Chapter 15: God Sets No Traps
GOD SETS NO TRAPS
WE ARE called to be women. The fact that I am a woman does not make me a different kind of Christian, but the fact that I am a Christian does make me a different kind of woman. For I have accepted God’s idea of me, and my whole life is an offering back to Him of all that I am and all that He wants me to be.
Ruth Benedict, one of the first women to attain recognition as a major social scientist, wrote in her journal in 1912:
To me it seems a very terrible thing to be a woman. There is one crown which perhaps is worth it all —a great love, a quiet home, and children. [Her childless marriage to Stanley Benedict ended in divorce.] We all know that is all that is worthwhile, and we must peg away, showing off our wares on the market if we have money, or manufacturing careers for ourselves if we haven’t. We have not the motive to prepare ourselves for a ‘lifework’ of teaching, of social work —we know that we would lay it down with hallelujah in the height of our success, to make a home for the right man. And all the time in the background of our consciousness rings the warning that perhaps the right man will never come. A great love is given to very few. Perhaps this makeshift time-filler of a job is our lifework after all.[6]
Mrs. Benedict has expressed candidly what thousands of career women must surely feel, but today there are few who would have the courage to admit to such feelings, when the career woman is thought by many to be somehow superior to the woman whose occupation is listed merely as “housewife.” Any nine-to-five job, no matter how routine, monotonous, or boring, is elevated by the feminists to higher status than being a wife and mother, as though the wife and mother’s work were more demeaning, more boring, less creative and exciting, or allowed less latitude for one’s imagination than being a lawyer or fitting parts on an assembly line. (Granted, feminists nearly always pit prestige jobs rather than assembly-line jobs against housework, ignoring the fact that few of the women they would like to “liberate” would end up in prestige jobs.)
Recently I found a notice in the newspaper of new job expectations for women joining the army. No longer are they limited to being secretaries or nurses or assistants to men. In at least one army training center they have been elevated to parachute packing. Parachute packing!
I’m afraid it’s a case of the grass’s being greener on the other side of the fence. How many of them have had a fair chance to compare?
For the Christian woman, however, whether she is married or single, there is the call to serve. A news magazine recently reported an adult course offered in “Assertive Behavior,” which, according to the descriptions of sample situations, amounted to a course in boorishness. One lesson, for example, encouraged women to break free from the “compassion trap.” In response to this article a reader wrote, “I cannot understand why a woman would object to being a part of the ‘compassion trap’ —the need to serve others and provide tenderness and compassion at all times. What this society needs is more emphasis on the need to serve others, and provide tenderness, compassion, cooperation and love.”
But God has set no traps for us. Quite the contrary. He has summoned us to the only true and full freedom. The woman who defines her liberation as doing what she wants, or not doing what she doesn’t want, is, in the first place, evading responsibility. Evasion of responsibility is the mark of immaturity. The Women’s Liberation Movement is characterized, it appears, by this very immaturity. While telling themselves that they’ve come a long way, that they are actually coming of age, they have retreated to a partial humanity, one which refuses to acknowledge the vast significance of the sexual differentiation. (I do not say that they always ignore sexual differentiation itself, but that the significance of it escapes them entirely.) And the woman who ignores that fundamental truth ironically misses the very thing she has set out to find. By refusing to fulfill the whole vocation of womanhood she settles for a caricature, a pseudo-personhood.