'You've come along way, Baby' is by Mary A. Kassian. She does a very good job at giving a history lesson in this chapter. I love History, so found it very interesting. But not sure I'll cover much of that aspect of it.
It depicts the Woman's Movement of the late 60's and 70's. All of the promises and hopes that many are realizing are not bringing the satisfaction and fulfillment that is was said to bring.
50 years ago life was almost totally different. Here's a partial-abbreviated list of 'Real Life Observations from the 50's'.
- Getting married was the norm.
- Once married the couple would have children, the husband would work to support the wife so she could stay at home with the children.
- The divorce rate was low. Couples were expected to remain married and make their marriage work. Divorce was considered a tragedy.
- If divorce did occur & there were kids involved, the ex-husband was expected to support the wife in a homemaking role, because society considered it vitally important that the children have a mom at home.
- Chasity, virginity, and fidelity were virtues. And sex outside of marriage was shameful.
- Having a child out of wedlock was considered shameful. Now 1 child is born outside of wedlock every 25 seconds.
- Only 30% of women were employed outside of the home. And then it was only a part time job.
- Children were a highly desired, a highly valued, and a highly welcomed addition to both family and community.
- No birth control pill.
- Abortion was illegal.
- Men saw it as their responsibility to protect and provide for the women and children under their care.
- Woman saw it as their responsibility to support their husbands and focus on raising their children in a stable, nurturing, loving environment. Their professional careers took secondary status to their primary and more important career of raising and nurturing the next generation.
'So in a few short decades the idea of a happy fulfilled woman has gone from one who values and serves her children, her husband and her community, to one who serves and exalts herself, sees men as dispensable, and considers children to be optional add-ons to her quest for fulfillment.'
And here she begins her 'history lesson'. How women were made to think they needed to become equal with men, they didn't want to be serving them anymore. They were made to feel their God-given role of wife and homemaker no longer was satisfying.
Women were made to think they needed to define their own existence.
Women were 'made to think that as a whole they needed enlightenment. They needed to discover how really oppressed they were'.
As women's 'eye's were opened', they began to rename the world. They 'needed to challenge and change that which men had constructed for their own benefits'. They 'needed to look at the world through the lenses of female experience and come up with new values and definitions'. Even school curricula was rewritten to reflect a feminist world view.
They even renamed God to a 'She'. They didn't like to think of the male role as being the dominate one.
'The underlying premise of feminism is that 'women need and can trust no other authority then our own personal truth.' Feminism teaches that women ought not to bow down and submit to any external power.'
It's is so sad that our world has come to just accept this as the norm, when the Bible states things so clearly in the opposite light.
1 Corinthians 11 states that, 'Man did not come from woman, but the woman from man; neither was man created for the woman but the woman for man'. How much clearer can it get?? The two sexes are different and were created for different roles.
However!! We will not find the true, deep satisfaction of the heart just by being a wife/homemaker. Our deepest longings and satisfactions will come only when we have yielded our lives completely and totally to Christ!! He is the only one who will be able to fill the void in our lives.
'A woman is a true woman when her heart says yes to God!!'
Today's women are searching for answers, they want to know how to make life work. We need a Biblical understanding of manhood, womanhood and gender relationships.
