Sexism, Protecting Women, Family Values, and Christians Placing Biological Family Above Everyone Else
(Link): The Problem with Protecting our Wives and Daughters
Excerpts:
by K. Du Mez
….I’m reminded here of the poignant words of Madeline Southard, one of the leading proponents of women’s rights in the Methodist church in the twentieth century. In her 1927 book, The Attitude of Jesus toward Woman, Southard raised precisely this question.
For centuries, Southard noted, women had been considered “the creature of her sex-relationships and of the resultant blood relationships.” As such, a woman’s status had been determined by her being “the wife, mother, daughter, concubine or mistress of some man,” but not as “a person in herself.”
Having worked with prostitutes and “fallen women,” Southard was familiar with the spurious nature of men’s “protection”: “When men think of women as primarily the creatures of their sex relationships and of their blood relationships” and deny them any sense of equality with men, “they may love their own women, their wives, their mothers, their sisters and their daughters,” and they might “go to great lengths to please women who attract them and from whom they wish to secure favors,” but outside such circles, “they are rude to women with a rudeness that easily slips into cruelty.”
…Further parting ways with what would eventually come to be known as “family values” politics, Southard insisted that the family did not exist for its own sake. Rather, it existed to prepare people to serve God and others.
Parenthood (here she pointedly included fathers as well as mothers), did play an important societal and spiritual role. But this end could be achieved only “when the parent, taken out of self-centeredness first by its own child, passes from that to tenderness for all children everywhere, and through them for all humanity.”
If parenthood failed to realize this goal, “this pure spring of living water may fall back into its own pool to become stagnant and fetid.” In this way, family affection needed both to be subordinated to individuals’ devotion to Christ, and at the same time enlarged to include “the household of faith.”
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Related Posts:
(Link): “Who is my mother and who are my brothers?” – one of the most excellent Christian rebuttals I have seen against the Christian idolatry of marriage and natalism, and in support of adult singleness and celibacy – from CBE’s site
(Link): Women in News Stories Predominantly Defined by Their Role as Mother If They Are One
(Link): Jesus Christ Removed the Stigma, Shame From Being Single and Childless – by David Instone Brewer
(Link): If Family Is Central, Christ Is Not
(Link): Creepy: ‘Barna: [Christian] Women Value Family Over Faith’
(Link): Do You Rate Your Family Too High? (Christians Who Idolize the Family) (article)
(Link): Francis Chan Challenges Christians: Stop Idolizing Family, Put Christ’s Mission First
(Link): Redefining Family (How Christians Exclude, Marginalize Adult Singles) – post from Sojourner’s
(Link): The Deification of Family and Marriage (re: Kyle Idleman book)
(Link): Please Stop Shaming Me for Being Single by J. Vadnal
(Link): Statistics Show Single Adults Now Outnumber Married Adults in the United States (2014)
(Link): Really, It’s Okay To Be Single – In order to protect marriage, we should be careful not to denigrate singleness – by Peter Chin
(Link): Are Single People the Lepers of Today’s Church?by Gina Dalfonzo
