By Garry J. Moes

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Whatever happened to the feminine mystique?

 

Feminism killed it, that’s what happened.

 

The slow death of the feminine mystique began with the decidedly unfeminine author and activist Betty Friedan who coined the phrase and used it as the title of her 1963 landmark book. In it, she employed the term to describe the long-held supposed assumption that women could best find fulfillment through motherhood, homemaking, marriage, sexual passivity, and child rearing alone.

 

“Further,” as writer Lindsey Blake Churchill noted, “prevailing attitudes held that ‘truly feminine’ women had no desire for higher education, careers, or a political voice; rather, they found complete fulfillment in the domestic sphere. Friedan, however, noted that many housewives were unsatisfied with their lives but had difficulty articulating their feelings. Friedan deemed that unhappiness and inability to live up to the feminine mystique the ‘problem that has no name.’” So she gave it a name.

 

Bert Parks, the long-time host of the Miss America Pageant, lyricized the idea and “ideal” of the feminine mystique every year as a newly crowned Miss America beauty walked the runway following her coronation. His hallmark song was Bernie Wayne’s 1955 theme:

 

There she is, Miss America

There she is, your ideal

The dreams of a million girls

Who are more than pretty

May come true in Atlantic City

Oh, she may turn out to be

The queen of femininity

There she is, Miss America

There she is, your ideal

With so many beauties

She'll take the town by storm

With her all-American face and form

And there she is

Walking on air she is

Fairest of the fair she is

Miss America.

 

Few were shocked at such depictions of the ideal woman in those days. Feminine beauty had always been admired, at least as far back as, for example, King David being smitten (sinfully, to be sure) by Bathsheba during her rooftop oblations. And we should not forget Adam’s seemingly stunning admiration when God presented Eve to him in the Garden.

 

I remember when I was a boy how delighted all of my family were when the annual Miss America Pageant was televised. Such pageants always included a talent presentation, a modest swimsuit competition displaying the ideal feminine form, a show of elegance in the evening gown competition, and a display of supposed intelligence with a very brief interview (which inevitably ended with a cliched expression of hope for “world peace.”)

 

Recently, someone posted on social media a series of newspaper photos and descriptions of swimsuit-clad contestants in a local county-fair beauty pageant from 40 or 50 years ago. The caption writer noted the shapely beauty of each girl. I made the mistake of commenting light-heartedly that beauty pageants have now been replaced with “scholarship pageants,” and the swimsuit competitions regrettably are no longer held. I was immediately castigated for that remark by incensed feminists who went so far as to investigate my professional background and religion to shame me for my historic observations.

 

Lindsey Blake Churchill, in the previously mentioned critique of Betty Friedan’s role in the demise of the feminine mystique, wrote:

 

Human-potential psychologists such as Abraham Maslow, popular during the late 1950s and early ’60s, influenced Friedan’s claim that the feminine mystique denied women their “basic human need to grow.” Because that basic need for development was stunted, Friedan maintained, women would remain unhappy, and children would grow up with unfulfilled and neurotic mothers. Friedan also argued that the feminine mystique hurt women both personally and professionally, and she held that, for women as well as for men, identity was largely cultivated through a sense of personal achievement, primarily through a career.

 

It is now well known how that sea-change for women has led our society into a massive breakdown of the nuclear family, the essential unit of a stable society, resulting in several generations of lost, troubled, and increasingly lawless children. It is Friedan’s feminism that has in fact left many work-force mothers unfulfilled and neurotic.

 

Most recently we have witnessed a further crash of societal stability stemming from the utter collapse of the crucial distinction between men and women. “Gender” dysphoria and anatomical mutilation are now tolerated and even touted as necessary for personal fulfillment, with the catastrophic result that the reality of two human sexes is buried under psychotic claims that “gender” is a personal construct of which there may be scores or hundreds of variations. In ancient times the female form was idealized as in the marble statue of Venus de Milo. Now it is the key feature of the ubiquitous pornographic smut that morally cripples so many men.

 

The Old Testament Book of Proverbs sings the virtues of the prosperous Lady Wisdom and her family (Proverbs 31) and warns against wanton Lady Folly. Friedan opts for Lady Folly. Her foolishly liberated woman has been told to jettison her natural “mystique” in favor professional advancement and the murder of her unwanted offspring. Home economics classes are now nowhere to be found in American schools, with most women now enslaved in occupational roles outside the home, while their children languish in nursery schools led by other career women. Men are welcomed to compete against women in sports, to the end that women’s athletic competitions are being rendered meaningless, and top prizes are no longer available to many women — ironically, that is, since women’s sports entitlements were supposed to be a sign of their freedom from the old mystique.

 

Thankfully, Friedan’s theories are now being widely questioned as being based on faulty observations and claims. Social historian Daniel Horowitz, for example, considers Friedan dishonest and her negative critique of the feminine mystique a fiction needed for her ideas to take root. Unfortunately, her fictions have become embedded in modern society and are potentially irreversible. Without a biblical understanding of the complementary roles of men and women and the blessedness of solidified nuclear family life, society will continue to disintegrate.

 

Perhaps one of the best affirmations of a biblical understanding of sexual complementarianism is the 1987 Danvers Statement of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. After outlining the contemporary confusion and misinformation about the roles of men and women in society and the denial of the very nature of the distinctions, the Danvers Statement reaches the following conclusions:

 

Based on our understanding of Biblical teachings, we affirm the following:

 

1. Both Adam and Eve were created in God’s image, equal before God as persons and distinct in their manhood and womanhood (Gen 1:26-27, 2:18).

2. Distinctions in masculine and feminine roles are ordained by God as part of the created order and should find an echo in every human heart (Gen 2:18, 21-24; 1 Cor 11:7-9; 1 Tim 2:12-14).

3. Adam’s headship in marriage was established by God before the Fall and was not a result of sin (Gen 2:16-18, 21-24, 3:1-13; 1 Cor 11:7-9).

4. The Fall introduced distortions into the relationships between men and women (Gen 3:1-7, 12, 16).

   • In the home, the husband’s loving, humble headship tends to be replaced by domination or passivity; the wife’s intelligent, willing submission tends to be replaced by usurpation or servility.

   • In the church, sin inclines men toward a worldly love of power or an abdication of spiritual responsibility, and inclines women to resist limitations on their roles or to neglect the use of their gifts in appropriate ministries.

5. The Old Testament, as well as the New Testament, manifests the equally high value and dignity which God attached to the roles of both men and women (Gen 1:26-27, 2:18; Gal 3:28). Both Old and New Testaments also affirm the principle of male headship in the family and in the covenant community (Gen 2:18; Eph 5:21-33; Col 3:18-19; 1 Tim 2:11-15).

6. Redemption in Christ aims at removing the distortions introduced by the curse.

   • In the family, husbands should forsake harsh or selfish leadership and grow in love and care for their wives; wives should forsake resistance to their husbands’ authority and grow in willing, joyful submission to their husbands’ leadership (Eph 5:21-33; Col 3:18-19; Tit 2:3-5; 1 Pet 3:1-7).

   • In the church, redemption in Christ gives men and women an equal share in the blessings of salvation; nevertheless, some governing and teaching roles within the church are restricted to men (Gal 3:28; 1 Cor 11:2-16; 1 Tim 2:11-15).

7. In all of life Christ is the supreme authority and guide for men and women, so that no earthly submission—domestic, religious, or civil—ever implies a mandate to follow a human authority into sin (Dan 3:10-18; Acts 4:19-20, 5:27-29; 1 Pet 3:1-2).

8. In both men and women, a heartfelt sense of call to ministry should never be used to set aside Biblical criteria for particular ministries (1 Tim 2:11-15, 3:1-13; Tit 1:5-9). Rather, Biblical teaching should remain the authority for testing our subjective discernment of God’s will.

9. With half the world’s population outside the reach of indigenous evangelism; with countless other lost people in those societies that have heard the gospel; with the stresses and miseries of sickness, malnutrition, homelessness, illiteracy, ignorance, aging, addiction, crime, incarceration, neuroses, and loneliness, no man or woman who feels a passion from God to make His grace known in word and deed need ever live without a fulfilling ministry for the glory of Christ and the good of this fallen world (1 Cor 12:7-21).

10. We are convinced that a denial or neglect of these principles will lead to increasingly destructive consequences in our families, our churches, and the culture at large.