Difference has been used as a justification to exclude women, black people, Jews, Catholics, Italians, Native Americans, and the Irish from full participation in society. As a result, these people groups have created their own institutions, philosophies and protest movements, often rejecting the belief in innate differences. Both feminism and black power have been criticized for being too extreme, but their critics forget often that it is impossible to reject a false image without first re-creating the self-respect needed to forge a new identity. For an oppressed and suppressed people group such as the black people, black power created the necessary psychological realization that being black does not make one a lesser human being.[1] Similarly, women found courage and support through feminism to challenge the image of femininity created by sexism. But neither black power, nor feminism, is the accurate expression of what it means to be a woman or a black person; instead they function as a bridge between yesterday’s discriminating practices, and tomorrow’s integrated society, in which difference is not a threat.
The aberrant roles are a rebellion against the old roles, as seen that they appear as society changes.
[Dr.] Lifton’s study of China since the Second World War and the Communist take-over indicates “a sudden emergence in often exaggerated form of psychological tendencies previously suppressed by social custom.” He believes that this “release phenomenon,” producing a proliferation of deviant types, follows unexpected social upsets. In other words, when aberrant roles are commonly seen, we may take it as a hint to look for profound social change. More and more individuals are finding it impossible to fit into the old sanctioned patterns.[2]
If society as a whole does not realize the meaning and function of the protest movements and aberrant roles, it will waste the opportunity to create a new identity for all, and end up with two mutually hostile camps that will wage war until one side wins - and everyone loses.
Men and women are different, but the difference is in how men and women perform functions, not their inability to perform a function, other than childbearing and tasks related to superior physical strength. If men and women were physically or mentally unable to perform specific tasks, we should find uniform evidence of it across the globe. However, anthropologist Margaret Mead describes the flexibility which characterizes the assignment of different roles in societies around the world:
Now it is boys who are thought of as infinitely vulnerable and in need of special cherishing care, now it is girls. In some societies it is girls for whom parents must collect a dowry or make husband-catching magic, in other the parental worry is over the difficulty of marrying of the boys. Some peoples thing of women as too weak to work out of doors, others regard women as the appropriate bearers of heavy burdens, “because their heads are stronger than men’s.” The periodicities of female reproductive functions have appealed to some peoples as making women the natural sources of magical or religious power, to other as directly antithetical to those powers; some religions, including our European traditional religions, have assigned women an inferior role in the religious hierarchy, others have built their whole symbolic relationship with the supernatural world upon male imitations of the natural functions of women. In some cultures women are regarded as sieves through whom the best-guarded secrets will shift; in others it is the men who are gossips. Whether we deal with small matters or with large, with the frivolities of ornament and cosmetics or the sanctities of man’s place in the universe, we find this great variety of way, often flatly contradictory one to the other, in which the roles of the two sexes have been patterned.[3]
Mead mentions that although the patterning is always found, the only aspect in which women differ from men is childbearing. In all other aspects, “they are simply human beings with varying gifts, no one of which can be exclusively assigned to either sex.”
In secular thinking, complementarity in marriage refers to character traits which complement each other, such as cautious-adventurous, extrovert-introvert, punctual-procrastinator etc. The opposites may attract at first and ultimately provide balance, but they can also become a major source of irritation and frustration as Judith Viorst points out, “[S]ome of us, sooner or later, may come to resent, resist, or outright loath qualities we initially embraced, a dramatic change of heart that is yet another of the shocks of married life.”[4] Theological complementarity in marriage, although portrayed as the pairing of the complementary elements of male and female, is the twin of the complementarity and role play of a mother and child found in anthropology.
Or she [the mother] may treat the child as one who is different from herself, who receives while she gives, with the emphasis upon difference between the mother’s behaviour and that of the child as she cherishes and shelters and above all feeds a weak, dependent creature. This patterning of the relationship may be called complementary, as each of the pair is seen as playing a different role, and the two roles are conceived as complementing each other… To the extent that the child’s whole individuality is emphasized, there is symmetry; to the extent that its weakness and helplessness are emphasized, there is complementary behaviour; and to the extent that the mother gives not only her breast, but milk, there is the beginning of reciprocity. But cultures differ greatly as to which they emphasize most.[5]
The egalitarian approach to marriage rejects rigid gender roles and the artificial dependency of the woman without disregarding the natural differences which exists between men and women, as explained by Don S. Browning in Equality and the Family.
This view does not mean, as some believe, that husband and wife must become identical and suppress the distinctiveness of being male and female. It means instead that husbands and wives must live by a strenuous love ethic of regarding the other with equal seriousness to themselves just as they expect their partner to regard them. Within such an ethic they should work together to determine their responsibilities and privileges in light of respective talents, inclinations, and realistic constraints.[6]
* * *
Because the dividing difference between men and women is believed to be ruling and childbearing, the only role available for women in patriarchy is that of a wife and mother. Complementarism continues Luther’s tradition of assigning motherhood as the only vocation available for women, as seen in Knight’s essay The Family and the Church.
God relates the effect of the curse respectively to that portion of His creation mandate (as already established in Genesis 1 and 2) that most particularly applies to the woman on the one hand and to the man on the other hand. God has said to them: ”Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over… every living thing that moves on the earth. (Genesis 1.28) Now he relates the curse to that aspect of the creation mandate that is the particular responsibility of the woman and of the man and in so doing indicates the particular role that He has determined each is to fulfill. … In short, God speaks about what is unique to her as a woman, namely, being a mother and a wife… Then he delineates what is the main calling for man, namely, the responsibility of breadwinner and provider for his wife and family.[1]
Knight finds the roles by dividing Genesis 1:28 into two categories and assigning “being fruitful” to the woman and “ruling” to the man, which puts the woman on par with the animals, which were told to be fruitful, but not to rule due to their lack of reason (Gen. 1:21-22).[2] Knight’s arbitrary division makes the woman’s entire existence revolve around her sexual function, and her entitlement to financial support from the breadwinning husband is due to her performances as a wife.
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.[3]
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 men, 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.[4] 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?[5] The “woman question” was partially answered by Helen Cambell: to keep the world clean was the one great task for women.[6] 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.)[7] 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.[8]
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.[9]
Yet, the illusion that the scientific approach to homemaking would make it a career worth pursuing has not been eradicated from the popular mind,[10] 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.[11]
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! [12]
Domestic science failed to provide an answer to the “woman question” because of the inherent boredom of housekeeping. Despite the hype, it 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. However, 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.[13] 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.[14] 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 an 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.”[15]
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.”[16] 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. [17] 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?”[18] 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.[19]
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.[20]
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,[21]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.”[22] In the fifties, husbands were at the end obliged to pitch in to keep the home running smoothly for their wives were too tired.[23] 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.[24]
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.[25] 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.”[26] 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.[27] 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.)[28]
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.[29] 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.[30]
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 that hovers above the ‘50s to realize the tendency to glorify a bygone era. John Stuart Mill objected against a form of Christianity that exists only to stereotype existing forms of government and society, and to protect them against change,[31] and he was right in his estimation that 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. [32]
Capitalism in its rawest form does not allow for altruism, 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.[33]
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.[34] 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.”[35] 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.[36] 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.[37]
***
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.[38]
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.” [39] 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.” [40] 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.[1]
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,[2] 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.[3]
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 that 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.[4]
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?” [5]And the women responded by re-defining motherhood as an essential part of their lives but not as an all-encompassing vocation.[6] 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.[7]
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.”[8] 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.[9]
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.[10] 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),[11] 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.[12] 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.” [13] But although he blamed “the dropout parents” for the juvenile delinquency of the sixties,[14] 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.[15]
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,[16] just as women had in 1912 and 1913 to gain the vote.[17] 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.[18]
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.”[19]
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.[20] 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.[21] Doctors prescribed tranquilizers and many a housewife were taking them “like couch drops,”[22] just as the nineteenth-century woman had been prescribed laudanum (tincture of opium) and alcohol to cure the debilitating effects of boredom.[23]
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.[24] 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.[25]
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.”[26] 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.”[27]
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.
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.
[1] Janeway, 37.
[2] Stearns, 12.
[3] Janeway, 281.
[4] James P Comer wrote, “I realize now that anxiety about pleasing a white authority or a white majority can prevent blacks from speaking out for black rights, and can lead black social activists into settling for watered-down compromises” (Comer, 21). Women feel often a need to please the male authorities wherefore they are willing to accept the compromise of “equal but different” instead of full equality.
[5] Ibid., 58.
[6] The infant needs a caregiver who is committed to his or her wellbeing, and although there is much talk about the family and the importance of the parent-child relationship during the first year of the infant’s life, there is little, or no effort, to ensure that mothers and fathers can afford to remain home. This reluctance is not only due to capitalism, but also because of the doctrine of the man’s headship which makes the wife’s financially dependency necessary.
[7] Ehrenreich and English, 310.
[8] The Feminine Mystique, 185.
[9] Rothman, 89-90.
[10] Rothman, 49.
[11] Ehrenreich and English, 204.
[12] The Christian Family, 81.
[13] The Feminine Mystique, 247.
[14] The Christian Family, 79.
[15] The Feminine Mystique, 29.
[16] It Changed My Life, 192.
[17] www.womenshistory.about
[18] The Christian Family, 37.
[19] Bro Kirk Luehrs and Stephen c. Graham, Women’s Lib vs. Adam’s Rib (Portland, OR: Telefriend. Inc., 1974) 17, 31, 37.S
[20] Getz, 75.
[21] The Feminine Mystique, 25.
[22] Ibid., 31.
[23] Ehrenreich and English, 87.
[24] Janeway, 225-226.
[25] Piper and Grudem, 42.
[26] Janeway, 190.
[27] There is nothing wrong for a woman to stay home with her children if she wishes to and can afford it, just as any wealthy person is able to abstain from working. The inherent hypocrisy of homemaking is that class mentality makes a distinction between rich and poor, and although theologians claim that it is necessary for the wellbeing of the children, yet they do not seek means to ensure that all children can remain home, by placing the responsibility to support single mothers and poor working women on the government - or the church, which is a biblical practice. If it is the quality of childcare which is objectionable, why not start co-operative childcare centers in the church to ensure the proper upbringing of children and peace of mind for both parents and theologians?
[1] Stearns, 12.
[2] Janeway, 281.
[3] James P Comer wrote, “I realize now that anxiety about pleasing a white authority or a white majority can prevent blacks from speaking out for black rights, and can lead black social activists into settling for watered-down compromises” (Comer, 21). Women feel often a need to please the male authorities wherefore they are willing to accept the compromise of “equal but different” instead of full equality.
[4] Ibid., 58.
[5] The infant needs a caregiver who is committed to his or her wellbeing, and although there is much talk about the family and the importance of the parent-child relationship during the first year of the infant’s life, there is little, or no effort, to ensure that mothers and fathers can afford to remain home. This reluctance is not only due to capitalism, but also because of the doctrine of the man’s headship which makes the wife’s financially dependency necessary.
[6] Ehrenreich and English, 310.
[7] The Feminine Mystique, 185.
[8] Rothman, 89-90.
[9] Rothman, 49.
[10] Ehrenreich and English, 204.
[11] The Christian Family, 81.
[12] The Feminine Mystique, 247.
[13] The Christian Family, 79.
[14] The Feminine Mystique, 29.
[15] It Changed My Life, 192.
[16] www.womenshistory.about
[17] The Christian Family, 37.
[18] Bro Kirk Luehrs and Stephen c. Graham, Women’s Lib vs. Adam’s Rib (Portland, OR: Telefriend. Inc., 1974) 17, 31, 37.S
[19] Getz, 75.
[20] The Feminine Mystique, 25.
[21] Ibid., 31.
[22] Ehrenreich and English, 87.
[23] Janeway, 225-226.
[24] Piper and Grudem, 42.
[25] Janeway, 190.
[26] There is nothing wrong for a woman to stay home with her children if she wishes to and can afford it, just as any wealthy person is able to abstain from working. The inherent hypocrisy of homemaking is that class mentality makes a distinction between rich and poor, and although theologians claim that it is necessary for the wellbeing of the children, yet they do not seek means to ensure that all children can remain home, by placing the responsibility to support single mothers and poor working women on the government - or the church, which is a biblical practice. If it is the quality of childcare which is objectionable, why not start co-operative childcare centers in the church to ensure the proper upbringing of children and peace of mind for both parents and theologians?
[1] Janeway, 281.
[2] James P Comer wrote, “I realize now that anxiety about pleasing a white authority or a white majority can prevent blacks from speaking out for black rights, and can lead black social activists into settling for watered-down compromises” (Comer, 21). Women feel often a need to please the male authorities wherefore they are willing to accept the compromise of “equal but different” instead of full equality.
[3] Ibid., 58.
[4] The infant needs a caregiver who is committed to his or her wellbeing, and although there is much talk about the family and the importance of the parent-child relationship during the first year of the infant’s life, there is little, or no effort, to ensure that mothers and fathers can afford to remain home. This reluctance is not only due to capitalism, but also because of the doctrine of the man’s headship which makes the wife’s financially dependency necessary.
[5] Ehrenreich and English, 310.
[6] The Feminine Mystique, 185.
[7] Rothman, 89-90.
[8] Rothman, 49.
[9] Ehrenreich and English, 204.
[10] The Christian Family, 81.
[11] The Feminine Mystique, 247.
[12] The Christian Family, 79.
[13] The Feminine Mystique, 29.
[14] It Changed My Life, 192.
[15] www.womenshistory.about
[16] The Christian Family, 37.
[17] Bro Kirk Luehrs and Stephen c. Graham, Women’s Lib vs. Adam’s Rib (Portland, OR: Telefriend. Inc., 1974) 17, 31, 37.S
[18] Getz, 75.
[19] The Feminine Mystique, 25.
[20] Ibid., 31.
[21] Ehrenreich and English, 87.
[22] Janeway, 225-226.
[23] Piper and Grudem, 42.
[24] Janeway, 190.
[25] There is nothing wrong for a woman to stay home with her children if she wishes to and can afford it, just as any wealthy person is able to abstain from working. The inherent hypocrisy of homemaking is that class mentality makes a distinction between rich and poor, and although theologians claim that it is necessary for the wellbeing of the children, yet they do not seek means to ensure that all children can remain home, by placing the responsibility to support single mothers and poor working women on the government - or the church, which is a biblical practice. If it is the quality of childcare which is objectionable, why not start co-operative childcare centers in the church to ensure the proper upbringing of children and peace of mind for both parents and theologians?
No comments:
Post a Comment