Mini Update

I know I have posted less stuff than usual in the past month. It's my busiest season. I went from the EPA conference and DTS graduation to the Israel-trip reunion and our church's last service to teaching summer school. Three weeks, all morning, every day. Creative writing. I love teaching it and the actual class hours feel like a mini Sabbath. We read to each other, critique, and create. But it does mean I do little else. After Friday, I return to the slower pace of magazine editing.

One of my interns, Kelly Stern, has some expertise in poetry--both knowledge of great poets and creation of her own works. So an added element in the class this summer is Kelly's fifteen-minute daily intro to poetry. Donne. T. S. Eliot. George Herbert. And especially the Welsh Christian poets who wrote over 1,000 years ago. Great stuff.

A former DTS student owns Texadelphia restaurant, and he offers free lunches to any faculty member who shows up with up to three students. So we've had the added benefit of yummy free lunches together in small groups. What's not to love about that? An educator's dream.

In the midst of this, I managed to finish my reading list for the women's history portion of my PhD exam prep. The last work was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. I had heard so many awful things about Betty and her book, that I almost expected to find a rant by a man-hating, housewife-dissing femiNazi. Instead I found a reasoned call to women having purpose in their lives. I found much with which I agreed, in fact. The number of women going to college dropped about 10 percent after the 1930s. And Fridan offers some interesting cultural reflections on why. (You can read her chapter on Freud's sexual solopsism here.)

Also, context is everything. When Friedan said homemakers asked, "Is this all?" she didn't mean to suggest caring for one's family is the occupation of losers. She suggested (and her sales indicate she was spot on) women were asking "Is this all" on a more cosmic level. As in--Can complete fulfillment as a human being come from cocooning with the hubby and kids?

My take is that Friedan thought the world needed women's involvement, and women themselves needed community and world involvement, right along the lines of "She stretches forth her hand to the needy and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue" (see Prov. 31). And beyond that, women need eternal purpose--the kind Rick Warren wrote a bestseller about. The kind which all humans need--a purpose that reaches beyond their own temporal lives. And seriously, Friedan was no man-hater. ("Man is not the enemy here. But the fellow victim.") She said she didn't hate men, only vacuum cleaners. Dare I say I agree on that score?

What I read made me wish we (especially the Christian sub-culture) had done a better job of listening and responding to her. And finding points of agreement. I wish we had acknowledged the emptiness of so many and encouraged them to find their purpose in the One who made them and granted them the job of co-regent over the planet. And to develop their spiritual gifts. And to take their kids with them as they served a broader community. And I wish we had affirmed each women seeking a skill, so if she were single or widowed, she would have some security against poverty. It seems to me these would have been much more constructive responses than vilifying the journalist who reported what she saw.