (see 1
Pet 3.6) A radiant wife who once sought escape in intellectual pursuits,
recently disclosed her secret for finding fulfillment in life: “It ‘s doing
what Jesus wants me to do!” She went on to say that Jesus can change our
attitudes: He can even change the routine tasks that were once a drudgery into
a joy. “Be rooted in Christ, not in your husband; then you are free to be a worthwhile
person, a good wife.”
But
what if Jesus wants the wife to become a doctor, a teacher – or a pastor?
Christenson’s Jesus would never suggest such a thing; instead he changes the
wife’s attitude so the housework becomes a joy instead of a drudgery.
Christenson was more concerned that wives stop nagging at their husbands than
trying to find a solution for the desperate housewives, for he continued,
“Jesus gives you the invitation to take your anxieties to the cross, and to
leave the reforming of your husband in God’s hands. The wife who is trusting in
God is not nagging her husband.” The wives certainly thought something was
wrong with their husbands for, “if a woman had a problem in the 1950’s and
1960’s, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with
herself.” That
she thought something was wrong with herself was not a problem, for she had to
only become more feminine, more submissive, and less anxious for the life she
could not have to realize how lucky she was to be a woman.
Yet,
another decade later, in 1980, Dr. Dobson advised women to “get into exercise
classes, group hobbies, church activities, Bible studies, bicycle clubs,” instead
of remaining at home and considering their husbands their only source of
conversation and comfort, for he believed the source of the problem was the
lack of female companionship.
Although his advice was sound, he missed the point, for it was not the
companionship of the other women that was important, but the fact that they used to work together. Dobson could
only suggest the same tired, worn out solution, for he, like others before him,
did not perceive the root of the problem: the belief that a woman’s life should
be limited to homemaking.
Back in the sixties, when it appeared that a
simple solution was not forthcoming, the final answer was, “This is what being
a woman means, and what is wrong with American women that they can’t accept
their role gracefully?” No
one suggested that women should work for the dreaded career woman had been
drowned under the many commercials which were geared towards creating the myth
of the happy housewife who had money to buy all the newest detergents and
appliances and nothing else to do than to use them.
The
woman living in the colonial era had the work, but not the education or
political rights; the 1950s woman had the education and political rights, but
not the work. Women had achievement near equality with men by the 1940’s, and a
career woman was not considered an anomaly, but then came the fruitless carnage
of WW II and the atom bomb, and the American people decided to go home.
We were
all vulnerable, homesick, lonely, frightened. A pent-up hunger for marriage,
home and children was felt simultaneously by several different generations; a
hunger which, in the prosperity of postwar America, everyone could suddenly satisfy.
The young GI, made older than his years by the war, could meet his lonely need
for love and a mother by re-creating his childhood home. Instead of dating many
girls until college and profession were achieved, he could marry on the GI
bill, and give his own babies the tender mother love he was no longer baby
enough to seek for himself. Then there were the slightly older men: men of
twenty-five whose marriages had been postponed by the war and who now felt they
must make up for lost time; men in their thirties kept first be depression and
then by war from marrying, or if married, from enjoying the comforts of home.
While
it is true that a career woman had to often choose between love and a career
before World War II, the glorification of the home which had existed in the
previous century, was intensified by the war, and women were diverted from
thinking about a career altogether. With the GI Bill the nation of renters was
changed into a nation of homeowners,and
the young men who would not have entered college did so after the war and
gained well-paying jobs which enabled them to support the women who chose to
set up a home and raise a family. But the safety of the home, which had
appeared so alluring for those who had lived in constant fear for years, lost
its charm in a few years and boredom ascended over suburbia.
The
boredom of the housewives caused an exhaustion which could not be cured, for
housework could not be made interesting enough to make women feel useful. And
although “the overwhelming majority of the women felt that a job was more
satisfying than the housework,” work was not considered an alternative; instead
there was a surrender to the fact of life that to be tired was part of being a
housewife. The husbands, who were told time after time to reward their wives
with praise, obviously failed to do so for Dee Jepsen concludes with Dr. James
Dobson that feminism was created because men were not “appreciating women for
the important role they were playing.” In
the fifties, husbands were at the end obliged to pitch in to keep the home
running smoothly for their wives were too tired. But
Friedan identified also another reason for the domesticating of the husbands.
Why
should anyone raise an eyebrow because a latter-day Einstein’s wife expects her
husband to put aside that lifeless theory of relativity and help her with the
work that is supposed to be the essence of life itself: diaper the baby and
don’t forge to rinse the soiled diaper in the toilet paper before putting it in
the diaper pail, and then wax the kitchen floor.
Eventually
the wife dominated the home even more than the wartime generation by her
expertise and “know-it-alls,” which left very little room for the husband’s
assumed authority.
In addition, the attempt to make the 50’s woman a subservient housewife through
channeling her energy into shopping and cleaning made her the maker or breaker
of American business world and through her decisions she controlled the destiny
of men who gained their livelihood in these enterprises just as she controlled
the home, her domain.
Elisabeth
Elliot was dismayed by the effect she believed secular culture had on theology
and to illustrate her point she quoted Francis Schaeffer who wrote, “Tell me
what the world is saying today, and I’ll tell you what the church will be
saying seven years from now.”
Schaeffer’s words found their fulfillment in the book Me? Obey Him? written by Elliot’s college friend Elizabeth Rice Handford in which she echoed
the commercial advertising of the fifties.
Handford offered “The Balanced Housewife” as God’s plan for womanhood, although
she modified the fifties concept somewhat since by 1972, the Career Woman had
returned, albeit still somewhat embarrassed of her own existence.
Just
because she is obedient does not mean she is limited only to the interests that
traditionally have been feminine. It will include cooking, clothing,
housekeeping and child-tending, of course, but
those are an essential part of her life. But within the framework of her
husband’s authority, she may follow any inclination in her leisure time:
welding sculptures, or turning up an automobile motor, or following major
leagues baseball, or trout casting. … There is no one description of a woman
who, honoring her husband, then finds a whole wide world outside, created by
God to be explored and enjoyed. And she savors it to full. …It is a blessed
fact that this [work], too, is available to the woman who honors and obeys her
husband. I don’t promise you can be famous trial lawyer or the doctor who discovers
the cure for cancer or author of the great American novel, or prima donna of
the Metropolitan Opera. (It’s conceivable that a woman with talent could do
these and still be an obedient wife.)
Thus
the greed of the market formed the woman’s role in society and theology. It is
naturally an ongoing process; the 1920s generation changed their former way of
life and “by abandoning the natural, men and women imprisoned themselves in
molds” created by advertising.
The fiftie’s experiment of making every woman into a housewife failed, but
later generations would feel the ripple-effect of the intense glorification of
shopping as a way to find happiness and fulfillment, which would lead to the
near-destruction of the financial system in the early twenty-first century.
Theology
tends to get stuck, usually in the era of the founder of a particular movement,
and roles, especially gender based ones, are frozen into the era which is later
believed to be the Golden Era. One has to only glance at the halo, which hovers
above the ‘50s, to realize the tendency to glorify a bygone era. John Stuart
Mill objected against a form of Christianity which exists only to stereotype
existing forms of government and society and to protect them against change,
and he was right in his estimation for a government can only provide a partial
answer to the problems of humanity, wherefore governments are changed
frequently either through election or revolution.
Capitalism
is often believed to be an outgrowth of Christianity but it is the logical
outcome of the evolutionary principle of the survival of the fittest. The
struggle for survival in nature allows only for a few predators on the top of
the food chain, and it is also true of the free market.
As the
result of the development of capitalism we witness an ever-increasing process
of centralization and concentration of capital. The large enterprises grow in
size continually, the smaller ones are squeezed out. The ownership of capital
invested in these enterprises is more and more separated from the function of
managing them. … The initiative has been shifted, for better or worse, in the
fields of capital as well as in those of labor, from the individual to the
bureaucracy. An increasing number of people cease to be independent, and become
dependent on the managers of the great economic empires. … The human problem of
modern capitalism can be formulate in this way: Modern capitalism needs men who
co-operate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more;
and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated.
It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or
principle or conscience – yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected
of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; who can be guided
without force, led without leaders. Prompted without aim – expect the one to
make good, to be on the move, to function, to go ahead. What is the outcome?
Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellowman, and from nature.
Capitalism
in its rawest form does not allow for alturism, which is well attested by the
nineteenth-century slave and child labor, and the ill-paid working class whose
labor made the wealth of few possible. A strong middle class exists only when
government regulations hinder the concentration of wealth in the hands of few
by the redistribution of wealth. James P. Comer responded in 1972 to the
argument presented by the white majority that the black people expected the get
everything for free without work.
Middle America has gained much of its security through such
government-assistance programs as the GI bill, Farmers Home Administration,
Social Security, public education, the Small Business Administration, Medicare,
and so forth. Their trade unions have guaranteed them additional security
through medical and life insurance plans, tuition programs, cost-of-living
increases, paid vacations and numerous other benefits. Government and private
assistance, not just “rugged individualism,” has made opportunity available for
large numbers of white Americans.
Life
in a capitalistic society does not offer many cushions from the cold reality of
life and Patterson is not pleased that the only work recognized by society is
that which is paid.
But the problem is not fixed by sending women home with poetic declarations of
their worth, for if society requires financial independence from its citizens,
those who are dependent will always be vulnerable. Christians are waking up to
the reality of capitalism, as is seen in that James Dobson believes America’s
greatest need is for husbands to begin to guide their families instead of
“pouring every physical and emotional resource into the mere acquisition of
money.”
The total control of communal assets by the governing body, which was also
practiced by the early church, is possible only in a sinless world, wherefore
Communism it is not a viable option for a secular society.
Because the individual needs the community as much as the community needs the
individual, the community must care for the individual as the individual cares
for the community; a political system which provides an incentive for
individual effort while caring for the weaker members provides a healthy
society in which the individual can thrive.
***
The glorification of the
housewife became necessary to uphold the system which was built on quicksand.
Toying
with the question, how can one hour of housework expand to fill six hours (same
house, same work, same wife), I came back again to the basic paradox of the
feminine mystique: that it emerged to glorify woman’s role as housewife at the
very moment when the barriers to her full participation in society were
lowered, at the very moment when science and education and her own ingenuity
made it possible for a woman to be both wife and mother and to take an active
part in the world outside the home. The glorification of “woman’s role,” then,
seems to be in proportion to society’s reluctance to treat women as complete
human beings; for the less real function that role has, the more it is
decorated with meaningless details to conceal its emptiness.
This
is also true of Christianity now that women are close to gaining full equality
in the church: they are reminded that a homemaker “cannot be duplicated for any
amount of money, for “she is worth far more than rubies.” And
whereas women in the fifties discovered that they were able to do the same
housework, which often was undone by dinnertime, in a fraction of the time when
they studied or worked, or had other serious interests outside the home, Dorothy Patterson prescribes the same remedy
as Christenson in Christian Family:
“The best way to make homemaking a joyous task is to offer it as unto to the
Lord; the only way to avoid the drudgery in such mundane tasks is to bathe the
task with prayer and catch a vision of the divine challenge in making and
nurturing a home.” But
why does the task need to be bathed in prayer if it is “a brilliant catalyst to
channel creativity and energies into meaningful work”? Because homemaking
follows the law of myth rather than that of logic.
Logic
and reason deal with the relationship between facts. They tend, therefore, to
speak in the indicative mood - as does Professor Ginzenberg when he notes the
long history of working women and the economic value of their labor. Myth,
however, will not be argued down by facts. It may seem to be making
straightforward statements, but actually these conceal another mood, the
imperative. Myth exists in a state of tension. It is not really describing a
situation, but trying by means of this description to bring about what it
declares to exist. One might think that the hopeful, optative mood was more
appropriate to wish fulfillment, but myth is more demanding that that. It does
not merely wish, it wills; and when it speaks, it commands action.
The myth of homemaking
demands that it must be joyous even though facts deny it and
prayer must be used to overcome the inherent drudgery and boredom.
The
women writers who prescribe homemaking to other women usually do not live such
circumscribed lives themselves. Besides the obvious fact that they are
published writers, they have other positions, such as a pastor’s wife (with all
the respect the position commands), counselor, or a missionary. This distinct
group in between men and women exists partly because patriarchy lumps all women
into one group and some women find ways to organize a pecking order, but
also because they are comfortable with their role, as explained by Janeway.
In fact,
I suspect that the weakening of the myth of female weakness is going to affect
men’s attitudes more dramatically then it is those of women. For one thing, a
great many women are going to want to hang on to the myth. They were raised to
believe that they had a special place in the world and that special
characteristics fitted them for certain tasks and unfitted them for others.
They want to be fulfilled by motherhood. … Woman’s role has been widening fast
enough for them, its restrictions have eased enough, and though they know that
inequities remain, they don’t feel them directly enough to want to take action.
Out of habit and custom and because they believe in the myth themselves, they
are content with the rate of change.
Motherhood
is the last one of the exclusively female vocations, which used to define the
separate male and female spheres. Men have taken over the producing of food
items, clothing and medicine and it is only natural that women are reluctant to
give up the one vocation, which gives them a sense of power and accomplishment
without a guarantee that men will not eclipse them entirely. Men on the other
hand fear that women will take over if they agree to equality and it is this
distrust which ultimately keeps both men and women from embracing equality.
Despite
all the efforts to assure women that “anatomy was destiny,” the tidal wave of
women leaving the home could not be contained. Freidan had asked in 1963, “When
motherhood, a fulfillment held sacred down to ages, is defined as a total way of
life, must women themselves deny the world and the future open to them? Or does
the denial of that world force them
make motherhood a total way of life?” And
the women responded by re-defining motherhood as an essential part of their
lives but not as an all-encompassing vocation.
But before we place all blame or credit on the women themselves, contrary to
the fifties woman, the sixties woman did not have a GI Bill and had to
therefore finance her own education, find a loan for her home and somehow finance
the lifestyle which the fifties marketers and psychoanalysis had created and
which was not made possible with only one income.
It
wasn’t only that the life of the full-time housewife was becoming
psychologically untenable. It was also turning out to be financially untenable.
There was a fatal catch in the mid-century domestic ideal. The picture of the
“good life” included a house (Cape, ranch or
pseudo-colonial), three or four kids, and of course the full-time homemaker who
held everything together. The problem was the first two items (house and kids)
turned out to be so expensive that the third (full-time mother) often had to
go.
But
if women are going to work, their children must be cared for. During World War
II, daycare was widely available for women’s work was considered essential for
the war effort. But after the war ended day care centers disappeared and ”the
very suggestion of their need brought hysterical outcries from educated
housewives as well as the purveyors or the mystique.”
In addition, the old stigma of daycare being a last resort for the poor is
still very much with us.
In the
1880s and 1890s, some associations also began the establish day nurseries in
working-class neighborhoods. Typically located in rented brownstones, the
nurseries provided a place where the working mother could safely leave her
young children for a nominal fee, about 5 cents a day…The nurseries insisted
that the children be brought to them spotlessly clean at 6:30 every morning, a
difficult task for a woman who worked a 12-hour day and whose tenement lacked
hot water. .. Not surprisingly, the nurseries were not popular among working
mothers. If Bloomingdale Nursery enrolled a total of 1800 children, it
generally had less than 50 in daily attendance. The Cleveland Nursery had 142
children listed on its books in 1891, but only 25 were present on any given
day. In fact, the nurseries generally received children from the woman who had
no other option; they were, in a sense, a last resort.
Poverty
and moral failure were intrinsically connected in the nineteenth-century
mindset and thus the woman who was morally superior was able to care for her
children at home, although the ornamental housewife more often than not left
the care of her children to the servants. It appears that the upper class did
not see, or care to see, the link between their own wealth and the poverty of
the working class, and because social services were largely left to the upper
and middle-class women who did more harm than good with their patronizing
attitude, the myth of the uncared for children of the working mother was
created. Naturally there were also countless middle-class women who found
themselves suddenly impoverished and with no resources to care for the children
as many small businesses were put out of business by larger companies, but
there was a great effort to hide the facts because appearance mattered more
than reality. The
Century of the Child, which was created to address child abuse, such as the
extensive use of child labor (2,250,000 American children under fifteen were
fulltime laborers at the end of the nineteenth century),
caused standards to rise until parents were considered unfit if they were “too
busy, tired, lazy, egocentric or indifferent to ride herd on their kids every
minute every day,” according to Dr Max Rafferty, former Superintendent of
Public Instruction in California.
He believed also that a parent who did not know what her child did every minute
of the day should loose the custody of her children. Dr. Rafferty was clearly
influenced by the feminine mystique of the fifties which had convinced everyone
that the “children will be tragically deprived if she [the mother] is not there
every minute.” But
although he blamed “the dropout parents” for the juvenile delinquency of the
sixties, it
appears that delinquency was already created in the fifties when mothers where
home and watched every step “junior” took.
Strange
new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose
mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their
homework – an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any
self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life. Educators are
increasingly uneasy about the dependence, the lack of self-reliance, of the
boys and girls who are entering college today. “We fight a continual battle to
make our students assume manhood,” said a Columbia
dean.
The
Women’s Rights Movement did not take off until 1970 when women marched down Fifth Avenue in New York and raised awareness
of their existence, just
as women had in 1912 and 1913 to gain the vote. The
Church responded promptly; the same year Larry Christensen published The Christian Family, in which he
considered the movement satanic in its origin.
How much
evil has come upon home and church because women have lost the protective
shield of a husband’s authority! We have let Satan beguile us into believing
that it is degrading for a wife to be submissive and obedient to her husband’s
authority. The whole teaching is dismissed as a foolish vaunting of the “male
ego,” a Neanderthal vestige which our enlightened age has happily outgrown. The
Bible, however, has no desire to exalt any ego, male or female. The Divine
Order set forth for the family serves the elemental purpose of protection,
spiritual protection. A husband’s authority and a wife’s submissiveness to that
authority, is a shield of protection against Satan’s devices. Satan knows this,
and that is why he uses every wile to undermine and break down God’s pattern of
Divine Order for the family.
Women’s Lib vs. Adam’s Rib was published four years later, in which Bro
Kirk Luehrs and Stephen c. Graham upheld the beliefs that the woman was created
an assistant for the man (Gen. 2:18-24), that woman’s punishment was to serve
the man (Gen. 3:16), and that women have
ruled men by their nagging and tears, although “we are all equal in the sight
of God… where there is love, there is no need to rule, for all would be
servants to our Lord.”
In
1977 Gene A. Getz wrote The Measure of a
Woman in which he blames the Women’s Rights Movement for causing resentment
in women who, according to him, had earlier been entirely happy in their role
as fulltime homemakers. Yet,
doctors reported of symptoms and neuroses that had not been seen before the
fifties and psychiatrists reported that unmarried women were happier than
married women. Doctors
prescribed tranquilizers and many a housewife were taking them “like couch
drops,” just
as the nineteenth-century woman had been prescribed laudanum (tincture of
opium) and alcohol to cure the debilitating effects of boredom.
A
study conducted in the early sixties in England revealed that ninety
percent of young mothers in the middle twenties were either working or planned
to work as soon as the children were in school and this occurred before the
Woman’s Right Movement took off in the late sixties. It
was not feminism that created the desire to work in women; it was women’s
desire to work which created feminism.
Piper
recognizes that most women have always worked.
The
point of saying that man should feel a responsibility to provide for woman is
not that the woman should not assist in maintaining support for the family or
for society in general. She has always done this historically because so much
of domestic life required extraordinary labors on her part just to maintain the
life of the family. … It is possible to be excessively demanding or excessively
restrictive on a woman’s role in sustaining the life of the family. Proverbs 31
pictures a wife with great ability in the business affairs of the family.
But
employers are not always willing to meet the needs of working mothers, for as
Elizabeth Janeway observed astutely, “If society assumes implicitly that women
shouldn’t work because their place is at home, and regards women who work as
flying in the face of custom or even nature, then there is no need for society
to do anything to help them out.” Thus
we do not have a social network which would allow women to work, such as paid
maternal leave and other benefits, without the many hardships that most working
mothers experience today; instead we make them feel guilty for wanting to “find
themselves” or call them selfish for wanting to have a career while their
children “suffer.”
On the other hand a man who works less than his wife is considered neglectful,
since the measure of a man is his paycheck. Thus social pressure creates rigid
roles which keep men and women in their “proper” spheres with the explicit
approval of the church.
The Feminine
Mystique, 250.
Friedan describes how the marketers of the fifties
realized that the Career Woman had to go because she was too critical and
unwilling to buy all the latest gadgets to enhance her life, “The moral of the
study was explicit: “Since the Balanced Homemaker represents the market with
the greatest future potential, it would be to the advantage of the appliance
manufacturer to make more and more women aware of the desirability of belonging
to this group. Educate them through advertising that it is possible to have
outside influences (without becoming a Career Woman). The art of good
homemaking should be the goal of every normal woman” (The Feminine Mystique, 210).
“Communism will work in a sinless world, and only in a
sinless world. This is perhaps the reason communism must assume as a basic
postulate that sin does not exist. This accounts in part for the success of
communal religious groups.“ (Stephen J. Tonsor, Equality, Decadence, and Modernity [Wilmington, DE:
ISI Books, 2005], 6).
