True Woman 101 - Week 6: Hear Me Roar

Nancy: Now those who are over fifty today, roughly, we have some memory of how this movement came about; how it changed things. But the women today who are under forty, for the most part, cannot remember a world that was any different than it is today. They don’t realize how very different things were for their mother’s generation.

I’ve learned a lot from you ladies, especially Mary and Carolyn. You’ve both written books on some of the historical perspectives of feminism. I think it’s important that we get educated on how we got where we are and how things have changed within just several decades.

It’s not just because we want to go back and re-hash old times—50s, 60s, and 70s. But we realize how much of what took place in those decades impacts and influences our world today. And not just outside the church, but even within the church. We have very much been made a product of that cultural revolution. So we’re going to get a little history lesson today.

I want to just start by saying to those who can remember to think back to the 60s and 70s when the feminist movement was really coming to maturity. What kind of memories do you have of that era? Do you remember any events or any songs or cultural moments?

Kim Wagner: I remember the first grade girls on the playground. We would all wear our white go-go boots to school. 

Mary Kassian: Go-go boots. There you go. They’re coming back in, you know.

Kim: They were white patent leather. We would get together in a group and sing at the top of our lungs to the boys the song "These Boots Are Made for Walking," "and that’s just what they’re going to do, these boots are going to walk right over you."

Mary: Yes, "right over you."

Nancy: Where did you learn this song?

Kim: It was on the radio, I’m sure. It was just in the air. It was a popular song. But we loved that feeling of power and aggression as we would sing that song and we would grind our little boot heels into the dirt. We were showing the guys, “We’re grinding you into powder.”

Mary: It was very similar for me. It wasn’t that particular song, but it was the song “I am woman hear me roar in numbers too big to ignore.” And then, of course, "I am strong. I am invincible."

Dannah Gresh: I am invincible.  I remember singing that.

Mary: The final line, "I am woman!"

Dannah: My dad loved Helen Reddy. I remember driving the summer that came out in 1972. We were driving around and listening to those words not realizing that they were having an impact in what I believed.

Mary: I remember middle school, linked arm in arm down the hallway. “I am strong. I am invincible, I . . .” When you examine the words of that song . . . I mean talking about my brothers, "I’m going to make them understand." I’m gonna roar, and I’m gonna become everything that I can be because my brother, the male, has kept me down for all these years, and it’s time for me to take charge.

Kim: And what’s sad is, I think God created us to be strong women, but that was a perversion of what God created us to be. We were relishing in our own strength rather than what He’s placed within us.

Carolyn McCulley: I was such a wee little girl that I have no memories directly of the 60s, but I do remember . . .

Mary: That wasn’t the 60s, that was the 70s—we’re talking the 70s.

Kim: And it’s been re-released, the twenty year-olds now have heard it.

Carolyn: Really? See, I couldn’t sing along with you all, but what I do remember is coming of age in the 70s and realizing, “This has already been done.” I was aware of it being beaten to death in the media and “we’ve achieved it.” I mean, we have Title 9, we have this, and we have that, so move on.

For me my experience was in college. I was going to study journalism, and I was so excited to be a freshman. I was like, “I’m big and bad! I’m on the college campus.” And everybody’s like, “Pfft, freshman!”

They were all taking these women’s studies courses, and I didn’t know anything about it. But it seemed like it would be so much easier than science or math or something, so I took them, and I just got sucked in. It wasn’t until years later when I read your book, Mary, that I realized that I was a guinea pig.

It was a very intentional experiment to expand this into the next generation and to reach young women in college, and I ate it up hook, line, and sinker. I was completely uncritical and I participated in things like take back the night marches. I just remember we’d go around campus yelling, “Take back the night,” like night’s not going to happen again? We knew what our point was, but we were mad about a lot of things.

Mary: You were mad about it.

Dannah: I think that was the point.

Carolyn: And so there I am trying to connect the dots of the social life. I’m all angry yelling, “Take back the night!” I’m like, “So where are those dinner dates?” You (Mary) really helped me to understand that, so my burden in writing my book was speaking to women in their twenties.

You have no idea the change in my life alone, and I’m a witness to this. What you all accept as normal in your sexual identity, in your sexual relationships, in what you expect of commitment and intimacy, and everything else has been just completely transformed, and so fast.

Mary: Well, let me just tell you, just that one decade . . . In 1969 they came up with the idea to have a women’s studies class.

Nancy: Can I just back up even further than that to say, again for our younger women, at that point these women were a small number. They were considered radical. They were considered fringe. They were considered extreme, way out there. They were not mainstream at all back in the 50s and early 60s, so how did that within, ten, fifteen, twenty years it become a movement? So mainstream. There was an agenda, and a small number of women set out to accomplish something. How did they do it? Kind of walk us through that.

Mary: Well, let me just give you a peek into the enormity of what they did. You had zero . . . no one had ever heard of women’s studies in 1969. The New York Radical Women’s group came up with this idea: “Oh, we can catch the next generation by going into the colleges and having women’s studies courses and educating them in terms of a feminist viewpoint.”

So there were none in 1969. By the end of the decade, so ten years, just one decade, there were over, I think it was, twenty-five or thirty thousand women’s studies courses. You could get a bachelor’s, a master’s, and a doctoral degree, a terminal degree in women’s studies. Women’s studies had been integrated not only as women’s studies courses, but into every discipline.

You would get a women’s studies course if you went to school. And then the professors were being educated in women’s studies. So when I hit university, which was in the late 70s and early 80s, this was kind of at the pinnacle of the influence of feminism.

And not only, then, did it influence the women’s studies there; it influenced textbooks. Children’s textbooks and grade school textbooks were re-visited and re-formulated. I just don’t think younger women have any idea as to how radically, and how quickly, and how intentionally the ideology changed in culture.

So how did it all start? It started (certainly Carolyn can back up in a moment and talk about the first wave of feminism), but the second wave—really the wave we’re talking about right now—started in 1963 when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. She identified this problem, that women aren’t happy. 

There was this cultural role for women—the happy housewife, the white picket fence, suburbia, Leave It to Beaver. How many of you grew up that way? She’s all happy, vacuuming in her pearls, making cookies. That was the ideal that was upheld for women, and yet women weren’t happy in that ideal.

She published the book. A group of twenty-eight women got together and formed the National Organization for Women (NOW) and started lobbying the government for funding, saying, “This is not fair. Women are downtrodden. We need equal representation with men, we need to be treated the same as men because there’s this inequality.”

We’ve talked about the battle of the sexes and how it is a reality, and that there were many things that were identified that were problematic. 

Nancy: Twenty-eight women?

Mary: Twenty-eight women.

Nancy: In a hotel room?

Mary: In a hotel room.

Nancy: And how did that mushroom?

Mary: Well, a brain-child of the feminist movement at that time was the whole idea that you could start a revolution through this process called consciousness raising. 

Nancy: Dannah, you’re nodding your head.

Dannah: Yes, what I remember reading about it was that it wasn’t new to the feminist movement. It was actually something that Mao Tse-tung had used in China to further the development of Communism (the revolution). They’re really hatred meetings. It’s sitting around and discussing all the things you hate about XYZ. And, in the case of the feminist movement, it was, “What do we hate about men?”

Nancy: Speaking bitterness.

Dannah: Yes, but what was interesting about it was that even in those meetings, it was the women they called together. It was the women who really formed the basis of the Cultural Revolution in China. So there’s something that happens when a bunch of girlfriends sit around and start complaining and start speaking bitterness and start complaining about ways they’ve been hurt.

Carolyn: I haven’t studied the feminist movement as broadly as you guys have, but I have studied the impact of it on sexuality. I’ve followed the work of Margaret Sanger, who really started in the 20s. I bring this up because you talk about the root of bitterness. Margaret Sanger was the real driver behind the pill, the birth control pill.

Mary: Which was what? 1961?

Carolyn: Yes, and by 1965 there were 6.5 million women prescribing to it, so it was very rapid once it was developed. She started the development of it in the 30s—20s and 30s. But what fueled her was bitterness. She was the sixth daughter, I think, of a mother who’d had eighteen pregnancies, resulting in eleven children. She believed that her mother was worn out and ruined and ultimately died because of being worn out from childbirth.

She had a bitterness about motherhood; she had a bitterness about childbirth. That was the fuel for this movement. In my opinion, the pill is not positive. I think it’s resulted in more sexually transmitted diseases, it’s resulted in more infertility, it’s resulted in less satisfaction and less ability to live up to God’s call to create, to procreate. But it was out of bitterness. These are the kinds of stories that the women brought into the 60s. They had real, literal tragedies. They had a seed of pain in their lives that led them to these meetings.

Nancy: In some cases, though, and this is not an area where I’m an expert, but I remember a little bit about it. In some cases it wasn’t intense pain, it was fomenting discontent. Your husband’s out there working; he’s getting an income. You’re here working in your home, but you’re not getting an income. So it was creating grievances at some level as well. And, boy, that’s not hard to do with our human hearts being what they are.

Carolyn: Margaret Sanger’s a great example of something. God has given all his creatures the ability to make a general observation. You can usually walk into a situation and see man hitting woman and say, “Man is hitting woman.” But it’s your worldview that gives you the interpretation of that problem and then drives your solution.

Margaret Sanger would work in these slums and these impoverished areas as a public health nurse in the 1914–1918 time period. She would go in and she would see women who were being neglected and abused, who were living in poverty, whose husbands were being hired out by extremely self-centered corporations that did nothing for their workers.

They were living in slums. Their husbands were drinking up their funds, and she saw all this misery. Instead of walking in and saying, “Oh, look at this picture of sin,” she looked at this woman surrounded by children and said, “What’s the problem here? It’s the children!” And that became her campaign.

So her interpretation, her worldview, driven by her bitterness, was what led her to this solution to say, “Okay, we’re going to have this birth control movement, this voluntary motherhood.” Margaret Sanger was a huge proponent of eugenics. Most people don’t even understand this, but eugenics was the cornerstone of Nazi philosophy. It was the idea that you could improve humanity by only allowing a certain kind of person to breed.

And certainly, if you’re African-American and going through this study, you need to know her views on this, because there were only a select number of people she thought were worthy of breeding. She promoted this eugenics idea of “only certain people should be allowed to survive.” She promoted it through her ideology of “voluntary motherhood.” She published all this information about heterosexual birth control in a newsletter, underneath a banner of “No gods, no masters,” and that was really revealing of her views.

They were tied to, also, the idea that women should have no inhibition, whatsoever, when it came to their sexual freedom. She certainly practiced this. Her euphemism was “a woman’s hidden energies.” So a lot of people think the 1960s were the real radical decade, but they actually stemmed from movements that came out in the 1910s and 1920s, when there was a profound change.

In fact, one newspaper called 1914 “the year when it was sex o’clock in America.”

Mary: That slogan, “No gods, no masters,” that’s really the issue. That is, at heart, the issue not only of the first wave of feminism, but also of the second, and really of the third wave as well.

Nancy: And of every issue in humanity from Genesis 3 to the current day.

Mary: I think it’s really important that women who are listening . . . They think of the good parts or real valid issues that feminism has addressed, but you need to understand that feminism is an “ism,” a philosophy. It's a distinct philosophy that says, “No gods, no masters."

It says what’s more, for women, “Men have been our gods and masters. We’re overthrowing that, and we’re setting ourselves up as our own authority. We have the right to dictate the meaning of our lives. We have the right to look at our world and dictate the meaning of what’s going around in our world.”

If you have the right to define your world, than ultimately you also have the right to define your god, and that’s where feminism has gone. That’s the root, “No gods, no masters.” That’s fascinating, because that so encapsulates the ideology that women have cut their teeth on—“You have the right to decide. It’s your body; it’s your choice.” It comes down to that in every area.

Nancy: “It’s your own personal truth,” as Betty Friedan said. “You don’t have to submit to any other authority, other than your own personal truth.” And isn’t that what the first woman’s sin was all about? “It’s my own personal truth that I can submit myself to.”

Carolyn: That’s important. Whenever I speak on the subject, I want people to understand I’m not speaking as though people who hold to the ideology of feminism are our enemy, because they’re not. They’re flesh and blood. Our enemy is this idea that is right there from the Garden on—“God’s holding out on you,” and “Has God really said?” "Is His authority really true and good?"

We have to recognize that the seeds of feminism, as we are discussing, are actually just sin, and they’re resident in all of our hearts. So apart from the saving work of the gospel, we all want our own way whenever we want, and we always are blame shifting to other people. But it is fascinating culturally to look at how fast it went from that into . . . There I was in the early 80s. We were in a women’s studies class, and we didn’t spell women like w-o-m-e-n because we didn’t even want to the word “men” in there. So it was “myn.” That really dates you when you can remember that.

Mary: It’s fascinating, because this movement that really started with these twenty-eight women kind of lulled didn’t it? You had this first wave, and then you had the World War, and that kind of put a damper on a lot of things. 

Carolyn: And then World War II and the Great Depression, and so we look back on the 50s, and what we see is this really patronizing time period. But what I look back and I see is the fact that people have been hurt by so much devastation for three decades.

They wanted a sense of normalcy, and everybody wanted to promote this sense of normalcy and a happy home. But now we had mass media, now we had the ability to mass market and produce things which we didn’t have before. So what Betty Friedan really reacted to, in part, was consumerism. There is this message that “stuff” is going to fulfill your soul.

Advertising showed all these women in a dress and pearls delighted with “my oven. Woohoo!”

Mary: There was a huge shift in technology. Right after the war, instead of making bombs, they started making appliances. I remember my mom getting her first electric washer. “Glory hallelujah!” It was party time in the Thomas household because that old wringer washer was going to the dump.

Carolyn: Wow.

Mary: How old is that? We were behind the times.

You had this message, this advertising, and you had the need of these big companies to sell these appliances, so the new consumer, the new ideal was, “women are going to be happy when they have their new oven, their vacuum cleaner, when they have their stuff, when they have their polyester that they don’t need to iron.” Oh, what were we thinking? That was the definition of womanhood, “When you have all this stuff, you will be fulfilled as a woman.” That’s really what she was reacting against.

So the question that she asked, and the whole question that the second wave of feminism played into was, “What’s going to bring women happiness and fulfillment?”

Kim: It was a good question. They just had the wrong answer.

Carolyn: Even in Betty Friedan’s life you can see the regrets. Shortly before she died—what, around 2003, 2005?—the Washington Post did an article with her and asked her what her main regret in life was. Do you know what she said? She said it was the ending of her marriage. She was so happy that her own children had gotten married and had children themselves.

She was extolling the values of family. I thought that had to be a really bitter place to look back and think, I broke up my marriage, and I broke up a lot of other women’s marriages, and I told them they would be better off without it. And then, with the wisdom that is granted to a lot of people at the end of their lives, maybe not so much.

Dannah Gresh: Well, Gloria Steinem said a liberated woman is one who has sex before she’s married and a job after. And that’s just a recipe for brokenness, isn’t it? We would say that today’s teenagers and young twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings would hear that statement, and they do hear that at the True Woman events. We share some of the history with the teens. We say, “How many of you would believe this: A liberated woman is one who has sex before she’s married and a job after?” And they say, “Oh, no, no, no.”

When you really get into their hearts and ask them how they’re living their lives and what they’re believing, they do believe that statement, and they’re living it out with their actions.

Mary: They are living it out. Another famous statement of the feminist movement was, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Gloria Steinem actually was quoted as saying that, but I think someone else said it initially. I don’t think that women today would say, “Yes, they believe that,” or that they even adhere to feminism, and yet it’s the way that young women are living their lives. It's that “I’m going to be independent; I have to look out for myself, I don’t need a man.”

There’s a sense in which that’s true. But there’s a sense in which that independence . . . It’s not, “Oh, I’m dependent on God.” It’s, “I’m independent. I’m dependent on myself.” And that’s where the twisting of it comes in.

Carolyn McCulley: We don’t want young women to misunderstand either that issue about having a job, because that goes back into the first wave of feminism. We can talk about that later on, but what’s always been in my heart is the understanding that God has called women to be productive, and the home was always a place of productivity. It was a contribution in a small economy at the times. It just shifted radically in the twentieth century and became a place of consumption. So, in that argument was the idea you needed to leave the home to go and work outside.

So we don’t want people to misunderstand and think any kind of employment is bad. But in that sense, you abandoned the call, the primary, eternal call that God has given to the home for which you’re not really going to get rewarded in this life, but you will in eternity, for the allure of a commercial marketplace as being better than the sphere, the private sphere that God has said for women to invest in.

And so that shorthand we would all understand it, but I wouldn’t necessarily want younger women to be, like . . . um?

Kim Wagner: Well, and we would agree with the fact that we would encourage young women not to be dependent on a man, but their dependence is to be on their relationship with Christ, and that’s where they find their sufficiency and fulfillment, not in a relationship with a man.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: It’s interesting how often Satan, from Genesis 3 on, takes something that God has set up and established and just puts a twist to it.

Mary: Yes, just enough to get us some truth.

Nancy: And on to a different trajectory. There is some truth in it, but that mixture of truth and error—and it takes you in a whole different direction.

Mary: Well, like these consciousness-raising groups that we were talking about earlier. That was a huge tool of the feminist movement where women began to gather together in small groups, hosted in homes . . .

Nancy: Which is where a lot of women were at the time

Mary: Yes. Homes, community centers, YWCA, just wherever women gathered, perhaps in the workplace with their colleagues, but wherever women were to talk about women’s issues. They very intentionally started speaking bitterness, blaming men for women’s predicament, and saying, “We need to take back our right to dethrone them and to put ourselves on the throne.”

And so, what happened with these consciousness-raising groups was, as women became angry, they became politicized. They became really energized to go out and make political changes in their world and to write their letters and to make their demands

Nancy: Mobilize

Mary: Yes, and to mobilize, and each one of those groups would form their own groups. It really was a grassroots movement of women who are such powerful influencers, influencing their girlfriends, influencing their girlfriends. So you have this radicalization of women and this reprogramming—and they talk about the feminist consciousness-raising click. It's where that click comes when a woman sees the light to realize that all of her problems and all the problems in the world and all the problems of women can be blamed on men.

Dannah: If I could just say . . . I’m passionate about this because I feel like my big, baby boy is taking the brunt of this.

Nancy: Your baby boy who is how old?

Dannah: My baby boy, who is a young adult man, but our boys, our sons, our grandchildren are feeling the repercussions of this. When we were writing Lies Young Women Believe, we were getting to the root of how teenagers and twenty-something women were really believing the lie that a job was just so much more important and fulfilling than being a wife and a mom. If that happened, it was okay, but she really needed to be a college graduate with a great job, and then she would have value.

And so I was asking my son and his best friend, “Do you feel that? As college students at the time, do you feel that?”

And they’re like, “Oh, my, yes! The way that the Christian college girls talk about the second-class status of being a wife and a mother, if we talked like that, we would be taken out to the streets. 

Nancy: About being a husband and a father

Dannah: If I said, “Oh, I’m going to have a great job, but if I’m a husband and a dad, all right, whatever.” He used the word, “They would say I was a jerk. They would say, ‘That is so selfish and so self-centered, and how can a man speak like that?'” But that’s how the girls are talking, the Christian girls. They’ve been so inundated by this message.

Kim: Well, and it’s affecting our young men, and they’re growing—this is generalizing—but growing more passive

Dannah: Yes, more passive/aggressive.

Kim: They are not wanting to take up the mantle of responsibilities, and so you have this adolescent-adult age. 

Dannah: adult-escent

Kim: Yes, that extends far into adulthood. I saw an article last week about “Man: The New Woman” because of all of the new feminine articles for men—not just a “man purse,” but all kinds of articles of clothing that used to be for women only. So it’s affected our young men.

Mary: And it’s affected our young men just in terms of saying that masculinity is inferior when it’s in a male.

Kim: Right.

Mary: But those masculine traits when they’re in a female are applauded. Where it’s frowned upon for my young men to demonstrate that they have initiative and drive and that they’re wanting to be manly and take strong leadership. 

Or even just as simple as in sports. You really get in there with the guys and boom around, and that’s, “Oh, you shouldn’t let them do that. They might get hurt.” And yet, at the same time, when women are doing that, that’s applauded. And so there’s this double message that really is, “Well, the girls should develop all these masculine traits,” but if they show up in a guy, that’s not good news.

Dannah: I’ve just taken two years to trace how the feminist movement has impacted our sons. I believe that we really need to start with our children when they’re very small to re-educate them, to infiltrate them with the biblical worldview.

But the adult-escent term is used to describe that twenty- or thirty-something man who is so busy playing Call of Duty that they have no actual call of duty in his life, no real call of duty. He’s busy in front of the PlayStation. He is overweight because he eats chips and soda all day. He is probably living at home or in a bachelor pad with a bunch of guys, a bachelor pad that hasn’t been cleaned in so long.

This wasn’t seen thirty years ago, forty years ago. Young men at that age had jobs. They had wives or were seeking wives. They were excited to be men that had children. They wanted to raise a family.

And my heart, what I came to is that the feminist movement in telling men that they were bad, they’ve kind of risen up to that calling.

Nancy: Or fallen down to it.

Dannah: Or fallen down to it. What God has called our men to is goodness. He’s called them to goodness, and that is that they would think towards and for others. They would be useful towards others.

When you trace the Scripture and look at the word “good,” whether it’s talking about God or it’s talking about our call to be good, it’s talking about man and woman both thinking towards and for others. And it’s that what the feminist movement has taken away from us?

Mary: We’re just thinking about ourselves. "I’m independent. I don’t need you, thank you very much. I can take care of myself. I don’t welcome your manhood in my life." Wouldn’t you say, Carolyn, that that’s a real, it’s a sort of a core thing that has happened through this ideology.

I have a real burden, especially for my younger brothers in Christ, just to know that they can pick up the mantle of masculinity and run with it and not fear rejection. That’s such a major thing. If I make a choice, if I don’t do well here, I’m doing to be rejected on whatever front, so it’s better not to do so.

And so, in much in the same way we often tell young women that it’s worth it to wait, to be pursued, to wait on God and not to manipulate things yourselves. In the same way, I encourage them: You trust God by risking rejection.

The part that we play as sisters and friends in Christ to our brothers is to build them up in their encouragement, to remind them of the faithfulness of God. And every time you do that, it’s like a little bit of just water in the desert. I can make just the most seemingly, to me, trivial remarks of encouragement. I will hear back from friends and guys in the church just saying, “Thank you. That really encouraged me. That reminded me that God is worthy of my trust.” 

We don’t have to fear all of this, as severe and sobering as it is, because we know that God has given us the power of influence in our speech to be able to build these men up in the variety of relationships around us so that they are different.

I see that, I do see that. For all the dire predictions, I look into my church, and I see young men who are serious about being godly. They’re serious about their relationships. To me, it would always be so funny to hear them, like in their late teens, early twenties, talking about, “When I get married, I’m going to do this . . .” I always thought it was the girls. But they were taking that seriously, and really wanting to do it.

Mary: What’s interesting to me is that this whole change was based on the question: “What’s going to make women happy?” And that was, we said, about in the 1960s, early 60s, saying: “Women are going to be happy when we’re independent, when we’re financially independent, when we don’t have to associate ourselves with a male. In fact, we'll be happy when we very intentionally don’t associate ourselves with a male, when we get out in the work force, when we’ve got money, when we can do what we want sexually, when there’s no stigma to women sleeping around.”

I want to get into third-wave feminism in just a moment

Nancy: Here’s my question: Did it make them happy?

Mary: Well, that’s exactly what I was going to say. What’s real interesting is that Time did a survey: “The State of the American Woman” in, I think, it was October 2009. They took a look at history and statistics and concluded that as woman’s power and her impact and everything that she wanted—she started having more money, more prominence in the work place, more power—as everything increased for her . . .

Nancy: As they accomplished all of their objectives . . .

Mary: Yes, they accomplished all of their objectives, her level of happiness decreased, exponentially. And so she is unhappier now. Women, as a whole, are unhappier now than when the feminist movement set about to solve the problem of women’s unhappiness.

Carolyn: But you know, we see that in 1 Timothy. I was thinking the whole time I was reading what you all have written, I was thinking of the fact that Paul’s encouraging Timothy to evaluate women in terms of their godliness, and especially the widows who needed help from the church. He talked about those who were godly, who would put all their hopes and trust in the Lord.

But then he goes on to say in 1 Timothy 5:6, “but she who is self-indulgent is dead even while she lives.” And that is just the theme for our times.

Mary: Yes. When we grab hold of the whole thing that we can control our own lives, and we can be happier when we do it our ways than God’s way, if we self-indulge in that way, then, yes, we just become more and more miserable.

Nancy: I want to just point out here that this whole thing of feminism—we don’t want to sound like we’re on a rant. Like Carolyn reminds us, feminists are not the enemy.

Mary: And, in fact, I see so many of those ways of thinking in my own heart, in my own life.

Nancy: That’s what I want to ask and point out. Mary, this is where your book was really so enlightening to me. It showed how that philosophy, that ideology had permeated and infiltrated religious circles, the church, but it’s not just liberal churches out there. As Carolyn has pointed out, the seeds of feminists’ thinking is in all our hearts.

So I let me just ask for some discussion here: How have you seen those seeds in your own life, in your own walk?

When I was in my early thirties I was asked to serve on a board of trustees for a large seminary. There were sixty-three men serving at the time, and I was the only woman.

Mary: The only one?

Kim: The only one, and when people would hear that I was going to be serving on a board with so many men, they would say to my husband, “Oh, aren’t you concerned about Kim, working on a board with that many men making decisions?”

He said, “Oh, I’m not worried about her. I’m worried about those sixty-three men.”

We might laugh about that now, but I’m very ashamed of that now. He knew I could hold my own or maybe even demean or intimidate them. And that’s not something to be proud of. So I struggled with using gifts and abilities that God had given me as a young woman in a way that really was not beneficial to the kingdom when I demeaned men, or I used to intimidate others.

Nancy: I think that’s a challenge for all of us as women with gifts and strong opinions and ideas and personalities. As we’ve talked with each other, we’ve all wrestled with some of those aspects. I know I can.

I work with a lot of men in our ministry, and I can walk into a room, into a meeting and adversely affect the climate or the tone of what’s going on there without saying a word. And when I start to say words, I can really be controlling, negative, critical—just pull down the atmosphere. And what I’m really doing is asserting myself above rather than what Paul says in Philippians, “esteem others better than yourself.” I’m esteeming myself, my interests,  what matters to me above them. And I just watch then what happens.

I’ve seen men get deflated, get discouraged, disheartened. Not just by me, but by the way that sometimes the way we women can be. And I’m miserable. It doesn’t make us happy to be “girls rule, guys drool.” That’s not a way to joy.

Kim: It can happen so easily and often unintentionally if we’re not thoughtful about how we treat men—just with a raised eyebrow, with a tone of voice—whether it’s to family members or friends or pastors, coworkers.

Nancy: We can do it in one-on-one relationships to where Proverbs talks about it, “Living with a woman who is a nag.”

Dannah: Is that the Nancy Leigh DeMoss version?

Nancy: Right. Scripture says he’d rather live on the corner of the rooftop. It can just drive a man crazy.

Dannah: Right. And I’ve read that verse with a lot of conviction on some days.

Mary: I think the feminist movement affects us all, and I don’t even think I understand or realize how much I’ve been affected by it. And sometimes it comes and hits me in the face and I just go, “Whoa! I didn’t realize how affected I’ve been by that.”

And just, for an example, my husband and I were doing marriage counseling with a young couple. Her desire was to really be a wife and a mom, and so she didn’t have a lot of career aspirations, and she didn’t have a career plan, and she didn’t have a big post-secondary education plan.

I remember having this thing in my spirit going, “Well, she should be getting her education. It would be wise of her to have a little bit of a life plan for herself.” I remember just catching myself and thinking, “Well, why do I think that? And why do I think that way? And what is it that I have assimilated from my culture that causes me to think that way?

Or even in terms of women having children or delaying marriage, it’s like, “Oh, well, you shouldn’t get married. You’re a teenager.” But all these things, I think we need to take a look at, and be very intentional about taking a look at. I’m not saying there’s one way to look at it, but to evaluate why is it that we think the way that we think. Is it a biblically informed world view? Or is it just a world informed world view?

Nancy: Have we just imbibed the culture?

Mary: Right. Have we just imbibed the culture? And I, sad to say, when I sometimes evaluate my thoughts and the way that I approach situations, and when I ask myself the hard questions: “Why am I thinking this way?” I come to the conclusion that I’m thinking this way because this is how culture has taught me how to think.

Nancy: Well, and here is where we come back to. We did a little history lesson here and talked about how feminism developed, it was a crash course, but a key word is they were intentional. They had an agenda. They knew where they wanted to head. They were not going to be deterred by people who didn’t agree with them because at the beginning, most people didn’t agree with them. They set out to have a revolution to influence the culture. So they were intentional. By every means and every possible way, they were exerting their influence.

If we want to see Christian women begin to think as Christian women, to think biblically, to think Christianly, to represent the heart and spirit of Christ in our world, to reflect His beauty, we’ve got to be intentional.

As we’ve been talking today, a verse from Proverbs chapter 5 has come to mind. It’s verse 6, and it’s talking about a foolish woman. In the context, she’s an influential woman, but she has a negative influence on the men around her and on her culture. It says of this woman that “she does not ponder the path of life and therefore her ways wander, and she does not know it.” She’s oblivious to the fact that she is not following in the right ways.

As we’ve talked about how intentional the feminists were in developing their ideology and promoting it in our culture, I’m reminded that we need to be intentional as women about pondering, thinking about, considering, meditating on the path of life, the ways of righteousness, God’s way, the gospel way. As we ponder the path of life, we can be assured that our ways will not wander, but they will go in the ways of God, and we will lead others in His ways.

We need to be smart when it comes to the messages we listen to. Culture promotes a way of thinking about womanhood that is just decidedly feminist. Its solution to the battle of the sexes is to undermine and dismantle God’s divine design. And how does it do that? By convincing women that they have the right to self-define.

We hope you’ve seen this week that this strategy of Satan is as old as time. It didn’t work for Eve. It didn’t work for solving the problems identified by the feminist movement, and it won’t work for you. True fulfillment and true joy come when we lay down the right to self-define.

Keep in mind that was the goal of the early feminist movement—to find fulfillment and joy. In seeking after that, they didn’t find it, but we can find that joy and fulfillment as we lay down our rights to be our own gods and masters and instead say, “Lord, You are my God. You are my master. I am choosing to walk in surrender, in joyful glad-hearted obedience to Your ways.”