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OBEY
The word "obey" was taken out of the marriage vows because it became a four letter word. We have reaped what we have sowed and we are overall not better off because of it. The Victorians were not perfect and there have been a few advances but the feminists cannot take credit for them.
TRANSITION
Judith Bardwick writes in her book In Transition, "While anti-ERA groups express opposition to feminism, such books as Fascinating Womanhood and Total Woman go further. These books and the classes based on them purport to provide a solution to the anxiety provoked by the feminists' questions, giving women clear instructions on how to find happiness through subservience to their husbands. These specific and detailed programs provide scenarios to play and sentences to say, in which adult women are asked to pretend to be dumb, absentminded, childish, submissive but seductive, diffident, deferential, passive, weak and opinionless. How acting out such roles can lead to self-esteem is unclear to me. I have equal difficulty imagining that men can respond to this contrived playacting with a surge of masculine confidence."
Well, Ms. Bardwick, millions of women have found a happiness greater than feminists have found. Bardwick does not know who men are. Bardwick misunderstands what Mrs. Andelin is saying. The basic reason is because what the Andelins write is based on the Bible. We live in a culture that rebels against the Bible. It is the Bible that Bardwick is "unclear" about and having "difficulty" with.
OLD RULES
She writes, "Many women apparently do find solace in these programs, which assure and support traditional women by saying that the choices they have made and the values they hold are correct, even moral, and sanctioned by God. In fact, these programs assert, the path to joy lies in following the old rules -- but more strictly and extremely than before." Before what? More extreme than what? The 1950s? The 1850s? The 1750s?
She continues, "In addition to the comfort gained from simple rules that deny social change, the essential message is sustaining, since it proclaims that if man is a king, his wife is a queen." Deny social change? This is nonsense. Simple rules? Yes, many times the truth is simple. Chastity before marriage is a much simpler life than having VD from being promiscuous. Living together before marriage is more complicated than waiting for marriage, but studies show that those who wait have better and more stable marriages. There is more happiness, even ultimate happiness, in living by God's simple rules rather than the complicated and painful rules of Bardwick. To her, Helen Andelin is a dinosaur clinging tenaciously to naive and hopelessly out-dated ideas. Andelin has many testimonies of women who have found happiness and Mrs. Andelin talks about her perfect marriage and family. Bardwick does not. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
MAJORITY OPINION
Bardwick writes, "It seems absurd but understandable that a movement devoted to upgrading the status of women is perceived as liberating by women ready to act on the new options and as sexist and denigrating by women who are not. To the latter, feminism appears to be a movement that scorns them and despises the central values of their lives. Imagine how threatening that is, since feminist values appear to them to be the dominant values in the media, in the nation. They are correct: pro-feminist values have become the majority opinion." That does not mean it will continue. She thinks that we will never restore traditional values, but she is fighting human nature and God's way of life.
"At the popular level, feminism seems to have generated a simple rule: In the future each sex will participate in the work or emotional roles traditionally assigned to the other. But since traditional norms defined acceptable behavior and desirable qualities as proper to one sex and prohibited to the other, this simple rule has raised the complex and fundamental question of what is feminine or masculine." And the answer is that this "simple rule" is satanic.
ANDROGYNY vs. TWO POLARITIES
"As far as we know throughout history and in very varied cultures, women have had major responsibility for the care of infants and young children, and men have been expected to assume an aggressive stance. Two polarities of personality developed as a result of the two milieus in which the sexes have had to function."
"The emphasis for men has been to develop ego strength, the capacity to delay acting upon impulse, an orientation toward the future, individuality achieved through strong ego boundaries, and a general quality of rationalism and objectivity. Men have been encouraged to emphasize separation, task mastery, isolation, competition, and the repression of feelings.
"Women have been encouraged to focus on feelings -- sharing with others, being predictable to others, being concerned with others, being concerned with others. The emphasis for women has been on communication, contact, union cooperation, and openness to others and to their own and other's feelings." Sure sounds like women are superior to men. This is nonsense. Men have feelings and cooperate with others too, but God made the world of man's work to be different than women's. The way to improve on the past is to not have men and women become alike but to have them live in communities where they can have real insurance -- real friends to help everyone be excellent at their work.
Dangerous Vision
Bardwick is afraid that in this rush to interchange men and women that we must not lose sight of the fact that men and women are different and we don't want androgyny. Sadly, she doesn't realize that if you open the door a crack to feminism it bursts open and we rush down a slippery slope to women at military academies and men wearing earrings. She writes, "While neither of these polarities is sufficient to be a complete human style, the danger of the androgynous vision lies in the possibility that our goal will become the development of an asexual culture. ... it would be a pity if an emphasis on androgyny blurred the complementary excitements that are created from the differences in how women and men perceive and feel." Bardwick is pitiful and shows a profound lack of wisdom and common sense in thinking she can have her cake and eat it too. The Andelins teach what is "complementary excitements," not Bardwick and her friends. Feminism is a nightmare of confusion and pain. It leads to divorce, homosexuality and suicide.
Bardwick never explains how we are all to find complementary excitement. She ends with confidence based on nothing that the future will be bright even though we haven't got a clue to what it is: "I do not know what truths or visions will be constructed when we permit ourselves to know the wholeness of our experience. But I am certain that the goals of revolution that we now espouse will then seem narrow, pale and superficial." In the future people will look back at this era as a time of madness.
Feminists are trying to build a better world but they are paving a road to hell with their good intentions. The core of feminist thought is to end patriarchy. It chants equality and partnership and cooperation and hate any kind of hierarchy.
The feminist theologian Virginia Mollencott writes books that say Jesus was a feminist and his followers have corrupted his love of women in combat and gay marriages. Her whole life is a crusade against patriarchy. She is a professor. Do you think that she rules her classroom like a patriarchal man rules his home? Of course, she does. Would she like to see an evil man in a courtroom be a partner and cooperate with the Judge? Of course not. When feminists blast away at Helen Andelin and Marabel Morgan for being submissive to the authority of their husband they show their incredible lack of understanding of how the world works. The Vice President of the United States treats the President exactly as Mrs. Andelin teaches women are to treat their husband. It doesn't mean that the Vice President is "inferior" to the President. If a Judge talks to a feminist in a courtroom that feminist understands who is boss and will defer naturally. Life is basically a hierarchy and men have even more people in a "husband" position to him than a woman does in a traditional society. This brings order to society. Feminism brings chaos.
