Earlier this week I commented on an article about women who are so modern and career-minded that they no longer want an alpha (dominant) male. Toward the end of the week, I am now a little stumped at this article I found in the LAT about Southern Baptist women going to seminary for degrees in Biblical homemaking.
In and of itself, through the beginning of the article, I don’t think there was anything I could disagree with per se — but there was just something odd, somewhat Stepford Wife about the whole story.
I agree that God values men and women equally and that women should submit (I like to call it cooperate, heheh) to her husband, with the understanding that the husband is putting his wife before himself. (Everyone likes to forget that caveat — just a couple of verses from where women are admonished to submit to their husbands, husbands are admonished to love his wife as he loves himself, in Ephesians 5:28.) But I guess what made me stop was this graf:
“If we love the Scripture, we must do it,” said Smith, who gave up her dreams of a career when her husband said it was time to have children. “We must fit into this role. It’s so much more important than our own personal happiness.”
We have to give up our own personal happiness? That doesn’t sound like a happy, long-lasting, joyful marriage. That sounds like a marriage that might eventually end in divorce.
It’s so weird, this spectrum of extremes. On one end its the uber-modern, career women who want someone who’s not going to “dominate” them. On this other end, there’s these ultra-conservative, “my place is only in the home” women who believe their only purpose is to submit to their husbands.
I am a modern woman, no doubt about that, but I cannot abide a wishy washy man who doesn’t know what he wants. My feeling is — if you don’t know what you want and you don’t know how to lead, what do I need you for? But even as I’m generally, socially conservative, I can’t see myself only being a housewife — even when I have kids. It’s also hard for me to accept that a woman’s only role is in the home — if that was the case, how could women be in Christian ministry? How could they write books to minister to others? How could they go through school to counsel people, in life and in ministry?
Trinity agrees with me, in that he doesn’t believe God ordained that women only work as housewives. At the same time, he added that these extremes may be in response to the general misalignment of gender and social roles. After all with women out there acting so dominant, there are men who believe they can score a sugar mama and just be a “house husband.” And that ain’t right.
Image lifted from OK Cupid’s Feminism Test¬†
He might laugh, I suspect, but I remember something about Him getting angry about how the temple had become a market place.
It turns out the article is an extension of his new book,