It is not a new ideology but feminism is slowly becoming a norm in our society, with some even in the church becoming apologists of the movement. The social media is now filled with posts and quotes agitating for the emancipation of the girl-child.
Against the backdrop of stories of young girls being married off to older men in parts of Nigeria, teenage girls getting pregnant and, as shocking as this may seem in the 21st century, female children being denied the benefit of a good education because they are girls, one tends to think that the propagators of this ideology do have a genuine cause to fight.
The most disturbing is the domestic abuse inflicted on women by the ones who promise to love, honour and cherish them — their husbands. So, we read in the papers and watch in the news countless reports of women battered, and in extreme cases killed. Sadly, there are few follow-up reports on punishments meted out to these savages.
Of course, there is also the debate about chores in the house; and so a woman is expected to be a career person, a home maker, a mother, daughter, and wife and still be a worker in church. So the question arises, “Is the woman seen as a slave or an actual human our society?”
In a society like ours where it is alright to demean a woman just because she is a woman; a man who is not as qualified as the woman is given the higher position because she is a woman. The men resist her at the office and generally make life unbearable for her because “the woman’s place is in the kitchen”. So, it is totally understandable that the women would stand to resist this injustice.
The Birth of Feminism
According to history, the feminist movement started as far back as the 19th century with a strong emphasis on overturning legal inequality, particularly women’s suffrage (the right of women to vote in elections). It steadily progressed to a fight against any injustice against women with Florence Nightingale and Jane Austen lending their voices to the movement, especially in the educational sector. Nightingale fought and stood her ground until she was allowed to become a nurse at the war front.
In the early twentieth century, Betty Friedan carried out a survey and interviewed dozens of women. Her results led her to form a conclusion that there was a discrepancy between how society assumed women felt and how they actually felt — sad, frustrated and unfulfilled. Being married and managing a home was no longer enough, they yearned for more.
In 1963, Friedan published a book The Feminine Mystique, and Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock described it as a trigger on history. Friedan, in the book argued that women were trying to conform to a male-dictated image of womanhood, the feminine mystique, but that doing so left them with vague feelings of dissatisfaction. She said that “We women need and can trust no other authority than our own personal truth. We need and can trust no other authority than our own personal truth.” Women across North America ran with this new supposition which caused a ripple effect across the world.
A Christian author, Mary Kassian, spoke on this at the True Women Conference, 2008, and gave quite a lengthy lecture on it. She said, “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 her children and her 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 fulfilment. 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.
“ Life for women was very different fifty years ago, very, very different. Almost everyone got married. The average age for getting married was twenty years old for girls and twenty-two 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. 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 marriage every twenty-five seconds; and tonight, more than forty percent of children will go to sleep in homes in which their fathers do not live.
“Only thirty 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 no 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.”
Assault On Patriarchy
In our present world, the drive seems to be a total eradication of the word “patriarchy”, which the Merriam-Webster dictionary describes as a “social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line”.
French philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir attacked this system, suggesting that “in order for women to live as full human beings, they needed to demand their rights, collectively rebel against men, and overthrow all of the societal structures that men had constructed to keep women in a state of servitude”. In other words, women should get out of the home and deconstruct the Judeo-Christian ideas about marriage and motherhood and morality.
So, the media began to shape our thoughts to conform to this new thinking; films and sitcoms depicted women as strong, independent and totally in control. Most times, they were seen as single women who could change sex partners, choose who to sleep with and excel in the corporate world. Men were depicted as either blubbering idiots who bowed to the lead female character’s wishes or who beat up women and the women had to fight them to escape. Cartoon characters were built on this concept too, the latest being the Disney animation “Frozen”, which basically says that you do not need a man to rescue you, take charge and change your world, and we all applauded! But something began to happen with these subliminal messages, debates began to arise on who should cook what and who would wash what. House chores were to be split, women were encouraged to “stand” up to their husbands who had maliciously enslaved them.
Man or God’s Opinion
As believers, the bible should be our final word of authority in any matter. In Genesis chapter two, it is recorded that God created man, male and female; also, He formed Eve out of the rib of Adam and he (Adam) declared her “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” and thereafter named her “Woman” because she was gotten out of man.
In the book of Ephesians, Apostle Paul gives admonitions to both sexes, instructing the wife to submit to her husband as she would submit to Jesus Christ and the husband to love his wife, as Christ loves the Church which would involve also being willing to die for the Church. In the face of this, there is no abuse of power, as each sex is given their role to play out.
Christian feminists have argued that Jesus said we are all equal in the eyes of God but Galatians 3:22 says “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all ONE in Christ Jesus”, not equal but one in Christ Jesus.
For peace to reign in society, there must be a semblance of order and the Bible gives the order that must be prevalent for a home to thrive. 1 Corinthians 11:3 says “But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God”.
No one is without a covering, everybody submits to a higher authority, even Jesus Christ. The problem begins when one pulls out of the other, so the man does not submit to Jesus and invariably becomes a monster, who beats his wife and dehumanises her. The woman tries to rebel from her husband and becomes something contrary to what she has been created for.
Dr. Azuka Onyia, a Christian married woman occupying a top position in a multi-national company responds to the question on the enslavement of the woman and the need for feminism. “Enslaved? I do not believe that I am enslaved. It’s a mind thing and I believe that it is either you walk in that freedom or not. I am already free. I believe it should be rather an advocating for our fundamental human rights. I personally boycott some companies that I feel do not give the opportunity for women to be represented. It is not about freedom, it is about education.
“There are certain jobs that are a woman simply cannot do and that does not demean her in anyway; that is just a fact. You need to be free from your mind before you can be free physically. I do not work to prove a point; I see it as a level playing ground and the men who seek to dehumanise women are insecure.
“My problem with this feminism is that it is a thinly veiled rebellious movement and I think it is haughty and arrogant. Who made them slaves? They probably see themselves as slaves. I don’t do stuff because I want to be politically correct but rather, because it is based on scripture and scripture says my husband is the head of the home. I’ll suggest that instead of them to fight for freedom, they should advocate for their rights, amongst them is education”.
Mrs. Ebere Onah makes her point from a different angle. “We do not need equality, feminism. We need to discover ourselves and who we can be and become it…against all odds. True women (like all humans) have rights. If we can learn to allow each other enjoy our rights, we’ll have less issues; if feminists can just present their points and allow every woman the right to choose their life pattern.”
She suggests that women must be students of the word of God to know what is right and wrong and live by it.
“We need to focus on the devil bringing chaos into homes with this #wifenocook thing. God’s divine order is a chain of command. The devil follows the opposite direction. That is what he has been doing. Just look at Eve, instead of going through her chain of command, he went to her, this is all in a bid to attack feminism. I am not saying violating human right is allowed in Christianity but, we need to be sure where these suggestions are from.”
Taiwo Akinlami, a social worker and social empowerment advocate and strong believer in children’s rights. “I believe it’s an identity issue. Humanity was created and moulded by God so it is only that in the order of manifestation, man manifested before the woman but that does not mean that man is superior; authority does not mean superiority. It was not created for oppression.
“So I believe, the challenge is that we don’t teach the woman or the girl child who she is, how she is a human being on her own and does not need to compare herself with anybody, more so the man. I don’t believe in that statement ‘what a man can do, a woman can do better’ rather what a man can do, a woman cannot do and what a man cannot do, a woman can do.
“We are here for different assignments but unfortunately society has pitched the girl child against herself by telling her everything she cannot do. So it creates a wall in her so that when she approaches society she approaches it with a defensive perspective instead of from the offensive to dominate her world.”
So women, what are you going to say “yes” to because we have been inundated with images. Christ is the solution, Christ alone. Our greatest desire should be to stand before him, as a woman, and say, “Yes, yes, Lord, may it be so.”