What feminists prescribed for women over the past several decades in an attempt to "free them with manly equality" has done precisely the opposite. Our cure is worse than our supposed disease. It is no gift to a woman to tell her that she must have a career outside the home (to have any worldly worth—or fully express herself—or pursue her rights) and somehow do the home thing, too. Or ignore the home thing or pawn it off on hubby.
Or better yet, give the raising of one's children to day cares and institutions from birth to the end of 12th grade. Supplant one's motherhood entirely. Leave the modern woman only with someone else's husband as her now stressful, full of deadlines, tyrannical boss, instead of a loving husband; someone else's office building of institutional green walls with no windows, instead of her own cozy home; and an indulgent separate paycheck instead of warm hugs from her now distant and estranged children.
True confessions:
Katharine Hepburn: "I'm not sure any woman can successfully pursue a career and be a mother at the same time. The trouble with women today is that they want everything. But no one can have it all. I haven't been handicapped by children. Nor have I handicapped children by bringing them into the world and going ahead with my career."
Actress Joanne Woodward: "My career has suffered because of the children, and my children have suffered because of my career. I've been torn and haven't been able to function fully in either arena. I don't know one person who does both successfully, and I know a lot of working mothers."
Golda Meir of Israel confessed that she suffered nagging doubts about the price her two children paid for her career, adding, "You can get used to anything if you have to, even to feeling perpetually guilty."
We can pay too much for our whistle.
Virtuous womanhood as God designed it:
Susanna Wesley, an incomparably brilliant and well-educated mother of sons who shook two continents for Christ, wrote, “I am content to fill a little space if God be glorified.” She described her now famous childrearing commitment in these words:
“No one can, without renouncing the world, in the most literal sense, do my method; and there are few, if any, that would entirely devote above twenty years of the prime of life in hopes to save the souls of their children, which they think may be saved without so much ado. That was my principal intention, however unskillfully and unsuccessfully managed.”
Dorothy Patterson said, “No one—no teacher, preacher, or psychologist—has the same opportunity to mold minds, nurture bodies, and develop potential usefulness in their children like a mother.”
From a Dear Abby column: A woman described her mother as a "professional woman" who collected a husband, a daughter, and a dog to enrich HER life." According to the daughter, the only one NOT damaged by this enrichment was the dog.
Napoleon was asked what could be done to restore the prestige of France. He replied: "Give us better mothers!"
Timothy Dwight, former president of Yale, remarked, "All that I am and all that I shall be I owe to my mother."
Even Mikhail Gorbachev observed that “We are experiencing a negative paradoxical family result of our sincere desire to make women equal with men in everything.” He added that Russia was not looking for ways to make it possible for women to return "to their purely womanly mission."
Let us not give up God's high calling in the way that He designed it best to be expressed by the separate and complementary roles of men and women—mothers and fathers.
