Here is a sad story that has become so common that it defines an entire generation of women, not only in Australia, but around the world. We are only now beginning to feel the effect of the social, economic, and spiritual ripples of the radical reordering of society over the last generation.The sins of our feminist mothers
By Virginia Haussegger
July 23 2002
A few years ago, in my mid-30s, had I heard Malcolm Turnbull pontificate about the need to encourage Australians to marry younger and have more children ("The crisis is fertility, not ageing", on this page last Tuesday), I would have thumped him, kneed him in the groin, and bawled him out.
How dare he - a rich father of two, with perfect wife and perfect life - presume for a moment to tell women, thriving at the peak of our careers, that we should stop, marry, and procreate. The sheer audacity of it.
Yet another male conspiracy, a conservative attempt to dump women out of the workplace and back into the home. A neat male arrangement: a good woman to run the household, and a workplace less cluttered with female competition.
A win-win for patriarchy. And precisely the kind of society I was schooled against.
As we worked our way through high school and university in the '70s and early '80s, girls like me listened to our mothers, our trailblazing feminist teachers, and the outspoken women who demanded a better deal for all women. They paved the way for us to have rich careers.
They anointed us and encouraged us to take it all. We had the right to be editors, paediatricians, engineers, premiers, executive producers, High Court judges, CEOs etc. We were brought up to believe that the world was ours. We could be and do whatever we pleased.
Feminism's hard-fought battles had borne fruit. And it was ours for the taking.
Or so we thought - until the lie of super "you-can-have-it-all" feminism hits home, in a very personal and emotional way.
We are the ones, now in our late 30s and early 40s, who are suddenly sitting before a sheepish doctor listening to the words: "Well, I'm sorry, but you may have left your run too late. Women at your age find it very difficult to get pregnant naturally, and unfortunately the success rate of IVF for a 39-year-old is around one in five - and dropping. In another 12 months you'll only have a 6 per cent chance of having a baby. So given all the effort and expense, do you really want to go through with this? Why don't you go home and think it through? But don't leave it too long - your clock is ticking." Then he adds for comic value, "And don't forget, the battery is running low!"
For those of us who listened to our feminist foremothers' encouragement; waved the purple scarves at their rallies; read about and applauded the likes of Anne Summers, Kate Jennings, Wendy McCarthy, Jocelyn Scutt, Morag Fraser, Joan Kirner, Elizabeth Proust etc (all strong examples of successful working women); for those of us who took all that on board and forged ahead, crashed through barriers and carved out good, successful and even some brilliant careers; we're now left - many of us at least - as premature "empty nesters".
We're alone, childless, many of us partnerless, or drifting along in "permanent temporariness", as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman so aptly put it in a recent Age article by Anne Manne to describe the somewhat ambiguous, uncommitted type of relationship that seems to dominate among childless, professional couples in their 30s and 40s.
The point is that while encouraging women in the '70s and '80s to reach for the sky, none of our purple-clad, feminist mothers thought to tell us the truth about the biological clock. Our biological clock. The one that would eventually reach exploding point inside us.
Maybe they didn't think to tell us, because they never heard the clock's screaming chime. They were all married and knocked-up by their mid-20s. They so desperately didn't want the same for us.
And none of our mothers thought to warn us that we would need to stop, take time out and learn to nurture our partnerships and relationships. Or if they did, we were running too fast to hear it.
For those of us that did marry, marriage was perhaps akin to an accessory. And in our high-disposable-income lives, accessories pass their use-by date, and are thoughtlessly tossed aside. Frankly, the dominant message was to not let our man, or any man for that matter, get in the way of career and our own personal progress.
The end result: here we are, supposedly "having it all" as we edge 40; excellent education; good qualifications; great jobs; fast-moving careers; good incomes; and many of us own the trendy little inner-city pad we live in. It's a nice caffe-latte kind of life, really.
But the truth is - for me at least - the career is no longer a challenge, the lifestyle trappings are joyless (the latest Collette Dinnigan frock looks pretty silly on a near-40-year-old), and the point of it all seems, well, pointless.
I am childless and I am angry. Angry that I was so foolish to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel. Angry that I was daft enough to believe female fulfilment came with a leather briefcase.
It was wrong. It was crap. And Malcolm Turnbull has a point. God forbid!
Virginia Haussegger is ABC TV news presenter in the ACT. She has been a television journalist for 15 years, hosting the 7.30 Report in various states and reporting for the Channel Seven's Witness and Channel Nine's A Current Affair
4 comments:
The perversity, the unraveling of the natural order, which results when women abandon domesticity so they can be more like men, was known to the Prophet Isaiah, who laments in his third chapter:
"As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths."
But like spoiled children, the people of our generation decided to ignore the wisdom of the past, and have had to learn these lessons the hard way.
It is now more critical than ever in the midst of the insanity of today's feministic culture, that the Church be there, with Her teaching, and with Her example. In this way, I pray, She will rescue some of the the women of today's thirty and forty something generation, and of the younger generations, and raise up daughters who will imitate the virtue of the Mother of God, for the sake of Her Lord and Sacred Head, Jesus.
Latif:
Excellent points. Unfortunately, Lutherans don't seem to want to discuss the "order of creation" issue - unless it is to argue against women's ordination. Outside of that issue, we seem to ignore all the ramifications.
Traditionalist Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Reformed Christians seem to have a more developed theology of the ramifications of the order of creation than do Lutherans.
All things considered, we seem to have capitulated to feminism - except, of course, when it comes to the issue of women's ordination. Then we're suddenly on board.
Anyway, here is an interesting organization dedicated to opposing feminism in the Church and living out the Christian vocations we have been given in family life: Vision Forum Ministries. There is also a documentary called The Monstrous Regiment of Women, named after a theological paper written by John Knox.
Both of these sites are from the Reformed perspective. One would think that with the Lutheran emphasis on vocation, we would have something to say on these matters, but the cat seems to have gotten our tongue.
Gentlemen:
As one who is really unfamiliar with the feminist agenda in detail and hence the conservative reaction to it, I am not sure I understand what the parameters and guidelines would be from your perspective. And so I ask, Should women be allowed to have full-time jobs outside of the home? Should they be allowed to be the primary earner or the biggest monetary earner in the family?
These are just two questions off the top of my head.
Dear Virgil:
First of all, I wouldn't put the question in terms of being "allowed" to do something or not. I would not make it illegal for women to hold any job. The point is that Scripture puts forth an order of creation in which there are defined sex roles according to God's plan. When our will conforms to God's will, things work better and we can find contentment in the will of God. When we buck against God's will and enthrone our will over and against His governance, we bring a lot of heartache on ourselves.
Obviously, women who find themselves with no husband for one reason or another must take care of their families, even assuming the vocation normally given to men for the sake of their children (and the inverse is true when a man must raise his family alone). However, in our culture, we typically have very small two income families not out of necessity, but out of greed.
There are also the curses in Genesis 3 for mankind's disobedience to consider. The consequence of working by the sweat of the brow was given to the man as his burden. The cross of pain in conception/childbirth was given to the woman as her burden. We're so disobedient that we actually heap man's punishment on women in addition to her own burden - and call it "liberation!" How diabolical is that? Feminism is nothing less than hatred of women and rebellion against God.
I believe this nonconformity to God's divine plan is the source of a lot of our cultural malaise these days - even as women (like the one in this article) are being brainwashed into pursuing career instead of children.
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