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The Impact of
Feminism on the Family
 Gloria
Steinem sounded the war cry,
"We don't
just want to destroy capitalism," she said,
"we want to
tear down the whole f____ patriarchy."
As the women's
movement turned fanatical and ugly in the 1960s and 70s the focus began to
shift from reform and equal opportunity. The feminist leaders - humorless,
militant, pugnacious, and angry with their particular lot in life, launched
programs that were anti-God, anti-capitalism, anti-family, anti-birth,
anti-heterosexual and fostered a virulent hatred of anything having to do with
males. They no longer wanted to equalize the status of women, but instead
wanted to irreversibly alienate women from men and vice versa.
"The fiction of
fatherhood is a giant religion called Christianity."
-
Jill Johnston in Lesbian Nation
Home and traditional family
values are no longer accepted answers to the questions, "Who am I?" and, "What
am I here for?" The preeminent purpose for some women have become their
careers, and they decided against the value of home and family.
Taken
over by radical leftists committed to adultery, lesbianism, and the
perpetuation of "self" over motherhood and family, the women's movement led by
the National Organization of Women (NOW), became an adjunct of the Democratic
party. The Democratic Party left millions of evangelicals and pro-family
Christians when they lurched to the left under George McGovern and his
successors. During the 1970s, the Democratic Party abandoned its centrist
pro-family base and became captive to the special interest of the radical left,
including the feminists, extreme environmentalists and gay rights activists.
Radical feminists linked all the Marxist causes together by writing,
"We want to destroy the three pillars of class and a caste society - the
family, private property, and the state."
[Peter Collier and
David horowith, Deconstructing the Left: From Vietnam to the Persian Gulf,
1991].
The concerns at recent national conventions have been
bashing the Christian men's group Promise Keepers and pushing for the rights of
"transgendered people," which could be anything from hermaphrodites to people
waiting for sex change operations.
To accomplish their goals,
organizations such as the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood,
the National Education Association, and the People for the American Way, the
Gay-Lesbian Caucus, and their ilk have arisen to champion unrestrained sex,
homosexual rights, abortion on demand, while they attacked Christian beliefs,
conservative organizations, and all the traditional family structures of
America.
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Promise
Keepers Threatening to NOW
A million
men willing to put their wives and families first is very
frightening to Patricia Ireland, head of the National
Organization of Women (NOW). The men of Promise Keepers promise to love their
wives, their children, and their neighbors as themselves, in keeping with the
teachings of Jesus Christ, according to the New Testament. Why that should be
threatening to Ireland and others of her ilk is apparent. One only has to look
at their lifestyles for the answer. Non-Christians have no understanding of
God's plan for our lives. What they DO have is a great deal of fear about the
subject.
In more recent years feminism has turned more to a fight for
abortion rights,
lesbian rights, environmentalism and witchcraft. Gone are concerns about
equal pay, assertiveness, and expressing one's individuality. In their place
are women ensconced in bitterness, hatred, and resentment.
It is
frightening for Ireland, and for Karen Taggart of the Washington, DC Lesbian
Avengers, who said about the Promise Keepers, " we'll show them that lesbians
are everywhere. We'll show them that lesbians have super powers" Taggart is
truly afraid that the men of Promise Keepers have tapped into just such a super
power that will render her message irrelevant to women.
What is it
exactly that Promise Keepers promise that is threatening to NOW?
The men
of Promise Keepers promise:
- To honor Jesus Christ and obey His word.
- To pursue relationships with other men, provide one another
with spiritual strength to keep his promises.
- To practice spiritual, moral, ethical and sexual purity.
- To build strong marriages and families through love,
protection and biblical values.
- To support his church.
- To reach beyond racial and denominational barriers.
- To influence the world by witnessing and obeying, loving
God and loving his neighbor as himself.
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Dissolving the
Family
Betty Friedan, founder of
NOW, referred to traditional family life as a "comfortable concentration camp"
from which women needed liberation. Sheila Cronan, one of the feminist
movements most respected leaders and spokeswomen said, "Since marriage
constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the women's movement must
concentrate on attacking marriage."
Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s
they launched an all-out assault on our nation's time-honored laws protecting
the marriage union. Divorce was presented as an easy way out for the
frustrated, disappointed or adventuresome.
Mel Krantzler, writing in
Creative Divorce, stated: "To say goodbye is to say hello ... hello to a
new life - to a new, freer, more self-assured you. Hello to new ways of looking
at the world and of relating to people. Your divorce can turn out to be the
very best thing that ever happened to you." That was a widely held professional
opinion for almost a decade.
Within a few years, they and their Radical
Left allies succeeding in overturning all fifty of the nation's "fault" divorce
statutes and replacing them with what is called
no-fault divorce. It was understood as an
effort to secure for women the economic, political and social rights and
protections that men have always enjoyed. A spate of pseudo-scientific studies
assured parents that children were resilient and would revcover quickly from
the effects of divorce.
In their zeal they also stripped away from
women, especially mothers with children, many of the economic and legal
protections they had historically enjoyed in this nation, thus creating a whole
new underclass in American society: the abandoned housewife.
The number
of displaced homemakers rose twenty-eight percent between 1975 and 1983 to more
than three million women. Another twenty percent increase from 1983 to 1988
brought that number to more than four million. An astonishing sixty-one percent
of those women suddenly left alone had children under the age of ten at home.
Often without job skills and stranded without alimony or child support, as many
as seventy percent of these women make less than ten thousand dollars a year,
and fifty percent are employed at minimum wage or less. It is, thus, readily
apparent why a full seventy-five percent of all Americans living below the
poverty line in the United States are women and their children.
[Sylvia Ann Hewlett, A Lesser Life: The Myth of
Women's Liberation in America (New York: William Morrow, 1986)]
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Militant feminists searching for
power found the absolute best way to exercise their control was in the area of
reproduction. Abortion became the single greatest avenue for militant women to
exercise their quest for power and advance their belief that men aren't
necessary. They don't need men to be happy. They certainly don't want males to
be able to exercise any control over them. The real message of the 'Dan Quayle'
Murphy Brown episode was that women don't need men. shouldn't desire them, and
that total fulfillment and happiness can be achieved without men or husbands.
Abortion thus became the ultimate symbol of women's emancipation from the power
and influence of men. With men being precluded from the ultimate
decision-making process regarding the future of life in the womb, they are
reduced to their proper, inferior role.
Gender feminists rallied in
Beijing China in 1995 for the United Nations Fourth World Confernce on Women.
The Beijing document -- the text of which was heavily influenced by Bella Abzug
and other radical feminists -- includes over 200 references to "gender" in
various contexts, i.e., "gender equality," "mainstreaming a gender
perspective," "gender diversity," etc. However, "husband" and "wife" are
nowhere to be found in the 121-page document, and the terms "mother" and
"family" were proposed to be changed to "caretaker" and "household." Clearly,
the effort to change the samantics associated with the family is the first step
in altering the way the world thinks about the family.
The roles defined
by nature for men and women had become clouded in feminists minds and has led
to all kinds of confusion, suspicion, and distrust between the sexes.
Women were liberated from the home, from their husbands, from their
children - from having to bear children at all. Fathers were liberated from
their authority. Children were liberated from limits, from rules, even
their parents.
And the entire population was liberated from moral and ethical standards. Yet
it turns out that those things were precisely what held society together.
"Family values" have been so scorned that we are left with neither families nor
values. What do we have? Rampant illegitimacy and sexual disease, widespread
divorce, and a generation of unloved, undisciplined, and uncared-for
kids.
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