What I Write About

I write about the infinite number of intersections between every day life and the good news of the God who has come to get us.

Monday, September 11, 2006

What's Gender, Anyway?

A brief touching on the issues of men and women in marriage last week prompted me to think about an address entitled "A New Feminism" that was sent along to me recently by a local pastor.

The speaker was Harvey Mansfield from Harvard University. Like most discussions surrounding gender (both from Christians and those outside Christianity) there are things that I like, things that I disagree with, and plenty that I'm intrigued by but not sure one way or the other. Here's a little teaser:

In sum, women have shown themselves capable in careers formerly closed to them, but seem no longer to enjoy the pleasures of being a woman. They know how to imitate men but are confused about how to remain women while doing so. Having started from the rejection of femininity, women's identity necessarily becomes a search without a guide. To see confusion in action, all you have to do is watch the television show Desperate Housewives.

On that show you see that women have not really been liberated by the gender-neutral society. Men and women are not the same, as the gender-neutral society of feminism claims. Nor are men and women merely different. They are both same and different. Formerly society recognized the differences between the sexes, and with laws and customs accentuated those differences. Now society does the opposite: it recognizes the similarities and accentuates them. There is no society without social pressure in one direction or another. Whereas before women were held back from the careers they could have attained, now they are pushed further than they may want to go. In this new situation women do need an identity; they need a feminism to replace the tradition we once lived by. But they need a new feminism, one that does justice to the differences as well as the similarities between the sexes.


To read the full speech, click here.

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