Reflections on Women’s Lib

“The woman thou gavest me”—Adam’s ready complaint in a time of self-defeat—is now being turned into a feminine rejoinder that raises disturbing doubts about modern man’s likeness to the divinely intended Adam. Women’s woes are increasingly attributed to male conversion of the female into a self-gratifying adornment and sex object. Worse yet, women are depicted as exploited and underprivileged victims of a hierarchical society.

A while ago I heard a liberated woman theologian address a learned society with some of the foulest language I have publicly encountered since my unregenerate newspaper days. To use vulgarisms and obscenities in pleading the case for women’s liberation seems to me to be no mark whatever of a liberated person.

Nevertheless, the Christian community can learn much about its mistakes and missed opportunities from champions of liberation.

One need not, of course, subscribe to dogmatic generalizations and exaggerations. The male is not alone or wholly to blame for all the complaints women turn his way. Nor is Judeo-Christian religion responsible for the plight of women; Christianity, in fact, emphasized respect for persons and spurred the revolt against sexism. One need only consider the role of women in primitive societies and non-Christian lands to see that it was Christianity that changed the lot of women. Nor need the cult of the Virgin Mary, whatever its faults, be debunked as presupposing a hatred of real women.

Mariolatry and celibacy or castration are not indeed ideal liberation symbols. It is already too much the case in our day that the spirit of liberation implies avoidance of marriage and family. The prevalent notion that marriage is to be resisted unless one wants children should be deplored, not encouraged.

But there is also another side to the story. While Roman Catholicism made a fetish of the Virgin and confused godliness with celibacy, Protestant emphasis on the universal priesthood of believers seems onesidedly to have meant male believers, since the priesthood of women was envisioned almost solely in terms of motherhood and childbearing. Had women been encouraged to invest all their creative gifts in the service of God and humanity, marriage and the home would not have implied an end to productive careers. The evangelical task force would in effect have been doubled had every Christian homemaker been encouraged to develop and invest her creativity in the service of God and man.

Christian women have assuredly displayed singular dedication and ingenuity in evangelistic and missionary endeavor. Much of today’s missionary task force would be depleted were we to recall from distant fields the gifted women who ventured there, often in the absence of male volunteers.

Nonetheless, the present generation needs a new theology of marriage—one that ignores neither the importance of sexual commitment and family responsibility nor the importance of the wife’s gifts as a career woman alongside her domestic role. Technology has freed men and women alike from many burdens, and modern scientific learning has provided more predictable family planning. Unfortunately more and more women resent motherhood as an experience in which the male’s momentary physical enjoyment involves her not only in nine months of pregnancy but also in sixteen or more years of distasteful daily chores.

She forfeits her career to become a permanent home-plant manager; the father meanwhile advances himself in industrial and professional circles. Periodic sharing of baby-sitting and cooking chores by young parents provides some relief but hardly assures liberation of the career women in the context of a successful family that shelters reasonably happy children.

To be sure, this feminine revolt sometimes reflects a yearning for a non-hierarchical society alongside a commitment to full equalitarianism. Yet the accompanying specific proposals for a new society are very nebulous. A non-hierarchical society is almost as difficult to imagine as to establish; anthropologists have speculated at length about primitive matriarchal societies. If one asks for concrete alternatives to present marriage models (in which many women have no doubt sacrificed themselves simply to hold together an otherwise vulnerable family), some spokesmen for the career-mother speak favorably of state-run child-care collectives not unlike those advanced by Marxist socialism, though the role of marriage is not always clear in this context.

Sometimes it is also unclear whether the alienated woman hopes to alter an industrial society by restoring economic production to the home instead of sharply dividing parental duties, or wants to eliminate what she considers male domination and oppression from the world of work and the sphere of life as well.

My purpose here is to add a comment in relation to the evangelical Christian community. The Christian Church was intended to be a new society that predicates its deepest family orientation on the spiritual kinship of Christ Jesus. The experience of regeneration often stirs up latent creative gifts and sometimes even surfaces new talents in a single or married male or female.

Evangelical women have maintained devout homes sensitive to a wide community of need, and have raised sons and daughters strong in faith and piety; they have also provided innovative leadership both on foreign mission fields and at home in education, writing, music, medicine, and much else besides child evangelism.

But the fact remains that motherhood diverts many evangelical women from their fullest creative possibilities. Not a few consider, and properly so, the nurture of a family and the keeping of a home open to neighbor-needs a superlative calling, aware that the mother who wishes to win disciples to Christ will have no more intimate influence on human beings than that which she has upon her children.

This is a moment in history, however, when able evangelical women are needed in all the professions and vocations now opening to both sexes—medicine, law, the mass media, politics, and much else.

Can it be that Christian women who delight in homemaking as a divine calling can fill a role also as godparents to the children of others who are divinely gifted and burdened to pursue a career alongside motherhood? Instead of merely deploring communal child-care centers, can we probe new possibilities of the extended evangelical family? Jesus once asked, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” (Mark 3:33). Has the day come when evangelical women can say something profound to the world not only about sexism and liberation but also about service in a community of love that frees the woman of faith for an accelerated contribution of her creative gifts in the world as well as in the home?

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