"To exist humanly is to name the self, the world, and God."
Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), p. 9
In the fall of 1982, I was a new wife, finishing up my senior year at a small private women's college, and taking a women's studies course as an effort to easily fulfill a graduation requirement with an already heavy course load. After all, I reasoned, it seemed easier than taking a 'serious' history course.
Required reading included Betty Friedan's, The Feminine Mystique. That book and the class discussion plunged me into the world of a way of thinking that felt to me so foreign it was as if I was reading about and living in a world of science fiction. What really astounded me was that all but one or two of my classmates was actually taking this stuff seriously. I was a naive small-town girl, raised by a loving father and married to a man who loved and respected me and figured since I did all the cooking, it would be nice if he washed the dishes. Needless to say, the attempt to convince me that I was oppressed by men was unsuccessful.
A little over ten years later, I heard about a conference that had been held in Minneapolis. It was called the Re-imagining God Conference, and one of its major sponsors was the mainline denomination of which I was a member, (and very soon to be an ex-member). Rumors of the apostasy of the conference were slowly leaking out. The bread and wine of the Lord's Supper was replaced with milk and honey. God was worshiped in a feminized form under the name Sophia. This Sophia was not only equated with the Biblical God, but also with Mother Earth and a number of other Pagan female deities. Again my mind reeled, "What are these people thinking?"
After reading Mary Kassian's The Feminist Mistake, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2005) I am now beginning to understand what they were thinking. Kassian's book is a history of what she calls the second wave of feminism, which began after the lull that followed feminism's 19th and early 20th-century first wave. Her book studies the development of modern feminist thought in both secular culture and in the church.
Modern feminism's roots borrow heavily from existentialist ideas about constructing a meaning of life for oneself, as well as Marxist ideals of destroying those societal structures that oppress and rebuilding a socialistic society that liberates and equalizes.
Kassian points to Simone deBeauvoir's book, Le Deuxieme Sexe, (The Second Sex), published in France in two volumes in 1949 as the catalyst for the modern feminist movement. DeBeauvoir was a Sorbonne philosopher and the lover of existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. The book was published in English in 1953, but the book's existentialist vocabulary gave it a small audience and no immediate widespread influence.
Then in 1963, Betty Friedan wrote, The Feminine Mystique, a book that made deBeauvoir's ideas accessible to the average intelligent reader, and presented the 'woman's dilemma' in language the average woman could understand. That dilemma, according to Friedan, was a woman's inability to find true fulfillment and personal development while trapped in the traditional female roles to which society had confined her. Later, the problem Friedan described would have a name: patriarchy.
Kassian traces the development of feminism from these beginnings over the next three decades as both secular and religious feminists attempted to solve 'the problem' by deconstructing patriarchal societal and church structures and replacing them with structures that would theoretically liberate women and enable them to become fully human beings.
Kassian divides this history into three main stages and names them according to the Mary Daly quote, above. The first stage, Naming Self, was the decade of deBeauvoir and Friedan. The dominant theme was for women to reject the definition of woman thrust upon them by a misogynist culture and a misogynist church, and to define womanhood for themselves.
The second stage, Naming the World, was characterized by similar redefinitions of family structure, gender relationships, and the Judeo-Christian worldview. In the Church the movement was characterized by "liberation theology", that sought to end oppression by societal reconstruction. In secular culture the movement was characterized by Woman-centered Analysis and Women's Studies that exalted the position of women above that of men. During the previous stage, female differences
were denied, now they were a source of pride. I am woman; hear me roar.
During the third stage, Naming God, the full philosophical and theological implications of the feminist reconstruction of culture and religion was working itself out. During this stage God was remade in the image of woman, and the philosophical and theological foundations for events such as the Re-imagining Conference were laid. According to Kassian, one plenary speaker at that conference declared, "The Christian Church has been very patriarchal. That's why we are here together in order to destroy this patriarchal idolatry of Christianity."
The second part of The Feminist Mistake deals with where we are right now. The activism of earlier feminism may have died down somewhat, but that is only because feminist philosophy and theology have become mainstream. Kassian helps the reader to see feminist influences in the culture and in the church--yes, even the Evangelical church--and avoid the errors in theology and Biblical interpretation that have allowed them to gain wide acceptance.
This book was an eye-opener for me in many ways, and I highly recommend it. It made sense of the seemingly disjointed events, trends and slogans of the decades of my own youth--how we got from burning bras to praying to Goddess Sophia. It also made me aware of ways in which I had unknowingly absorbed some feminist principles and definitions and how I had been manipulated by the 'consciousness raising' techniques of feminism adapted to classroom use by my college professors.
I would suggest that those readers who haven't studied philosophy, or haven't studied it lately, review the basics of Existentialism and Marxism before reading this book. The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog, by James W. Sire is a good source for this information, and the relevant sections can be read in a few minutes. However, an in-depth knowledge of philosophy is not necessary to understand and benefit from Kassian's excellent book, which is scholarly, yet accessible.
This is an important book for Christians, to equip us to understand and resist the purposeful dismantling of the Judeo-Christian worldview in order to erect in its place a new Woman, a new World, and a new God.
Note: This book review is a part of the Diet of Bookworms book review project. Visit the Diet of Bookworms site for more reviews of this book and many others.
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