Women in "Godly Marriages"

[xenologer]

I was having a discussion once with a born-again Christian who was arguing passionately that it is best for women to be under the "loving headship" of a man, the way that the church is under the loving headship of Christ. The ideal marriage is not an egalitarian one, but one in which a man governs the woman based on his own consideration and love for her.

I did not see this as an ideal marriage, and have little interest in it. I'm one of those college-educated "women's libbers" who feels that I'm qualified to have my own means of economic support, and the same social and political autonomy as a man. Most importantly, I feel I'm better off this way.

My issue with taking the gender roles offered in the Bible at face value is that traditional heteronormative (if you'll forgive the jargon) marriage roles are upheld as "Biblical" (which is itself a largely-undefined term), but advocates are really just picking and choosing from what's in the Bible to support what they'd like.

Now, I know that "picking and choosing" is a trigger-phrase for a lot of people who are debating the Bible, and it's often used as a way to instantly condemn as "UnBiblical" whoever gets it applied to them. I feel it's appropriate here, though. There are a lot of aspects of the submissive-woman/leading-man arrangement that clearly came from the culture in which the Bible was written.

Levirate marriage is the best example of this I can think of. Because women in those times didn't have any economic power of their own (aside from prostitution, which is not exactly desirable), they had to be married to survive. If their husband died, it was his brother's duty to marry the widow (often in addition to his own wife) so that he could support her and give her the offspring that his late brother could not.

This came up in Matthew 22:23, and Christ doesn't deny the worth of this practice. He just says that in the world to come NO ONE will be married. If Christ had a problem with the practice, that was his chance to say something. He did not, and Matthew 22:23 is actually a better argument against romantic relationships overall than it is against Levirate marriage.

The reason I bring up Levirate marriage is that it's a practice that was assumed as normal in the time of Christ, and not condemned by him as adultery. The reason people don't practice it today is because we live in a different culture. "Oh, that's just what they did then," people say. "We know better now. Marriage is between one man and one woman, and these are the obligations each has to the other. The Bible says so (in the parts that we choose if we ignore the parts that we don't like)."

Marriage in the time of Christ (and in the early church of Christ) was a much more complex thing than it gets credit for, and if we can accept that Levirate marriage doesn't belong in our modern society, why are we blindly accepting all gender roles attributed to the Bible? To put it another way, if we can trace practices like Levirate marriage back to the culture of the Bible's authors and thus dismiss their applicability for us, but we ascribe divine sanctity and authority to the parts we DO like... how is that honest? At the very least I think it requires that we find another definition of what counts as "Biblical," since clearly "it's okay in the Bible" is not enough.

Of course, another alternative is to pay close attention to what the cultural atmosphere was like at the time the Bible was written. What did the authors take for granted? What was "normal" to them, and what was deplorable? It was normal and natural to them that a woman could not support herself without a man. It was normal and natural to them that if men are good, women will be supported. If men are not good, women are the ones who suffer. Oh well.

And that's my big problem with attempting to reinstate millenia-old cultural norms by encouraging women to be economically dependent on men. Sure, in an ideal world this'd all work out fine. But we don't live in an ideal world, and in the world where we live now... if anybody in this system fall short (which Christian theology teaches that they must) women suffer. Women will bear the brunt of their own failings AND the failings of the men on whom they are dependent.

That's why feminists don't like these gender roles. It's not that they hate men. It's that men have to be perfect in order for this system to work, and even Christian theology admits that this is a lost cause. Because feminists are concerned with women being able to survive in a world where humans are imperfect, they assert that women need to have their own social and economic viability. Feminists therefore take issue with the Christian "traditional" marriage. It assumes that it's important for women to be healthy, safe, and otherwise well off, but not important enough to build a system that will actually produce that end.

Comments

[beldar.livejournal.com]

The more I think about "traditional marriage" the more I realize a lot of people don't know what the hell they're talking about.

Marriage has numerous "traditions," and they mainly boiled down to control of property (with the woman often being part of that property). Raising kids? That was to provide labor in the short term and someone to care for you in the long term, with property secured via inheritance.

Marriage has been redefined in Western society as a partnership of equals -- which makes gay marriage viable. Some people may want to change things back to a prior era, but even most Christian women aren't going to give up freedom so easily now that they've experienced it.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

Take the infamous Phyllis Schlafly paradox, for instance -- women working outside the home making millions of dollars and gaining vast public recognition for their crusade against women working outside the home.

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

Well, you see, these women would be happier at home serving their husbands and in return being utterly dependent on them. This is a noble sacrifice on her part, knowingly forgoing what she knows will make her most happy: staying in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant where she belongs.

[/sarcasm]

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

If you remember my rant about the reactionary who blamed video games and modern lad culture for everything wrong with the world, the reason I hate old-fashioned ideas of gender roles on a personal level is that even though the woman gets a much rawer deal than the man, it's still a form of slavery for both people.

I don't *want* to be made totally responsible for my wife's decisions and welfare. I can't do that. It's a tough enough responsibility having to raise kids -- having a marriage where a wife is supposed to be a perpetual child for her entire life? I couldn't do it. It would drive me crazy.

A lot of men *were* driven crazy by the Victorian ideal of a proper marriage, hence the rife adultery and spending months at a time away from home and so on common to older time periods. It takes a very specific kind of personality match to actually enact the BDSM-style relationship that a Victorian ideal marriage actually would look like, which is why there were so many "confirmed bachelors" who never married, and women who did the next best thing, marrying rich husbands and basically ignoring them while their social circles were centered around their girlfriends.

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

You mean you don't want a woman who would roam the streets starving to death without your constant maintenance?

Deadbeat. >:P

Seriously, though, I can see what you're saying. And, even according to Christian theology, when you try and live up to a role like that you are going to fail. You are set up to be a failure, and your wife is being set up to be failed by you.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

In all seriousness, lower-income families *need* to have two working parents, and have *always* had to have two working parents to get by -- the ideal of the housewife who makes no income outside of the home because the husband is the sole breadwinner has always been a middle-class thing, and has never really resembled the realities of what working-class or rural families do to survive.

Much of the pressure on American middle-class men to sacrifice their time and energy and health to try to get ahead in their profession by any means necessary has been because of the housewife ideal -- indeed, there's a deeply pathological way in which 1950s advertisers encouraged women to remain ignorant about how much things actually cost while nagging at their husbands for constant upgrades to their furniture or appliances while the husbands, in order to be "good providers", accept such burdens without complaint and respond by working harder.

It's a textbook divide-and-conquer strategy for keeping people locked in the production/consumption treadmill, and it worked. And middle-class women and men alike suffered deeply for it.

The concept of a "midlife crisis" isn't at all mysterious when you look at what the actual ideal for a white-collar worker in this culture is supposed to be -- someone who is specifically relegated to the role of "breadwinner" who therefore spends all his time and energy accumulating money to buy goods he is explicitly encouraged *not* to take any interest or involvement in. Old-school sitcoms are rife with jokes about the husband taking great pride in his ability to write out huge checks for new curtains and a new refrigerator and a big new house while bemusedly shrugging his shoulders at why his wife cares so much about such frippery. (With the very strong implication that men who *are* interested in such things would be weird and creepy and probably gay.)

It's all ha-ha-hilarious until you consider the enormous amount of pent-up bitterness a situation like this engenders and see how directly it led to the social disruption and bitterness of the next few decades, as it became socially acceptable for well-to-do men to abandon their families for a mistress and a shiny new car and all the stuff they actually *wanted* to buy when they started working before they got sucked into the American Dream, and social conservatives started blaming men's "selfish" desires to escape a horribly confining and painful gender role on wives who just weren't "supportive" and "loving" enough, followed by misguided feminists piling on and claiming that this just showed how all men were deadbeats.

It's really frustrating, and it's a path I'm very determined not to set myself on at any point.

Feminism is freedom, and it's freedom for *everybody*. This doesn't get emphasized enough when trying to sell feminism to men.

[brainwalker.livejournal.com]

"That's why feminists don't like these gender roles. It's not that they hate men. It's that men have to be perfect in order for this system to work, and even Christian theology admits that this is a lost cause."

I just wanted to point out that this is the best argument for feminism I have ever heard.