John H Armstrong

Do Women Face a Different Standard?

Did anyone see the interviews this week with former aides to Senator Hillary Clinton during the RNC? Several of these former Clinton aides have openly criticized the “sexist” attacks on the Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. These attacks have led many to question her devotion to her family. Check out politico.com for more.

Howard Wolfson, a former top Clinton adviser, said: “There’s no way those questions would be asked of a male candidate.” And Paul Singer, who worked with Wolfson on the Clinton presidential campaign, said: “There’s no question that the issues a woman has to deal with are different. The real indictment that needs to be prosecuted is about her views, not her personal life.” He believes Hillary was victimized by sexist news coverage as well. Singer cited articles “on Clinton’s cleavage,” and whether she had the personality of a “bitch.” Palin has already heard various statements about her appearance as well. The even more tourbling stuff is the scandalous rumors about her family and the suggestion that she is being a bad mother. Is anyone as sick of the media and these blogs as I am?

What troubles me, as I noted earlier this week on this site, is that some self-righteous Christians are a part of this same attack, suggesting that they really know what only God can know, namely that Sarah Palin is a very bad mother. (See some comments found in one link on this own blog spot on Sarah Palin posted from earlier this week.) Mothers, all of them, need our support and encouragement, not this kind of undermining. If a mom can have a career, and there is no good biblical reason why she cannot, then please tell your friends who judge women on this kind of issue to “get a life.”

Radical Feminism and the Grace of God

The Confessions of an Ex-Feminist (Ignatius, 2008) is a revealing look at how the grace of God moved one woman from radical protest to living faith. Author Lorraine V. Murray was deeply involved in the sex and drug culture of the 1960s, and was an open protester. She had attended Catholic schools for 12 years and was immersed in the old Baltimore Catechism. When Murray arrived at the University of Florida in 1964 she began to doubt everything she had been taught. By 1968 she had read Das Kapital and Sartre's Being and Nothingness, but not the Bible.

She concluded logically that, if there was no God, then she could live any way she pleased, and this was the course she followed for some years. She went from relationship to relationship and lived for "free love" and open sex. She also embraced radical views of "women's rights."

Attaining a doctorate in philosophy with an emphasis on the feminist writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Murray then taught philosophy in college. For many years she launched a personal vendetta in the classroom, against God and the Catholic Church, trying to persuade students that God did not exist. She mocked values Catholics hold dear, and touted feminism as the cure for many social ills. When she discovered she was pregnant, Murray followed the route that feminists offer as a solution for unmarried women. Much to her surprise, her abortion was a shattering emotional experience, which she grieved over for years. It was the first tragic chink in her feminist armor.

After her marriage in 1982, Lorraine anguished over the decision to have children, but became an advocate of the “child-free” movement, believing children were burdens and life could be happy without them. Later, in her forties, Murray experienced a mysterious series of events in which it seemed that “someone” was inviting her back to God. The mysterious calls came from different ports, including nature, books and other people. Gradually, she realized that the One seeking her was Christ, and the place He was calling her to was the Catholic Church. Eventually realizing it was only in the Church that she would find what she was seeking—the person of Christ and his love and mercy—Murray returned to the Church, finally finding healing and forgiveness for her abortion.

When a boyfriend dumped her, and she took an an overdose of Valium, a friend heard her weeping and rushed her for medical help. The 60s agenda eventually proved futile to her, and after marriage to a kind man she began her journey back to the church. She says her first prayer, after seeking out a priest for counsel, was "Help me to believe." This was the beginning of her new journey, and today she counts her faith a precious gift from God.

As with many who make or have made this same journey, Lorraine reacts in general to almost everything related to women's rights, besides to the particularly secular and godless parts of the so-called feminist agenda. I rejoice in her finding her way back to God, but I am also glad that women have gained many of the rights they now have, and which they should long ago have had. By this I do not include abortion, of course, but I do believe that we should not "throw the baby out with the bathwater" when we talk about feminism in the public square. There are a thousand varieties of what is now called "feminism," and not all of them are evil. Lorraine's story is helpful but it is her story, not the story of every sister in Christ.

Speaking About God

The Presbyterian Church USA recently recommended, via its General Assembly, that new language for the Triune names of God be used in public worship. Suggestions included: “Compassionate Mother, Beloved Child and Life-giving Womb.” Another was “Overflowing Font, Living Water and Flowing River.” Then there was: “Rock, Cornerstone and Temple” as well as “Rainbow of Promise, Ark of Salvation and Dove of Peace.”

This kind of silliness attempts to alter the use of “male” gendered language for God as used in the Bible, which is considered offensive to some members. The problem is that the Bible already addressed the issue by making it clear that God is not gendered at all. But God chooses to reveal himself very clearly in language that carries some very specific ideas.The church has always seen this as important. This is not an issue of patriarchy or chauvinism. Further, the Bible speaks of God in terms that actually do accommodate female imagery. But when it comes to “naming God” this issue is too important to make up terms like these. Most people, even in the PCUSA, know better.

I like what Rev. Mark Brewer, the pastor of the PCUSA member church Bel Air Presbyterian (California), said about these innovations: “You might as well put in Huey, Dewey and Louie.”

The Gains & Losses of Orthodox Feminism

Women have made great gains in modern Western society. Except for the poorest of the poor these gains have benefited almost all women in some way. These gains are the result of a significant social revolution that we have undergone as a society over the past fifty years.

Perhaps the most important early influence in this massive social change was Betty Friedan, who passed away last Saturday (February 5). Friedan was always interesting and often inflammatory. She spoke out on a number of issues over the course of her eighty-five years of life, at times offending the very feminist movement she helped to nurture and grow. Her 1963 bomshell, The Feminine Mystique, was a best-seller. It clearly expressed the agenda for a radical break from the post-World War II Eisenhower era and shattered what has been called “the cozy suburban ideal.” A 1999 New York State University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century voted the book No. 37 on the list.

Showing that she could listen to some of her more conservative critics Betty Friedan’s later best-seller, The Second Stage, included an admission that she had been too dismissive of domestic life. She wrote, “Our failure was our blind spot about the family.” She deeply opposed “equating feminism with lesbianism” and was seen by radicals as “hopelessly bourgeois” according to feminist writer Susan Brownmiller. She routinely insisted, in her last twenty years, that feminism needed to remain in the American mainstream, an appeal that in general has done very little to stop the radicals. She also argued that men be accepted as allies, which has happened more in recent years.

Some of Betty Friedan’s more radical feminist allies were deeply troubled by these moderating statements. Friedan had the courage to break with these radicals whenever she saw their influence as harmful to the cause, prompting social critic Susan Faludi to accuse Frieda of “yanking out the stitches in her own handiwork.” For these more moderating influences I think we can be grateful.

Betty Friedan’s influence clearly gave us some huge and important gains for women, such as equal pay for equal work, promotion opportunities in the work place and the just concept of maternity leave. I realize all of these can be faulted, at least at certain points, but most Christians, and most men, would agree that in the broadest sense they are true and good gains for women and equality. And Friedan’s attempt to define women in ways that were not always seen in relationships to men that were sexual was another gain. In her last years Friedan also advanced the cause of the aged through her book, The Fountain of Age (1993), which contributed to social gains in understanding the personhood of the elderly.

I also found Betty Friedan worth listening to, at least sometimes. I very often disagreed with her and at times found her manner insufferable. But she made real sense at times. And she did have the courage to disagree with her comrades at several crucial points. She had clearly studied whatever her subject was at the moment, thus she spoke with a large degree of intelligence and sought to improve lot of women in general.

This is not the place to write an entire piece on the history of feminism in this country. However, it is worth noting that not everything called feminist is evil. As has been true of all social movements for change there is always the good mixed with the bad. The thoughtful Christian should always welcome the good and then learn to show where the evil must be resisted and why. Conservatives, by the nature of the case, do not do this very well.

It is also worth noting that modern orthodox feminism has continued to turn in more radical directions in the past twenty years. It has created, says Christina Hoff Somers, in the January 13 National Review, “a large network of gender-type apparatchiks who work tirelessly behind the scenes to transform American institutions according to strict feminist specifications.” Adds Sommers, “There women fervently believe they are improving the world” but this is in fact the real problem. The liberties gained over the past fifty years are quite real and they are generally good. But the agenda seems to now be taken up with moral and political ends that are destructive of faith and culture.

Christina Hoff Sommers rightly suggests that the modern leaders would do a great service to women if they sought to understand what real women want and need and how they can be helped to achieve it. Instead the bureaucrats and radical liberals support the professional feminist propaganda machine and create a context in which, as Sommers argues “NOW knows best.” How much better it would be if these modern feminists stopped focusing on issues like how not to have a baby or how to abort a fetus if you do not want the baby that you have conceived.

Perhaps the most foolish of all radical feminist nonsense is the ongoing attempt to demonstrate that there is no unique maternal bond between a mother and her child. To teach that the world is divided by gender, and that gender is nothing but a social construct is so patently stupid that most will not accept this view of life easily. Having said that I believe it is imperative that orthodox Christians catch up on basic issues of equality while we also continue to condemn, with proper scholarship and care, the modern radical “anti-motherhood, anti-family” agenda of the Left. We should also celebrate the gains of the past fifty years. To some degree we can thank Betty Friedan for these even while we strongly disagree with her on several important issues. Today 57% of college graduates are women and a majority of the graduate degrees now granted in the US are given to women. As the father of a healthy, well-balance and lovely married daughter, who is also a graduate of an excellent private college, I am grateful for all of these gains. I wanted everything for my daughter that she could rightly receive by way of both education and opportunity. I encouraged her to “be all that she could be.” I realized at the passing of Betty Friedan that some of this way of thinking came from people like her. Admitting that may offend some but it is simply the truth.