By Jazmine Lawrence
Jazmine Lawrence is a Master of Arts (Theology) student at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, Canada. Prior to theology studies, she served for 14 years in the Royal Canadian Air Force as aircrew on Sea King helicopters.
It’s probably not coincidence that I’m finally picking up Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique at an age similar to her when she wrote the book, searching for and beginning to find language by to understand what’s happened to me and other women I know. Friedan’s book was a cultural bomb, blasting open the bubble in which postwar America had been influenced by Freud, sociology, theology, etc. It’s theology’s influence on Friedan’s culture and the resulting sense of injustices against women that particularly catch my eye, being a student of theology at seminary, myself. What grips me more, however, is how Friedan’s culture emerging from the 1950’s actually resembles the hierarchical church cultures in which I’ve been influenced. I did not expect Friedan’s proposals to offer such good dialogue for contemporary theology and church praxis.
With so many fireworks going off as I read Friedan’s book and reflect on personal experience and observation, I’d like to offer a short series of reflections to let Friedan dialogue a little with theology and church praxis. In this first article, I’ll offer an overview of the book and then glance at Friedan’s context.
In a nutshell and as TheGreatestBooks.org observes, Friedan is arguing “that women are not naturally fulfilled by devoting their [entire] lives to homemaking and child-rearing.”[1] Friedan observed that postwar American women encountered a major identity crisis after growing up thinking homemaking was their life’s meaning only to find the home become void of meaning: the promise of fulfilled purpose as a homemaker quickly drained of power to satisfy. Friedan’s thesis was an affront to glorified domesticity in postwar America in which men had come home from war and displaced women from outside-the-home jobs. If you notice the ethos of hierarchical/complementarian churches today that idealize women’s domesticity, Friedan’s thesis turns out to be an affront to it as well.
Let me share some of what I learned about Friedan’s fascinating personal context from which she wrote.
The annals of the online Jewish Women’s Archive feature Betty Friedan in their ranks: she was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein to a Russian father and Hungarian mother, the latter of whom the JWA says gave up editing the local paper’s women’s page to raise a family. Wikipedia quotes Daniel Horowitz’s Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War and Modern Feminism (2000), to point out how Friedan’s passion against injustice grew out of the holocaust’s horrors and other injustices against Jews.[2] The JWA goes on to report that Friedan studied psychology and then became a writer for a major labour union, out of which grew her interest in women’s issues and led to writing for women’s magazines. The Feminine Mystique, JWA observes, critiqued the then-in-vogue romanticizing of domesticity, and the explosive public response to such a thesis is credited as the beginnings of the sex-role revolution of the 1960’s.[3]
Friedan is joined by a great cloud of witnesses, mothers of contemporary western culture, who confronted all manner of injustices via avenues open to them to speak and act. Even if they may have felt nothing sufficiently shifted in their day, their voices resonate powerfully today. I ran across one such voice in Abigail Adams’ 1776 letters with her husband, John Adams, who spent much time away from home working toward his eventual signature on the American Declaration of Independence. As a Canadian not thoroughly familiar with American history, I was floored at Abigail Adams’ hidden legacy in the Declaration. She formidably declared in a manner John would, in a later letter, call “saucy,” that:
in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to forment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.
If you search “remember the ladies,” you’ll discover the many endearing fans of Abigail’s line.
John Adams’s response demonstrates his awareness of the strain felt at every level of human government to be free from tyranny, from “Children and Apprentices” to “Indians” and “Negroes.” But this was his first “Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented.”[4] Perhaps it is a slap to hear his solution: “We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems,” after which he attempts to assuage Abigail’s concerns by suggesting the masculine system is not entirely evil and has fairness and softness available in its practice under which men were equal subjects (I’ll leave comment on this to a footnote to keep focused on Friedan[5]).
Abigail’s response throws forward a baton of resistance to later generations:
I can not say that I think you very generous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives. But you must remember that Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken—and notwithstanding all your wise Laws and Maxims we have it in our power not only to be free ourselves but to subdue our Masters, and without voilence [sic] throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet.[6]
It cannot be missed that churches today which espouse a hierarchy of men over women also proclaim “peace and good will” through Jesus Christ but “insist upon retaining” power over women and make the dangers of repealing their “Masculine systems” a matter of theology: that is, “But God said…”
This lesser-known dimension to the Declaration of Independence is a voiced resistance pitted against great patriarchal power, a churn out of which grew the culture in which Friedan, herself a wife and mother, was still uncomfortably caught almost 200 years later. The Feminine Mystique catches Abigail’s baton and intelligently defends her concerns to effectively “remember the ladies” and publicly—we could even say politically, as a foil to John Adams—confront unjust culture. Friedan offers an example of how church goers can intelligently research and voice concern “without violence.” What Abigail refers to as “our power” is our agency to bring change and increase justice: speaking aloud where consciences can be influenced to drive change.
In the next reflection, I’ll look more at the specific resistance Friedan throws against theology and the identity crisis she identified in homemaking women.
[1] “100 Most Influential Books of the Century” on The Greatest Books. Accessed 10 Jan 2025. (https://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/42f)
[2] “Betty Friedan,” Wikimedia Foundation, last updated 8 Jan 2025. Accessed 20 Jan 2025 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Friedan).
[3] Marion Kaplan, “Betty Friedan” on Jewish Women’s Archive, last updated 23 June 2021. Accessed 10 Jan 2025. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/friedan-betty
[4] Let’s just make sure we acknowledge an implicit injustice here, that John likely meant “another Tribe more numerous and powerful” to refer to white women, not the entire half of humanity, more or less, that are women. The tribe is more numerous than he supposed.
[5] To “know better than to repeal our Masculine systems” sounds eerily similar to concern I’ve heard about the “dangers” of actively moving a church toward a model of mutuality, of endangering relationships. A Priscilla Papers article by Pushpa Samuel investigates the Indian Mar Thoma Church’s 1980’s doctrinal position that there was no theological reason a woman should not be ordained. But as of 2020, no women had been ordained, “in favor of maintaining unity and allowing patriarchal norms to change at their own pace,” a passivity Samuel finds unacceptable (Pushpa Samuel, “Let Your Yes Be Yes”: Progressing Toward Female Ordination in the Mar Thoma Church” in Priscilla Papers, 31 Jan 2020. Accessed online 18 Jan 2025 (www.cbeinternational.org/resource/let-your-yes-be-yes-progressing-toward-female/)). Avoiding potential instability of “repeal[ing] our Masculine systems” comes at the cost of women’s unrealized potential, and health and relational issues, on which Friedan touches in The Feminine Mystique.
[6] Emily Sneff, “March Highlight: Remembering the Ladies” on the Declaration Resources Blog, 4 March 2017. Accessed 10 Jan 2025 (https://declaration.fas.harvard.edu/blog/march-ladies).
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