Living as God’s woman in God’s world: Part One
Confusion
Some of the biggest questions you can ever ask yourself as a human on this planet are: who am I? why am I here? what is my purpose?
We ask those questions because we are human, and we ask them as women. And how we answer them determines how we live our lives, how we see ourselves, how we relate to each other, how we treat each other, and above all, how we respond to God.
Let me begin with two affirmations: 1) that we were created for God, for God’s glory - created to bring glory to God; and 2) that it is only as we live as God intended that we are truly free.
So the questions we need to ask ourselves are: what do we learn about who God is? what do we learn about ourselves, as humans and as women? what do we learn about how God wants us to live in His world?
I want to begin a series of posts on living as God’s woman in God’s world with this first one about confusion.
Lots of confusion
Imagine your 8-year-old daughter, or niece, or granddaughter asks you, “What does it mean for me to grow up as a woman, and not a man?”
How would you answer that question? Because if you don’t answer it, then that 8-year-old will find an answer, any answer or several answers all around her.
Some that she might pick up are:
• To be a woman is to provide men with sex when they want it;
• To be a woman is to make the most of my body to be sexually attractive to men;
• To be a woman is to break free from the chains of child rearing and homemaking and have an independent career;
• To be a woman is to be able to choose to be and do whatever I want to be;
• To be a woman is to make fun of men - that they are immature and lazy;
• To be a woman is to be a second-class citizen who is only good for raising children and keeping a good house.
And this 8-year-old would be confused, because they would be receiving competing answers. Do we have no answers for our 8-year old’s question because we women are confused about what it means to be a woman?
This confusion of who we are as women is a result of mostly of an enormous social upheaval called feminism. It has affected all of us – it is in the air we breathe. We might say “not me”, but unless you have been living in a vacuum all your life, you will have been influenced.
A quick journey through feminism
The first wave of feminism began in the 1830s in the USA, spread to Europe and ended in the vote for women around the 1920s. There was much wrong with the way women were treated.
In 1877, Charlotte Elizabeth McNeilly attempted to gain a divorce from her husband of twenty-six years. She recounted in detail the violence her husband had committed: he had threatened to murder her, chased her with a meat fork, left her body bruised black by kicks, nearly choked her, and pushed a stick down her child’s throat (the child later died). She had evidence of her husbands adultery, too. She had tried to earn her own living apart from him but he had confiscated her earnings, which under law he was entitled to do. Her petition for divorce was unsuccessful; the judge was unconvinced she had established her case, and it was dismissed with costs.[1]
We don't want to go back to this world - the systemic inequality was horrific. Affirming the inherent dignity and equality of women was a great achievement of the first wave of feminism.
The second wave was much more significant and far reaching in its effects. There are 3 key authors who are worthy of attention
A Frenchwoman by the name of Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in 1949. It has been acclaimed as one of the most important works ever written to further our understanding of women. But it was really only a reflection of her childhood and the tortured relationship she had, particularly with her mother. It should be classed as imaginative psychology, rather than a scientific treatise. De Beauvoir’s view is that all stages of a woman’s life (childhood/ girlhood/ marriage/ motherhood/ old age) are all uniformly awful. Eg,
“Marriage is obscene in principle.”[2]
“Menopause is mutilation, the fatal touch of death.”[3]
What was her cure for this terrible tragedy called womanhood?
Firstly, she was against marriage “Individuals are not to be blamed for the failure of marriage; it is the institution itself, perverted as it has been from the start.”[4]
Secondly, women needed economic independence: to be able to follow careers of their own and independently support themselves.
Thirdly, the ideal society was “where women would be reared and trained exactly like men…woman was to be obliged to provide herself with other ways of earning a living apart from marriage”[5]
In 1963 The Feminine Mystique burst into the American consciousness. According to Betty Friedan, the problem with American society was that women had been duped into believing that their fulfilment and identity as women could be found in being mainly wife and mother.
She ran the equivalent of ‘focus groups’ in many women’s groups across the nation and found a sense of incompleteness, emptiness, tiredness and simmering anger for no apparent reason. Her answer? Get out of the home and go back to work. Work had to be part of her life-plan; she had to have a career. Volunteer work not enough. It had to be challenging and paid! The only way for a woman to find herself and know herself as a person was to engage in creative work of her own.
Then in 1970, a young Australian called Germaine Greer attacked The Feminine Mystique. In her book, The Female Eunuch, she claimed that a woman couldn’t combine marriage and fulfilment: woman had to have an overriding responsibility to herself. Her message to women was to do whatever they felt like, throw off any arrangement they felt constricting, including husband and children. They must be free to choose.
The third wave (from the 1990s to the present) has many strands. We are seeing the effects in society and culture now: to be truly equal, gender must be minimised. There is no longer male and female - there is only a gender continuum. Previously, our gender identity and sexuality have been shaped by society and we need to reconstruct it to freely express who we are.
A real problem but a bad solution
It is important to acknowledge that many of the problems where feminists have shone a torch, were real:
*as a whole, women were 2nd-class citizens;
*many men did dominate women in marriage leading to harsh abuse;
*there was inequality of pay, working conditions, and legal rights;
*the portrayal of women as sex objects in pornography, etc.
For those of us here in Australia who have lived through the turmoil of another change of Prime Minister and the surrounding circumstances, we have heard of the alleged bullying and bias against our female parliamentarians. And we rightly judge that we still have a long way to go!
So, yes, some of the results of feminist activism have been very helpful.
But the analysis of the problem – that all women’s problems are the result of men’s power over women (known as patriarchy) - is a wrong analysis and produces the wrong answer.
The feminists’ answer is: destroy men’s domination over women; establish the independence of the woman; liberate women to be able to choose who they are and what they will be. An American feminist theologian, Mary Daley said, “To exist humanly is to name self, the world and God”.
But the real problem for women is not domination by men; it is the power of sin in this world. Sin is the big problem of women AND men.
What is it that Adam and Eve said to God? We will be autonomous and independent, we will decide right and wrong, we will determine how we want to live and what we do or don’t do. That is called self-determinism! We humans have taken the right to choose for ourselves, to name ourselves, the world and God!
But as Creator, God has the right to determine who we are as women. He has the right to define us. As Christians, we have given up the right to define ourselves as women. We must allow God to do that.
So our question is: what does it mean to be Gods woman? How does God’s woman live in God’s world? To find that answer we have to go to the Scriptures and that takes us to the next post.
[1] Marylin Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1999, pp. 2-3
[2] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Penguin Books NSW 1972, trans H M Parshley (first published in French 1949), p463
[3] Ibid., p587
[4] Ibid., p497
[5] Ibid., p733
Lesley Ramsayhas been in local church ministry with her husband, Jim, for 47 years. After university she trained as a teacher and then raised four children. Over the past 30 years she has worked as a Bible teacher and evangelist across Australia and overseas. She has written and edited several books and training packages that are sold and used internationally. She now works at Moore College in Sydney, in pastoral care to the students. To relax, she enjoys a good coffee and a good book and hanging out with her grandchildren.