The Impact of Feminism
on the Family
Gloria Steinem
sounded the war cry,
“We don't just want to destroy capitalism,”
she said,
“We want to tear down the
whole f____ patriarchy.”
As the women's movement turned fanatical and ugly in the 1960s and 70s
the focus began to shift from reform and equal opportunity. The feminist
leaders - humorless, militant, pugnacious, and angry with their particular lot
in life, launched programs that were anti-God, anti-capitalism, anti-family,
anti-birth, anti-heterosexual and fostered a virulent hatred of anything
having to do with males. They no longer wanted to equalize the status of
women, but instead wanted to irreversibly alienate women from men and vice
versa.
“The fiction of fatherhood is a giant religion
called Christianity.”
-Jill Johnston in
Lesbian Nation
Home and traditional family values are no longer
accepted answers to the questions, "Who am I?" and, "What am I here for?" The
preeminent purpose for some women have become their careers, and they decided
against the value of home and family.
Taken over by radical leftists committed to adultery, lesbianism, and the
perpetuation of "self" over motherhood and family, the women's movement led by
the National Organization of Women (NOW), became an adjunct of the Democratic
party. The Democratic Party left millions of evangelicals and pro-family
Christians when they lurched to the left under George McGovern and his
successors. During the 1970s, the Democratic Party abandoned its centrist
pro-family base and became captive to the special interest of the radical
left, including the feminists, extreme environmentalists and gay rights
activists.
Radical feminists linked all the Marxist causes together by writing, "We want
to destroy the three pillars of class and a caste society - the family,
private property, and the state." [Peter Collier and David Horowith,
Deconstructing the Left: From Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, 1991].
To accomplish their goals, organizations such as the National Organization for
Women, Planned Parenthood, the National Education Association, and the People
for the American Way, the Gay-Lesbian Caucus, and their ilk have arisen to
champion unrestrained sex, homosexual rights, abortion on demand, while they
attack Christian beliefs, conservative organizations, and all the traditional
family structures of America. Feminism is an evil monster!
Dissolving the Family
Betty Friedan, founder of NOW, referred to traditional family life as a
"comfortable concentration camp" from which women needed liberation. Sheila
Cronan, one of the feminist movements most respected leaders and spokeswomen
said, "Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the
women's movement must concentrate on attacking marriage."
Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s they launched an all-out assault on our
nation's time-honored laws protecting the marriage union. Divorce was
presented as an easy way out for the frustrated, disappointed or
adventuresome.
Mel Krantzler, writing in Creative Divorce, stated: "To say goodbye is
to say hello ... hello to a new life - to a new, freer, more self-assured you.
Hello to new ways of looking at the world and of relating to people. Your
divorce can turn out to be the very best thing that ever happened to you."
That was a widely held professional opinion for almost a decade.
Within a few years, they and their Radical Left allies succeeding in
overturning all fifty of the nation's "fault" divorce statutes and replacing
them with what is called no-fault divorce. It was understood as an effort to
secure for women the economic, political and social rights and protections
that men have always enjoyed. A spate of pseudo-scientific studies assured
parents that children were resilient and would recover quickly from the
effects of divorce.
In their zeal they also stripped away from women, especially mothers with
children, many of the economic and legal protections they had historically
enjoyed in this nation, thus creating a whole new underclass in American
society: the abandoned housewife.
The number of displaced homemakers rose twenty-eight percent between 1975 and
1983 to more than three million women. Another twenty percent increase from
1983 to 1988 brought that number to more than four million. An astonishing
sixty-one percent of those women suddenly left alone had children under the
age of ten at home. Often without job skills and stranded without alimony or
child support, as many as seventy percent of these women make less than ten
thousand dollars a year, and fifty percent are employed at minimum wage or
less. It is, thus, readily apparent why a full seventy-five percent of all
Americans living below the poverty line in the United States are women and
their children.
[Sylvia Ann Hewlett, A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women's Liberation in America
(New York: William Morrow, 1986)]
Promise Keeping Men are Threatening to NOW
A million men willing to put their wives and families first is very
frightening to Patricia Ireland, head of the National Organization of
Women (NOW). The men of Promise Keepers promise to love their wives, their
children, and their neighbors as themselves, in keeping with the teachings of
Jesus Christ, according to the New Testament. Why that should be threatening
to Ireland and others of her ilk is apparent. One only has to look at their
lifestyles for the answer. Non-Christians have no understanding of God's plan
for our lives. What they DO have is a great deal of fear about the subject.
In more recent years feminism has turned more to a fight for abortion rights,
lesbian rights, environmentalism and witchcraft. Gone are concerns about equal
pay, assertiveness, and expressing one's individuality. In their place are
women ensconced in bitterness, hatred, and resentment.
It is frightening for Ireland, and for Karen Taggart of the Washington, DC
Lesbian Avengers, who said about the Promise Keepers, " we'll show them that
lesbians are everywhere. We'll show them that lesbians have super powers"
Taggart is truly afraid that the men of Promise Keepers have tapped into just
such a super power that will render her message irrelevant to women.
What is it exactly that Promise Keepers promise that is threatening to NOW?
The men of Promise Keepers promise:
-
To honor Jesus Christ and
obey His word.
-
To pursue relationships with other men,
provide one another with spiritual strength to keep his promises.
-
To practice spiritual, moral, ethical and
sexual purity.
-
To build strong marriages and families
through love, protection and biblical values.
- To support his church.
- To reach beyond racial and denominational
barriers.
- To influence the world by witnessing and
obeying, loving God and loving his neighbor as himself.
Abortion Kills a Child
Militant
feminists searching for power found the absolute best way to exercise their
control was in the area of reproduction. Abortion became the single greatest
avenue for militant women to exercise their quest for power and advance their
belief that men aren't necessary. They don't need men to be happy. They
certainly don't want males to be able to exercise any control over them.
The
real message of the 'Dan Quayle' Murphy Brown episode was that women don't
need men. shouldn't desire them, and that total fulfillment and happiness can
be achieved without men or husbands. Abortion thus became the ultimate symbol
of women's emancipation from the power and influence of men.
With men being
precluded from the ultimate decision-making process regarding the future of
life in the womb, they are reduced to their proper, inferior role.
Gender
feminists rallied in Beijing China in 1995 for the United Nations Fourth World
Conference on Women. The Beijing document -- the text of which was heavily
influenced by Bella Abzug and other radical feminists -- includes over 200
references to "gender" in various contexts, i.e., "gender equality,"
"mainstreaming a gender perspective," "gender diversity," etc.
However,
"husband" and "wife" are nowhere to be found in the 121-page document, and the
terms "mother" and "family" were proposed to be changed to "caretaker" and
"household." Clearly, the effort to change the semantics associated with the
family is the first step in altering the way the world thinks about the
family.
The roles defined by nature for men and women
had become clouded in feminists minds and has led to all kinds of confusion,
suspicion, and distrust between the sexes.
Women were liberated from the home, from their husbands, from their children -
from having to bear children at all. Fathers were liberated from their
authority. Children were liberated from limits, from rules, even their
parents. And the entire population was liberated from moral and ethical
standards. Yet it turns out that those things were precisely what held society
together. "Family values" have been so scorned that we are left with neither
families nor values. What do we have? Rampant illegitimacy and sexual disease,
widespread divorce, and a generation of unloved, undisciplined, and
uncared-for kids.
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