Why Am I Doing This?

I have not long been interested in all this stuff about women. I have actually spent all of the years I've been cognizant of feminism associating the word with anger. I've only ever seen students of the theory as entitled, self-righteous, victims, martyrs, and full of hatred.

Just over a year ago, I started dating a wonderful guy named Greer. I was smitten immediately, but when things started to look like they could potentially take a serious turn, I started to look at what the prospect of marriage would mean for my own life. It meant the end of my independence. The end of my freedom to have an exciting career, to have adventures, to be reckless with money, to be spontaneous, to be the center of attention, to climb to the top of something and thrive, to engage with intelligent and driven adults. It meant me shrinking into the background to be the silent supporter of my husband. He would forever be the receiver of accolades, paychecks, and promotions. I would have no choice but to erase my every dream from the drawing board and turn my attention toward supporting his. His ideas would determine the course of our lives. Everything I'd worked so, so hard for had been pointless - grades, jobs, resume, knowledge, savvy now meant nothing to me because I was to be a wife.

Why are women raised the same way men are? Girls and boys are educated the same way, compete for the same places in schools and jobs, taught the same lessons about following their dreams, instructed with the same skills by the same teachers, taught to evaluate success in the same terms, strive for the same goals.

And yet - if a man is truly going to be the head of a household, it looks like the leadership qualities lauded in many young women must somehow be altered to fit into that construct. But how?

And in all of this teaching, no girls are ever told that if they want to stop working to focus on a family, they have about eight or nine years total to make it all happen. And that is impossible. Just when a career would start paying off, maternity interferes with a biological requirement to bow out - at least temporarily.

I am 24. I looked at the remaining years before I would need to start a family if I wanted to have one, and I saw about seven years left to make all of the dreams I'd ever had for myself come true. All the travel, the exposure, the experience, the engagement with community, the education - not to mention the fulfillment I was sure these things would bring - had to happen now or never.

I am ashamed, but it made me really, really angry. I felt like I'd been tricked into working like crazy for something I would never be able to attain simply because I am female. There were times I even got mad at Greer simply for being a man (which is so ridiculous). He would spend the rest of his life getting to tell people, "I'm a lawyer." "I'm an officer in the U.S. Army." I would say, "I'm Greer's wife. I get out of my pajamas before noon most of the time." He would never go to a cocktail party and say only, "I'm Catherine's husband," and then listen while all the people with careers went into the other room to talk shop. I would never want that for him!

But I also don't want it for myself.

I have to mention that Greer has been remarkably understanding about this. He's been beyond encouraging about me going to grad school and finding countless ways for my own ambitions to not just coexist with but genuinely be supported by his own. He's agreed to move and work anywhere I get into school. Greer is wonderful.

But I am not satisfied with the conclusion that this is the way it is and it just happens to suck for women. There has to be more to this conversation.

I am convinced that any real problem one human can face is a problem that every human can face in some way. Here I look at the way I expected to be able to live for myself for the rest of my life and spend my days chasing my own dreams. While yes, women often give up a lot on the front end, there are few men with a wife and children who can keep on after their boyhood dreams. The burden all of the sudden becomes enormous when they realize just how much provision is actually necessary, and how many alterations and sacrifices must be made. And they don't have the option of bowing out. The fact of life for men and women alike is that if you choose to have children, they become the full and complete focus. Period.

And I've read enough books to know that men who pour their lives into career and ignore the love and family aspect of life are not the happy and fulfilled people we might imagine them to be. While it stings for a woman to put an end to professional dreams, it is much easier for her to focus on "the important things" - children, family, friends, community. Women are allowed to make people their priority, which will always be a much more fulfilling pursuit than a paycheck. Not as interesting at cocktail parties, to be sure, but who cares. I am sure we will both wish Greer could spend as much time with our kids as I'll be able to.

And this is probably the most important thought I've had yet about the issue - the antedote to the anger and frustration is so simple. It's about love. Of course it wouldn't make sense for me to put a halt to everything I've worked for unless there was something better. And there is! Being in love with Greer is the best possible scenario for my life. It calms my spirit, and, thankfully, makes me stop just thinking about myself. Marriage is a structure that beautifully models the way we should always be self-forgetting - think how much happier we would be if we could do that all the time! I know I would be. Being in love with a man you want to marry might be the only way any of this makes sense. And outside of that, it might be impossible to understand.

So why do I want to write about this topic? Because the categories have gotten narrow for both men and women. CS Lewis says (as I quoted in the first post here) it is arrogant of men to think of "masculine virtues" and arrogant of women to think of "feminine virtues." If they are virtues at all they are surely universal. I think we, Christians and non-Christians alike, need to take a closer look at the feminine; perhaps if we stop looking at her as a victim she will stop feeling like one, and, most important, stop acting like one. I want to clarify what role the Lord intended women to play in society and in the household. I want to understand what he hopes for her character, her passions, her leadership. Where and how is she to be humbled, and where glorified? And by whom?

I determine that it is not sad to be a woman. And I want to explain why.

Rob Bell, "She"

Female imagery God uses to describe himself (via Rob Bell, Nooma film "She"):

"As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you." Isaiah 66:13

"In Christ's family there can be no division into Jew and non-Jew, slave and free, male and female. Among us you are all equal. That is we are all in a common relationship with Jesus Christ." Galatians 3:28

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them." Genesis 1:27

"Throughout the Bible, God is described as compassionate. In Hebrew, the original language of the Scriptures, it's the word 'raham.' It's also the word for 'womb.' So, 'God is compassionate' is 'God is womb-like.' This is a feminine image for God." - Bell

In this new reality of Christ, there is neither male nore female.

God asks Job "From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens?" Job 38:29

Of course this is poetry so you can't take it too literally, but there is certainly feminine imagery ascribed to God. "Now these images can be very helpful in describing the divine, but Jesus said that God is spirit. And spirit has no shape, it has no form, it has no physical essence. I mean, God is in essence beyond male and female. Or perhaps yo ucould say it more accurately: God transcends and yet includes what we know as male and female."

Epithalamium

Via Michael Ward, for Davey's Daily Poetry

In this poem, D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) imagines what a bride might think at dawn on her wedding day, as she mentally projects forward twenty-four hours and pictures what it will be like waking up next to her new husband in their nuptial bedchamber.


'Wedding Morn'
D.H. Lawrence

The morning breaks like a pomegranate
In a shining crack of red,
Ah, when tomorrow the dawn comes late
Whitening across the bed,
It will find me watching at the marriage gate
And waiting while light is shed
On him who is sleeping satiate,
With a sunk, abandoned head.

And when the dawn comes creeping in,
Cautiously I shall raise
Myself to watch the morning win
My first of days,
As it shows him sleeping a sleep he got
Of me, as under my gaze,
He grows distinct, and I see his hot
Face freed of the wavering blaze.

Then shall I know which image of God
My man is made toward,
And I shall know my bitter rod
Or my rich reward.
And I shall know the stamp and worth
Of the coin I've accepted as mine,
Shall see an image of heaven or of earth
On his minted metal shine.

Yea, and I long to see him sleep
In my power utterly,
I long to know what I have to keep,
I long to see
My love, that spinning coin, laid still
And plain at the side of me,
For me to count - for I know he will
Greatly enrichen me.

And then he will be mine, he will lie
In my power utterly,
Opening his value plain to my eye
He will sleep of me.
He will lie negligent, resign
His all to me, and I
Shall watch the dawn light up for me
This sleeping wealth of mine.

And I shall watch the wan light shine
On his sleep that is filled of me,
On his brow where the wisps of fond hair twine
So truthfully,
On his lips where the light breaths come and go
Naive and winsomely,
On his limbs that I shall weep to know
Lie under my mastery.

The Creation of Adam

In most reproductions of "The Creation of Adam" in the Sistine Chapel, this is the picture you get - God giving man the spark of life that is different from the plants and animals. God endues him with an eternal soul. He loves Adam.





But this picture is truncated. This is the whole picture:





Nestled under the arm of the loving, gift-giving, all-knowing, artist Father-God, is Eve.

So Many Persons

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed. Lewis recalls the many persons his wife was to him after she has passed away.

"For a good wife contains so many persons in herself. What was H. not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my soverign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have had good ones) has ever been to me. perhaps more...

...That is what I meant when I once praised her for her 'masculine virtues'. But she soon put a stop to that by asking how I'd like to be praised for my feminine ones."

"Solomon calls his bride Sister. Could a woman be a complete wife unless, for a moment, in one particular mood, a man felt amost inclined to call her Brother?"

"For we did learn and achieve something. There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them. It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry 'masculine' when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them, to describe a man's sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as 'feminine.' But what poor, warped fragments of humanity most mere men and mere women must be to make the implications of that arrogance plausible. Marriage heals this. Jointly the two become fully human 'In the image of God he created THEM.' Thus, by a paradox, this carnival of sexuality leads us out beyond our sexes."