A recent issue of Time magazine has an article asking “What Women Want Now” The article finds that both women and men are stressed today over employment, marriage, and gender roles.
What responses do you have to the article? Would everything be better if women would just “stay in the place” at home, raising their children? Would that be more biblical?
Since men are demonstrated to be stressed over employment and marriage issues, too (since this is about gender roles, I’ll leave that alone), I’m not sure that things are necessarily fixed by advocating for traditional gender roles.
I love Dorothy Sayers’ statement on this, and my mind jumped to it as soon as I saw the title of the TIME article:
“‘What,’ men have asked distractedly from the beginning of time, ‘what on earth do women want?’ I do not know that women, as women, want anything in particular, but as human beings they want, my good men, exactly what you want yourselves: interesting occupation, reasonable freedom for their pleasures, and a sufficient emotional outlet. What form the occupation, the pleasures and the emotion may take, depends entirely upon the individual.” (Sayers, Dorothy, Are Women Human? Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1971, p. 44)
Will some of these women in the article be better off in a more traditional role? Quite possibly. It might even turn out that a majority of women would be better off so occupied. But that doesn’t mean it is better for every woman, and it certainly doesn’t mean it is inherently morally or biblically superior.
Our society is stressful, period. The marketplace is rather harrowing for most people who enter it, male or female. To again quote Sayers, when addressing this very subject: “…what human being is not, from time to time, heartily sick of the office and would not love to get out of it?” (ibid., p. 35)
And tying in with the previous post… what we want or are called to do isn’t necessarily what makes us happy, depending on how you define happy.
Has there ever been a time when men and women were not stressed over employment, marriage, and gender roles?
Here’s what I want: universal health care for everyone, more treatment of women and children as human beings instead of as sex objects, leaders that don’t lead us into unnecessary wars and businesses who truly run their companies with the public good at heart.
What a nicer that we be to live in. That’s why I want it.
Here’s what I want:
The freedom to keep my high quality healthcare and to not have the federal government take control of it while running up unsustainable deficits.
Federal government leaders who believe that national security and the needs of those who defend us are a higher priority than fundraising and campaigning.
An economic structure in which the federal government does not stifle the growth of businesses and which does not cause unprecedented unemployment by its interference.
Churches that no longer disrepect women while pretending that they do.
I was never happy just staying at home. I’ll never be happy just being a pew sitter at church either.
I like sdd’s list.
sdd:
I agree with your list.
I just checked and found out that 30 years ago, rape, physical assault and domestic homicide were 3 times more prevalent. It is a sad commentary that some Christians are trying to turn back the clock to those days.