You've Come a Long Way, Baby

In a few short weeks the women of my church will, Lord willing, hear a few new studies from our women's ministry.

We will be focusing on living counter-culture lives as Christian women. We will explore and examine the differences between women today, women of the 50s and the Biblical example of womanhood.

Below is an article that I pray you all will read all the way through. It is full of wisdom, conviction and grace.

I can't wait to read your comments!
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In the past fifty years, women have come a long way, but a long way isn't necessarily the right way or a good way. Up until the middle of the last century, Western culture as a whole generally embraced a Judeo-Christian standard, Judeo-Christian framework on gender and sexuality and the purpose and structure of the family.

Heterosexual marriage and marital fidelity were highly valued concepts and the norm of society's practice. Most agreed that the primary responsibility of the male was to lead and to protect and to provide for his family while the primary responsibility of the female was to nurture and care for children and home.

Differences between male and female were accepted and seldom questioned, and for both man and woman, the sense of duty and responsibility to family was far greater than the quest for personal fulfillment. Though they may not have been able to identify the source of their values, individuals had a sense of what it meant to be a man or a woman and the appropriate outworking of gender roles and relationships.

The speed and magnitude with which all this has been deconstructed is absolutely phenomenal. It's mind-boggling. Consider the image, the cultural image, of women back in the 1950s, represented by the popular TV sitcom, Leave It to Beaver. The Cleaver family exemplified the idealized, suburban family.

In the series, there are four things that are presented as requisites for happiness for both man and woman. They are marriage, children, education—both of the Cleavers, man and woman, they both had a college education, and they met at college—and hard work. In typical late-1950s fashion, June worked hard at home all day taking care of the house and serving the community while her husband, Ward, worked hard outside of the house to financially support the family.
June was there with fresh-baked cookies and a tall, cold glass of milk when her children, Wally and Beaver, got home from school. When Ward came in the door after work calling out, “I'm home,” June, wearing a pretty dress, greeted him with a smile and a kiss, a clean house, and a hot meal on the table for supper.

In the show, adults who didn't follow this marriage were depicted as troubled or missing out. Life for women was very different 50 years ago, very, very different. Almost everyone got married. The average age for getting married was 20 years old for girls and 22 years old for men.
Once married, a woman could normally count on her husband to financially support her and the children.

The divorce rate was very low.

Chastity and virginity were virtues.

Sex outside of marriage was considered shameful.

Scarcely anyone lived common-law because it carried the stigma of living in sin. So few couples lived common-law at that time that statistics for this phenomena wasn't even recorded. They didn't even keep statistics.

Having a child outside of wedlock was also considered shameful. Now, one American child is born outside of wedlock every 25 seconds, and tonight, more than 40 percent of children will go to sleep in homes in which their fathers do not live.

Only 30 percent of women were employed outside the home in 1960. Very rarely was there a woman who had under school-age children who went out and worked outside of the home.

There was not birth-control pill.

Abortion was illegal.

Pornography and rape and homosexuality, sexual perversion, sexual addiction, sexually transmitted diseases were uncommon and rarely encountered.

Men regarded it as their responsibility to protect and provide and care for their families.

That was the world that I was born into, and it wasn't all that long ago. We've come a long way, baby. Our ideas about what it means to be a woman have come a long way.

By the late 1960s, the image of June Cleaver being happy at home in her role as wife and mother were gone by the wayside, replaced by the 1970s Mary Tyler Moore image of a pretty, single woman in her 30s pursuing a career at a television station. The show was lauded as a breakthrough because it had the first, independent, attractive career woman as the center.

It discreetly implied that Mary was single. She was on the pill. She was also sexually active, but the focus of the show was on her career, not on her association with men. She truly was on her own, without a recurring father or husband or boyfriend or anyone looking out for her. Every episode, the theme song proudly alluded to her autonomy. “You're gonna make it after all.” Okay? A lot of you women remember that. You remember that. You're shaking your heads.

In the 1980s, we're introduced to Murphy Brown, an investigative journalist and news anchor for FYI, a fictional TV news magazine. In contrast to the gentle sweetness of Mary Tyler Moore, this character, Murphy Brown, has a loud mouth, is rash, driven, self-assured, self-absorbed, and highly opinionated. She is a divorcee and a proud atheist, and during the course of the series, Murphy becomes pregnant but chooses not to marry her baby's father. A man would cramp her style. She has the child none-the-less and leaves the baby in the care of a revolving door of nannies so she can pursue her career. The child is merely a side in the plot that revolves around Murphy's self-actualization in the workplace.

In the mid-90s, enter Ellen, a woman who doesn't work for someone else but who independently owns her own business, a bookstore. Ellen lives with a man, but the relationship is platonic. He's just her roommate. She's not sexually attracted to him, and gradually, we discover that Ellen isn't attracted to men at all. She's a lesbian, a woman-identified woman. She has the right to define her own sexuality and her own morality, and no one has the right to judge her for it. She's out, and she's in charge, as are virtually all the women portrayed in the media in the past decade. From children's cartoons to television series to movies, women are portrayed as having an in charge, don't need a guy, I'm powerful, traditional marriage and family and morals are outdated, I have the right to rule, how dare you tell me what to do, mentality.

In the past decade, we've been inundated with the message that when it comes to relationships, women can hook up, be in a casual or long-term relationship, live common-law, get married or not, get married and then get divorced, get pregnant or abort the babies, sleep around, live with a guy or a girl, have sex with a guy or a girl, and participate in a whole assortment of immoral and perverted behavior as long as they are friends. In other words, woman makes her own rules and sets her own standards, and as long as she is nice, it really doesn't matter what she does.

Who are you to judge?

The epitome of this is reflected in the most popular sitcom recently for and about women, Sex in the City. Southwood and Sisterhood is what it's all about. As long as women are first loyal to themselves and second to their female buddies, they're on the right track. Single, married, lesbian, heterosexual, promiscuous, perverted—they can be vulgar, crude, and crass, but if they are for themselves and for other women and are caring and nice, then they're okay.

In the new worldview, men are whiny and needy and not-too-bright and totally unreliable. They're marginalized and de-masculinized, used, regarded, and discarded like Kleenex out of a box. The Sex in the City character, Charlotte, only hesitates a moment before giving up her engagement ring to help her girlfriend pay for the down payment on a house.

Now days, the epitome of empowered womanhood is to live a self-serving, self-righteous, neurotic, narcissistic, superficial, and adulteress life. The main character in Sex in the City series wraps it up well when she counsels women that, “The most exciting, challenging, and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself.”

So in a few short decades in the span of my lifetime, the ideal of a happy, fulfilled woman has gone from one who serves and exalts her children, her husband, and her community to one who serves and exalts herself and has a very different type of commitment, very different type of idea towards men and women. This begs the question, how did this all happen? How did it all happen?

This is a snippet of a talk that Marry Kassian gave at the True Woman '08 Conference. You can find the talk in its entirety HERE.