WOMEN AND FREEDOM

Women continue the long journey of struggle for basic rights of respect, equality,and justice. Statistics unblinkingly blare the economic disparities. Career obstacles strew women's paths. Violence toward women is pandemic. A recent U.N. study concluded that in every nation without exception women fair worse than men on the major quality of life indices. The common view of women's roles still apparently continues to be to submit, to serve, and to sexually gratify.

Never the less the road has ascended, the fog has lifted, and women now scan a new horizon whose sun is rising. Little girls can aspire to be physicians, attorneys, astronauts, or senators, and not be dreaming the impossible dream. Women can expect to be seriously considered by politicians, respected in the business world, and applauded for athletic, intellectual, and artistic achievement.

Certainly for most women the struggle is still enjoined. Low-wage, dead-end jobs, exploitative, violent domestic relationships, beaten-down self-esteem — all this proliferates. Advocacy for women's justice must continue unabated.

II

"...ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occaision to the flesh, but by love serve one another." (Gal.5:13)

While the Galation passage may directly be speaking to the emancipation from Mosaic law to the freedom of Agape love, a parallel can be drawn to minority emancipation movements of gender, race, and class: Simply, for instance, women, or blacks, or Appalachians, who through courageous struggle and opportune circumstances break through the oppressive crust to a measure of autonomy and power should use this strength as servants to others. The black ghettos cry out to the black educated leaders who have emmigrated to comfortable suburbs (see "Salvation in the Streets" by A. Parker, Sojourners, May, 1993). Likewise, talented women must not scorn the traditional professional female careers such as nursing and teaching as subservient, or, women who do enter the power careers in business, government, law, need to lead all of us toward a more gentle, caring, humane society. (For example, women are leading a wholesome trend in the workplace toward flexibility with maternity leave and family togetherness which is comparably needed for men, also.)

Never the less, the pressures of a technological society that molds people into objects, the consumer addiction that afflicts most first world people , the distorted images of male and female which the media thrust into our consciousnesses, all this is a new onslaught against the liberty and fullness of womanhood coming just at a time when the traditional age-old sexist prejudices and oppressive walls are beginning to crack. One must ponder this flight from one prison to another.

III

In her intriguing book, The Feminization of American Culture

(Alfred A.Knopf, 1977), Ann Douglas discusses the crisis of 19th century middle-class American women displaced from traditional roles of responsibility by the industrial revolution. No longer were they equal partners with their husbands in the farm or home business; their husbands trundled off to the factory or office. No longer did these women teach their children at home or nurse them when ill, rather, schools and specialists were available.