Chapter 19: Is Submission Stifling?
IS SUBMISSION STIFLING?
DOES a submissive woman do nothing else but submit? It is too bad that the issues raised by those called liberationists have led to the making of false antitheses. It is an old political tactic and seems at first to strengthen the case for one side against the other, but ultimately it is self-destructive. The mail has just come, bringing a letter which illustrates this confusion.
You were present when I spoke recently to the honor society in your college on “A Christian View of Liberation.” The college forwarded to me the protest of an alumna:
“To invite a speaker to tell the women who have just been chosen as the most academically gifted in the entire graduating class that their highest fulfillment is to be found in subjecting themselves to a man in marriage is incredible in this day and age. It would have been unthinkable even a century ago! Why is this college educating women if their primary calling is to be motherhood? Intellectual women in the Christian world have a difficult enough time without adding insult to injury. They need encouragement, not stifling. I have always personally found (the speaker’s) actual accomplishments a real inspiration but when her rhetoric so completely contradicts that, she makes an ambiguous role model at best for those of us who have traveled the road a ways [sic]. For college graduates just embarking on that road, she could be seriously confusing.”
The writer of this letter withheld her usual annual contribution in protest and added that she felt the choice of a speaker was “particularly inappropriate.”
I had never thought of myself as “an ambiguous role model.” I guess I had never thought of myself as any sort of role model. Does my rhetoric contradict my accomplishments? Is there anything in what I say that stifles “intellectual women in the Christian world”?
I’ve tried to think these charges through. I suppose I am an “ambiguous role model” if a mother is not supposed to write books, or if a wife who is submissive would never be asked to speak on a college platform, or if no college graduate ought to love housework.
Is it my rhetoric or is it perhaps the rhetoric of this lady herself (who has written and spoken on the equality of the sexes) which contradicts my “accomplishments”? If I have said that a woman’s highest fulfillment is to be found in subjecting herself to a man in marriage, I meant, of course, the woman to whom God has given the gift of marriage. Her highest fulfillment will be found in obedience to that calling. I who have had that gift, as well as the gift of being your mother, have no difficulty whatever in saying that my deepest sense of “fulfillment,” my highest human joys, have been found in being a wife and mother.
This is not to deny or belittle the other gifts God has given. I have been called to be a missionary and to write, but surely there is nothing incompatible with such tasks and acknowledgement of the fundamental fact that woman was made for man. That wasn’t my idea, after all —I got it all out of the Book!
The “intellectual” women who feel stifled by what I say have not yet understood the biblical meaning of freedom. God’s service is, as our Prayer Book says, “perfect freedom.”
The lady’s idea that mothers do not need a college education floors me. What, she asks, is your college educating women for? Surely it is to draw out (the root meaning of the word educate) the gifts God has given, whatever they may be. Surely I did not send you to college on the assumption that you would not marry. A Christian liberal education will make you a better wife and mother, I’m convinced, if that is God’s will for you. If you were called to be a tax collector or a philosopher I should likewise want you to have that kind of education.