By Elizabeth Prata
I’m 65 years old. Second wave Feminism hit when I was in my formative years and early adulthood. I watched it, perplexed. It WAS a wave, it swept the country quickly and made many promises.
We are reaping regret now. A generation or two later, women who bought into the myth of having it all are on videos and blogs crying, wondering, regretting, mourning.
Even as a teenager and young woman I looked at the slogans, speeches, and TV ads touting that woman “can have it all,” and it seemed to me that it was impossible to have it all.
In the 1988 mega-hit film “Working Girl,” Melanie Griffith as Tess is ambitious woman is trying to work her way up from the secretarial pool to an office position with power. She is treated badly by much of the ‘boys club’ and treated worse by her new female boss. Still, she claws her way through with determination. Tess finally makes it…to this:
Her “success” is as a worker drone with a desk in a soulless skyscraper. This is what is depicted as upward mobility. Big-haired Tess from Staten Island cuts her hair, applies less makeup, buys a pencil skirt, and incidentally has to lie and cheat because she was lied about and cheated herself, to make it to the ‘top’. The top is a long commute in a small office with a million others who are doing the same.
THIS is ‘having it all’?
It always seemed to me even as a young woman, not even a Christian yet, that being a “working mom” was untenable. Moms have a lot to do, women who work in the outside world have a lot to do, there just was not enough hours in the day to do both. What you get is exhaustion and frustration.
As we advance further away from the Second Wave of feminism and have gone through what some say is a Third and even a Fourth Wave (though feminists disagree on this), I’m seeing more and more women say out loud, “this isn’t working for me”.
In 2012, Hillary Clinton was the 67th U.S. Secretary of State under President Barack Obama. She was also a mom. A working mom, one of the most visible in the world. Following in Clinton’s footsteps, Anne-Marie Slaughter eventually learned the hard way, that being a top dog in a dog-eat-dog world had left her son behind. She famously wrote an essay called “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”
She realized, at her dream job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, sipping champagne at a high-powered dinner studded with powerful policy makers, including President Barack Obama, that she was more concerned that her 14 year old son was slipping into bad habits of “skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him.“
He had become uncommunicative with his mother, who worked in Washington DC while he lived with his dad in Princeton, NJ. Worse, the school year prior she described in her article she’d had to leave DC quickly when several emergencies popped up, hopping a train for four hours to get back to her home in NJ to help her husband deal with the issues. They were married, and he had agreed to “support her new job” in the nation’s capital and took on both the mom role in addition to his own dad role.
Feminism is a pagan worldview. It is in opposition to God’s view that the role of married mother should be a stay at home mom. Her role in His design is helper. Support role to the husband. Not less, equally important. No one can be all and have it all. Except Jesus.
When Anne-Marie Slaughter confided to her working mom friend that when her two-year stint as high-powered policy maker in DC was done, she was going to write an opinion piece about the futility of having it all. Not surprisingly, her friend was aghast and fervently convinced Slaughter not to write it. Slaughter wrote-
What she meant was that such a statement, coming from a high-profile career woman—a role model—would be a terrible signal to younger generations of women. By the end of the evening, she had talked me out of it, but for the remainder of my stint in Washington, I was increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet.
She is correct. Any house built on sand will shift under your feet. (Matthew 7:24-27). God’s way is best. For the woman, tending her home will be fulfilling if she is obedient.
Not to say that being a homemaker is always exciting. The grass is greener on the other side, as they say. Changing diaper after diaper, washing the 1000th dish, or folding clothes is not exciting. But in a house there has to be nails to hold the house up. Drilling nail after nail is not exciting, but it’s necessary. I understand we don’t see the nails, we see the cute shutters, the curved brick walkway, the fancy things, but the undergirding is the steadiness, obedience, and often hidden support to the whole structure. Moms. At home.
Ashley Wishman: her bio says “life advice from a working mom” I haven’t seen anywhere that she is a Christian. But this is the reel that she posted a few weeks ago saying, “I fell for it.” Here is her reel: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DUqtXfUD7QA/
Other women’s comments in response to Ashley Wishman’s reel:
I have 1 daughter who is 9 🤯 I fell for it until a year and a half ago.
Yes please stay home with your babies if you can find a way! Biggest regret for me is that I didn’t and now my babies are grown and I can never get that time back. I feel your heart mama ❤️❤️
Thank you so much for saying that out loud. Woman got to hear this. It’s not how its meant to be.
Yes, this. I wasn’t in corporate but in healthcare and I couldn’t agree more. I walked away 12 years ago to raise my kids and don’t regret it for one second. Big hugs. ♥️
Wow. We 👏are👏the👏same👏person.
We are even the exact same age and I have 1 daughter who is 9 🤯 I fell for it until a year and a half ago. There is a different way. 🤍I’m glad others see the problem with that way of life.
“Having it all” refers to the dream that feminism offered. The dream was that it’s possible to have a fulfilling career (that was not motherhood), and also to be an attentive parent. Now, that’s not to say that women who have made the choice out of preference or necessity aren’t caring or attentive. Some need to work because of circumstances. I understand that. But the sweeping promise of feminism was a straw man from the start. Why? Because its underlying premise was that motherhood isn’t a career. That there is more to life than ‘just’ being at home. That being a mom at home was demeaning, unfulfilling, and valueless. Having it all meant having more than being a mother to your children God gave you.
Wasn’t that the promise of the serpent in the garden? That there is more to life than what God has already given you?
the-end-time.org 