Note: This column is part of Scott Lively’s series “30 Days of Pride-Month Push-Back.”
“Every wise woman builds her house, but a foolish one tears it down with her own hands” (Proverbs 14:1).
Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, was one of the most toxic women ever empowered by Marxist radicalism. She was co-founder of one of the bloodiest abortion-pushing entities in American history, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and was cursed with a personality even her leftist allies at the New York Times characterized (in her obituary, no less) as “famously abrasive” … “thin-skinned and imperious, subject to screaming fits of temperament.” But the most destructive part of her legacy was “Second Wave Feminism,” which “The Feminine Mystique” was “credited” with triggering. Perhaps more than any other person, Friedan is responsible for weaponizing feminist grievances to poison women against home-based, family-centered lifestyles and transform them into aggressive workplace competitors with men, leveraging leftist power in the civil rights movement to achieve the cultural Marxist goal of “disintegration of … the monogamic and patriarchal family.”
As a man who came of age in the 1970s I am a part of the first generation of males upon whom was imposed Friedan’s feminist theory of social order by the American public-education cabal. We were the first to be indoctrinated in the false narrative that men and women are equal and interchangeable in all things, and that men’s collective unfair past “oppression” of all women warranted new public policies and practices favoring the advancement of women in roles traditionally relegated to men. Men who declined to voluntarily defer or submit to women’s leadership in this campaign were deemed “male chauvinist pigs,” justifying anti-discrimination laws to punish those who stood in the way of “equality.” I only broke free of that mindset when I became a Christian in my late 20s and started understanding God’s plan for family.
To be sure, many aspects of male/female relations and social distinctions in the increasingly secularized world of 20th century America were unfair – falling well below the previously practiced biblical standard of mutual respect and partnership in which men and women are equal in value while different in function. Some of Hollywood’s John Wayne movies, for example, in which he treats women like children or chattel are truly cringe-worthy. But like every other aspect of Secular Humanist social engineering, the Marxist “cure” called “feminism” (first adopted as public policy in 1920s Russia under the Soviets) was far worse than the disease.
The worst part of the Marxist approach was the rejection of God’s natural order in family relations. Marxism does not merely offer a different view about “culturally arbitrary” traditional roles, but denies a fundamental truth about Creation itself. God established first the dominant Alpha (male) gender and then submissive Beta (female) gender, and affirmed the permanence of this pattern from Genesis to Revelation. Eve was created not to become a wife, but created IN the role of a wife: not the equivalent of a master/servant relationship but more akin to that of a president/vice president.
Paul perhaps summarized God’s design best in Ephesians 5:21-31: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, His body, of which He is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her to sanctify her. … In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. … ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.'”
Importantly, the biblical model was far more generous to women regarding “traditional” roles than the secular world that spawned feminism. Proverbs 31:10-31 famously outlines the character and actions of a godly wife: She is competent and self-directed in the management of her own household and from that strong base extends the positive impact of her family into the community through charity, good works and entreprenurialism.
As always, human alternatives to God’s plan for civilization produce confusion and suffering. Friedan’s weaponized feminism gave women unprecedented power to steer society to suit themselves while at the same time teaching them to pursue a corrupt concept of self-interest instead of family cohesion, contributing greatly to the slaughter of tens of millions of unborn babies, the ruinous breakdown of the natural family and the concurrent utterly disastrous masculinization of women and emasculation of men that underlies the emerging existential crisis of gender dysphoria.
Cut loose from its moorings in Judeo-Christian tradition, women’s innate maternalism was manipulated by the elite Marxist puppet-masters away from a child-rearing orientation toward “protectiveness of the oppressed,” most especially “gay” men, whose own agenda since the Stonewall Riots of 1969 has been absolute cultural supremacy. Thus, because of feminism, the civilization-killing LGBT agenda advanced steadily through legislation despite opposition by a consistent majority of men.
So now the Friedanian feminists have no one but themselves to blame. They let themselves become the ultimate useful idiots of the left, the “gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts” of 2 Timothy 3:6 – enslaved to the anti-family agenda of Marxist men. And, as is always true with each successive class of idiots, feminists are now being thrown under the bus because they’re no longer useful. Those who openly resist are smeared as Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs), targeted for personal destruction. Those who don’t resist are betraying their own movement and hastening its demise.
Meanwhile, hardcore “Incel” misogynists, brimming with smoldering hate – the Frankenstein creations of feminism-perverted male-female social dysfunction – are “identifying” as women to vengefully invade and defile their most intimate spaces and institutions – backed by legislators and judges whose Marxist delusions and zealotry are even more deeply entrenched than that of the Friedanians. Female identity itself is being systematically erased to serve the new transgender cum transhumanist cause.
Can American survive the Feminist Mystaque? It’s perhaps too little too late, but there IS recent evidence of a move back to godliness and traditionalism in male female relations. Let’s encourage that trend as best we can, even as we invoke Paul’s admonition in Romans 12:21 to “overcome evil with good.”
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
SUPPORT TRUTHFUL JOURNALISM. MAKE A DONATION TO THE NONPROFIT WND NEWS CENTER. THANK YOU!
