The New Eve (6 page)

Adding fuel to this flame for Christian women was the emergence of Christian egalitarianism. This new theological movement within the church espoused “sameness” among men and women as God's ideal before sin entered the world. This theology soon caught fire. Men were no longer to be the heads of their homes or the overseeing leaders (that is, elders) of the church. Role differences were out—even sinful. Everything was to be shared equally—fifty-fifty.

While all this sounds fair and balanced, the problem is men and women are
not
the same. Equal in value? Yes. Equal in sharing God's divine image? Absolutely. But we are different by God's design (Gen. 1:27). And those differences mean something, both practically and theologically, whether or not we want to face it.

During this time women also encountered another hard lesson. As they sought to be like men in the workplace and vied for promotion and advancement, they learned something men had long known: companies want
more.
The concept of sameness may have advanced many women's professional lives, but after hours it quickly became a home breaker. And children were the ones wounded by it the most. In truth some career women have ended up becoming the very person the 1950s homemaker chronically complained about in her husband: he works too hard, he's gone too much, he's home too little.

So how can a working woman make home and career work for her? For many women that's the million-dollar question. For other women the social pendulum has moved on to something new—role reversal.

As the twenty-first century breaks upon us, a new evolution of woman is arising. It's a feminine transformation defined by a social realignment occurring more frequently between men and women. And what exactly is that? Simply this: men and women are switching roles. It's the ’50s traditional model in reverse. More and more women are leading the men in their lives. More and more women are the primary breadwinners of their families. And more men are working less and staying at home with the kids. Newsmagazines confirm that this is a growing trend.
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Thirty-four percent of men polled say they would consider staying at home if their wife earned more money. Studies show that
of the fifty most powerful women in business, a third of them have “trophy husbands,” men who stay at home full-time to take care of domestic duties. More broadly speaking, 51 percent of the men whose wives outearn them do the majority of the domestic work.
Businessweek
magazine assessed this trend by concluding, “Finally, more career women are getting the one thing they say they need most from their husbands: a wife.”
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For men this spells an identity crisis of the first order. A
Newsweek
article bears this out, for with few exceptions the stay-at-home dads who were interviewed confessed their dislike of this new role. Why? Because from earliest boyhood, males fix their eyes on the broader world outside the home, where they have a God-made hunger for adventure and accomplishment. Women too are exhilarated by success, but for men it is the very stuff of life. Men who aren't conquering the turf God has called them to aren't merely standing still; they're losing ground and their masculine soul in the process. Something dies inside a man when he gives up on authentic manhood and settles for something less than the call that lies within him. His manhood becomes hollow. And when a man surrenders his life and leadership to a woman, as Adam did to Eve (Gen. 3:6, 17), both inevitably hate it in the end.
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So where does this swinging social pendulum leave you as a woman? Honestly, with hard choices concerning …

• What you want out of life
  
• Balancing home and career
  
• Living with a man
  
• Children and what is required for them to grow up healthy
  
• Your spiritual beliefs
  

But underneath all these concerns that you and other women battle with daily is a basic question rarely asked or answered: How do you define what a woman is and isn't? For you as a Christian woman, we could add: How does God define what a woman is and isn't? When those questions are left open and unresolved, confusion, wrong turns, and painful regrets usually follow. But an amazing clarity, confidence, and problem-solving ability comes when you can move past confusion to solid, life-giving answers. Defining your womanhood at a basic level is
the issue
behind the challenges and problems of an ever-evolving femininity. It's an issue we will address from a biblical perspective in chapter 6.

Let's face it: life today, especially for young women, has been turned upside down. A radical and profound idea has been introduced and propagated concerning what womanhood is really all about. Against all social history as well as the wisdom of Scripture, young women are bombarded with slogans and images in the media, taught from grade school through the university, and told indirectly by what they see honored among women that
a career is the ultimate goal in life.

This is womanhood's new supreme pursuit against which all else should be measured. We celebrate “Take Your Daughter to Work Day”; we guard girls against stereotypes that make motherhood and domestic life seem like their inevitable calling; and every time we speak to them about aiming high, we're thinking of careers in medicine, law, business, or the like, possibly inviting them to put off or deny altogether some of their most powerful, God-given drives. Former Brandeis professor Linda Hirshman pressed for this new pursuit when she wrote, “Housekeeping and child rearing [are] not worthy of the
full-time talents of intelligent and educated human beings.”
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Her book for today's woman is appropriately titled
Get to Work.

I recently attended a high-school football game in a rural Arkansas town. It was the essence of small-town Americana. Picket fences, a general store, folks gathered on the front porch to solve the world's dilemmas. The game was homecoming, and at halftime the announcer introduced the members of the homecoming court. For each of the young ladies he mentioned their accomplishments and future aspirations. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, teachers … the aspirations were high and career oriented. Nothing wrong with that. A career is a good thing. We can all be proud when our daughters aim high in accordance with their gifts. But as I sat in the stands, I began to wonder how the crowd might react if one of the girls had named motherhood or homemaking as her chief ambition. Honestly, it would have sounded odd. Second-rate.

In the twenty-first century the primacy and place women individually and collectively give a career is a huge issue with immense consequences. And what women decide—what
you
decide—depends on how some deeply philosophical questions are answered: What should be the supreme pursuit of my life? Around what should everything else in my life be ordered? We will address those questions in chapter 4.

If engaging a man feels as if it has become more difficult, it has! Stephanie Coontz, the author of a comprehensive book on the history of marriage, says, “Relations between men and women have changed more in the past thirty years than they did in the previous three thousand.”
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Traditional relational pathways have become tangled and confused. Polls indicate the greatest pessimism women have today is about their love lives. Single
women around me keep asking, “Where have all the men gone?” They are frustrated and bewildered at the timidity and passivity of modern men. A recurring complaint is that men no longer take the initiative. They seem to run from it as if from an infectious disease.

On many college campuses “the date” is becoming extinct.
New York Times
columnist David Brooks shares the following personal encounter he recently had with a group of students. “One night over dinner at a northern college, a student from the South mentioned that at her local state university, where some of her friends go, they still have date nights on Friday. The men ask the women out, and they go as couples. The other students at the dinner table were amazed. The only time many young people have ever gone out on a formal date was their high school senior prom. You might as well have told them that in some parts of the country there are knights on horseback jousting with lances.”
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More and more with men, young women are having to step forward first to make the call, take the lead, and be the pacesetter in the relationship.

Women are also changing the ways they engage men. Casual sex is up; so is living together. So is having a family
without a man.
Today a record 37 percent of all new moms are unwed, many by choice. The most dramatic increase is with women in their twenties. “More American women than ever are putting motherhood before matrimony,” reported
Newsweek
writers Debra Rosenberg and Pat Wingert.
⁹

Unmarried women are today's fastest-growing demographic.
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And when you do meet a man you desire to commit to, what are the rules of engagement that will make the relationship last? Do you know? Does he agree? What are the roles, yes
roles
, you will play in your new life together? If you think they will be the same, think again. The so-called fifty-fifty arrangement is
always in the eye of the beholder. What you say is my fifty, I may feel is my eighty and vice versa. Who keeps score?

So what are the conditions that bring a man and a woman together in happiness? A host of problems arise when you don't know. That's why we are going to tackle this important issue in chapters 10 and 11.

What does it take to be a good mother, especially when a career is mixed in? The “mommy wars” pitting working women against homemakers has marked the deep divide that exists over this issue. It's one loaded with hard choices, intense feelings of guilt (real or imagined), personal ambitions, and economic necessities. We will address this issue at length in chapters 4, 7, and 8.

Being a mother is like being a nurse, chef, guidance counselor, mediator, teacher, playmate, policeman, and air traffic controller all rolled into one. If stay-at-home moms struggle to fit all this into a single day, mothers who work full-time outside the home face even greater challenges. The hardest-working people anywhere are career women who double as moms. A
USA Today
poll revealed that 60 percent of working mothers would choose to stay at home if their financial situation permitted it.
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But financial concerns often rule this out. Today 60 percent of women with children under the age of six are working outside the home, the very time when social scientists and child psychologists tell us that children need maximum attention and nurturing from their moms to ensure sound intellectual, social, and emotional development. There is simply no substitute for healthy, engaging “face time” with a child. And children need lots of it from their parents to feel good about themselves and about life. This reality will not go away, no matter how much a woman earns or provides for them.

Today's working woman feels this dilemma and the guilt it often brings. The pressure and the toll of trying to juggle children and career ambitions have become so great that a new trend is developing in America today: young women are choosing to have fewer children or none at all! A record number of women ages fifteen to forty-four report that they actually intend to forgo motherhood. Most often it's a lifestyle decision. A growing number of couples now rate the value of their work, recreation, and standard of living above that of having children. Anne Hare is one example. According to an AP reporter who interviewed her, “Hare and her husband made a momentous decision three years ago: They would not have children. It's not that they don't like kids, she says. They simply don't want to alter the lifestyle they enjoy.”
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The 2000 Census Bureau report indicates that the birthrate in America is the lowest in our history. It currently stands at 2.06 per couple. At this rate American parents are barely managing to replace themselves. Immigration is the only reason for America's robust growth. For increasing numbers of women, opting for motherhood is no longer automatic or even a top priority.

For a Christian woman God's command to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it” in Genesis 1:28 has not gone away. Rightly understood, it is a sacred charge to commit oneself to raise and launch a healthy next generation that is able to bless the world (our communities and our cities) with the righteousness of God. For Christian women the question should not be, Will I choose to embrace this God-given command? but rather, Do I know (or want to face) what my children really need from me to grow up healthy? In our demanding, fast-paced, pricey, career-oriented culture, wisdom and the courage to make hard choices are now absolute necessities for addressing this crucial issue of motherhood. Without them you can expect
your kids to have the same kinds of problems you see throughout society today.

I remember the lively interaction I had with a futurist back in the late 1980s. As a researcher, his job was to assess specific kinds of data that could reveal coming cultural changes. In our discussion I asked him pointedly what he considered to be the most significant change looming before us. I don't know what I expected, but his answer surprised me. “Choices,” he said. “The greatest change and challenge in the next generation will be in dealing with the plethora of choices you will have.”

His prophecy is now your reality. Today as a woman, you have unlimited choices as well as the freedom to pursue them. As we discussed in chapter 1, this is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because now more than ever, women can pursue their dreams. But it can also be a curse because the reality of so many choices demands a new skill many women (and men) lack: the ability to choose rightly.

One of America's greatest thinkers, the late Peter Drucker, made the following observation shortly before his death in 2006. He wrote, “In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time—literally—substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.”
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