Yesterday I repeated a blog on Lies Women Believe. Marina commented on this from her perspective as a young mother. I didn’t want her comments to get lost and I want to discuss it further.
Marina:Wow….this article was sent to me by my mother…it is soo true. I myself have been evaluating this issue for the last four days, and here’s why. I was at a conference this last weekend and one of the speakers was Kris Vallaton of Bethel Church in Redding, CA. He gave us a little spill that has had me thinking. He brought up the issue of abortion and how this issue has arised in our culture and how our society’s value of children has been demeaned. America went through the agricultural age with a high value for children. The children helped with the farm and helped to bring income in their family. They were important to the family. They could do more. Somewhere along the line (after the war sometime) the feminist era creeped in and women had an itch to be comparable, to be valued as much as men.
Pastor Susan: During WWII women went to work, while the men went to war. It’s what was needed to keep our country going but what happened is, we really liked working. We liked the independence and we were appreciated in a new sense. This group of women, raised women of my mother’s era. My mother graduated high school in 1959 and for the first time, women of her generation were given options. No longer did they HAVE to get married and have children to be considered decent women. Suddenly they were going to college to get a masters and not a Mrs.
Marina:In the industrial age many women entered the workplace and suddenly the children became a burden for the family. Now we need somebody else to watch our children because he have the responsibility to provide just as the man because now we’re equal! Our mindests become as such: The more children we have the more expenses we have and the children are no longer valuable for helping us, but burdensome for taking from us.
Pastor Susan: This were the dilemma came in. As women, we were supposed to work and bring home the money but society still expected every woman to have a child. If you were a woman who didn’t want a child you were considered selfish or something was wrong with you. We still carry that stigma. If you wanted to stay home and raise your child, you were a stone-aged babe who needed to get with it. The pressure was coming from all angles and we, as women, were just as caught up in the pressure of this new generation as the men were.
Men became accessories in this era. Women determined that men weren’t necessary. We needed their sperm but not their input. We began to teach our sons that they needed to find a woman who would work and help him financially keep the family together. It was a pretty sad state of affairs but you would have never convinced us of this at this time. This is, coincidentally or not, if you see the writing (spirituality) on the wall, where the shift in families attending church services began to decline. I mean, think about it, with all we had going on at the time, we couldn’t fit another thing in. We were tired women and something had to give!
Good points. We’ll continue this tomorrow!
Pastor Susan 