Our 4-year-old daughter has no qualms about being feminine. She does her school in her princess dress, loves stories about princesses, hates wearing pants, wants to get married (to Daddy), diapers and clothes her stuffed dog multiple times a day, and believes green and blue are colors that should be reserved for boys.
Being girly is just so... so natural to girls (most of 'em)! Little girl, who aren't old enough to understand or conform to the most degrading and dehumanizing aspect of our culture: feminism.
I wish there was a way I could preserve my daughter's natural inclination to girly things. How can I raise her to be feminine in a feminist culture? A times, the challenge overwhelms me.
Society, at large, stifles biblical womanhood.. Girls get told it's a "waste of intelligence" to stay at home and raise children. Motherhood is a "mindless" routine that consists of changing diapers and being shackled to the stove. We know it's not a waste of time, but defending our decision seems like a losing battle. After all, there are a lot more of "them" than there are of "us."
In the end, it comes down to who gets to define the terms: neither you nor I. God alone, the Creator of women, wields that kind of authority, and He hasn't left it up to us to play the guessing game with our role or how we should act.
His Word is filled with meaning, instruction, and examples of mothers, wives, daughters, grandmothers, saints, sinners, lovers, nurturers, teachers, peacemakers, artists, and so much more. All we need to know about what makes for blessed society is right at our finger tips.
Still, we somehow believe our culture's vision for "liberating women" is better than the One who created women and came to set them free from their self-induced bondage.
Somehow we find ourselves in an identity crisis that our Bible-believing foremothers did not seem to have.
Somehow our "liberation" in the 21st century has bound us to a cubicle of tormenting doubts about what we are doing as women.
Somehow filing a stack of paperwork in an office is more important than sorting laundry.
Somehow drawing up a spreadsheet requires more creativity than artfully decorating your home.
Somehow teaching 30 kids to read takes more preparation than instructing three children how to live.
Somehow it requires sheer brilliance to manage employees in the corporate office while raising our children to be intelligent, honorable citizens is a demoted to a brainless job.
Somehow, if you get paid for doing one of the thousand jobs a mother does in a day, you can call yourself an expert.
We buckle under the pressure and bashfully admit, "Oh, I'm just a stay-at-home Mom."
We attempt to justify our choice by rambling on about all the other things we do with our "spare time" as though being a mother isn't a real job. "Well, I'm a chef, baker, time management expert, teacher, personal shopper, repairman, financial adviser, writer, etc."
It's time to stop apologizing.
Whether we find life as a woman to be stifling or liberating is ultimately our choice. The paradox of Scripture is that submission brings the greatest freedom and that death brings life. Only when we die to ourselves, our dreams, and our desires, will we find vitality and freedom in pursuing the high calling of biblical womanhood with joy, intelligence, and purpose.
If we get this, if our daughters get this, we can begin fostering femininity back into our feminist world.