The Other F-Word (Feminism)

 I have read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and heard Gloria Steinem in person. And I spent some years in the halls of academia exploring the history and teachings of feminism. The result: I've concluded that most Christians need to pull back and regroup both in our representations of feminists and in our approach to engaging them.

Just as there is not one "Christianity" but many Christianities (Orthodox, Catholic, Anglo-Catholic, Protestant, Lutheran, Armenian, Calvinist, Reform, dispensational, etc.), there are many feminisms (Marxist, socialist, radical, liberal, lesbian, biblical, difference feminists (we are women—viva le difference! from men) and sameness feminists (we're very similar to men).

Those who self-label as liberal feminists come from the equal rights movement. Betty Friedan was one of them. They are interested in legal equality, not to be confused with sameness. They want the law to quit seeing gender when they approach job opportunities, pay, child custody, property ownership, etc. They were never for unisex bathrooms, though I myself claimed they were in a scathing article I wrote against the ERA in college. I was wrong.

And they are not at all man-haters. Not. At. All. About five years ago, I was present when Gloria Steinem said that one of her greatest frustrations has been that she is accused of being a man-hater, and she is most adamantly not, nor has she ever been. In fact, she said the saddest letters she receives are from male prison inmates empathizing with women who have been raped/oppressed, because they are finding themselves victimized behind bars and they identify with the suffering now.

Those who refer to themselves as radical feminists came out of the peace movement. They see so much wrong with materialism/capitalism that they think we will never have equality under the law. Forget trying to change the law, they say—we need to overhaul society. Make noise. Shake it up. That's why many in this group are also big into environmentalism, sometimes Marxism, sometimes socialism, peace, no nukes, etc.  But as a radical feminist professor asked me, "There is much in Christianity that would oppose materialism too, right?"

We need to ask people, "What do you mean when you use that word?" We might be surprised.