Womanhood

What is a woman? 100, 50, even 20 years ago that question could be answered easily by anyone you met. A woman, they might say, is a female. She's born with female anatomy, she's generally smaller than a man, she has two X chromosomes. They might even just look at you quizzically because the question is so absurd.

Now, that's all changed. Now, we say a woman is whatever a person feels it ought to be. Now we say someone born with XY chromosomes can change their sex, they can become female, and anyone who questions their femaleness is wrong and backwards.

It used to be that women had a certain set of duties; she mothered children, she kept house, she cooked, cleaned, and looked after the needs of her husband. If she was unmarried, maybe she had other duties, but ultimately people expected the average adult to marry, have a family, and perform their spousal duties. A woman could be easily defined in the way she dressed, carried herself, and acted. And for most of human history, women fulfilled one roll, while men fulfilled another, and only occasionally did someone step outside of that norm.

Women's Suffrage

That all began to change when women decided to pursue the right to vote.

Strangely enough, although we are taught that all women, or at least most women wanted this right, very few showed any actual interest, and quite a few even opposed the idea. The Anti-Suffragette movement did not become a full-blown movement until the Suffrage movement started to gain serious traction. Anti-Suffrage supporters believed that women were already free, and already in control of their own domains, within the home.

Although it's easy to assume that this Anti-Suffrage movement had to have been spear headed by patriarchal old men, in the United States, it was heavily led by women themselves. There were books, pamphlets, and talks given in the Anti movement as much as the Suffrage movement, insisting that women were perfectly content to let their husbands and fathers handle politics, so that they could better focus on the business of home.

Beyond these two polarizing movement were the scores of women who simply did not have the time or didn't care enough to throw their voices into the mix. Perhaps it's because they were afraid to speak up, but very likely a vast majority of these women, especially in America, were simply busy running their homes and raising their children and didn't care one drop what was happening in Washington. That's not to say they were ignorant by any means, but in the mid 1800s to early 1900s, there were still massive swaths of the US that were still relatively, if not completely, rural, and many people, men included, were so busy trying to survive and carve themselves out a comfortable life that they did not care that women did not have the elusive right to vote.

In spite of the opposition and lack of support, women did eventually gain the right to vote. In 1919, the constitution of the United States was amended, granting some women the right to vote. It would take many more years for this right to be extended to women under 30, and non-white women.

But it was the start of something new, and it started a ball rolling that has led to a much different society than what our ancestors could ever have imagined.

The Rise of Feminism

Women had gained the right to vote, but the status quo still remained mostly the same. Even the Suffragettes, who were seen as radical in their day, still mostly settled into marriage, had children, and kept their own homes. Even these women would faint at the sight of a modern feminist. But what led from wanting the right to vote, to WAP being chosen as song of the year?

Next, we see the rise of the flapper era.

The 1920s was wild, especially in comparison to eras gone by. Skirts got shorter, women began to creep into societies that previously only men, or loose women, would have frequented, smoking, drinking, and a general disdain for all things 'proper' flourished, and some women began to realize that they no longer had to stay home like their mother's and grandmothers.

The fight continued for the right to vote, but during this era, there was more of a cultural shift rather than merely political.

While we may see the Roaring 20s as a wild era for partying and flashing those scandalous ankles in flapper dresses, a huge portion of women still held to their belief that a woman's place was in the home. While popular modern media would have us believe that all women gratefully burned their bras after they got the right to vote, it was more of a slow erosion of culture. Mothers still would have watched in horror when their daughter came home in a flapper dress or cut their hair short, fathers still would have reprimanded their little girl for bringing home such scandalous ideas.

Not every daughter was out participating in the change of culture, but a good many young women were. Not only young women, but some older women, as women were also granted a broader right to divorce their husbands, paving the way towards no fault divorce years later.

The 30s saw the Great Depression hit, and feminist ideas ground to a halt, along with the economy. The opulence of the 20s necessarily ceased as the Dust Bowl ravaged farm lands, and the US Government cracked down on imbibing alcohol. Through the 20s and 30s, crime rose significantly, and a lot of women went back home to find a way to feed their families as starvation struck.

Although the spirit of the 20s was much dampened by the Great Depression, that didn't erase the new ideals. Now, the media was quick to share the story of a certain Bonnie and Clyde, emphasizing, and certainly overblowing, the sex appeal of a young woman involved in crime, in an illicit relationship, murderous and hungry for blood. The only reason the story went down in history like it did is because a young woman was involved. It was flashy, it was sexy, and it was dangerous. Suddenly, there was a woman up there in lights like the other notorious villains of the 30s. She was a mobster, and the nation ate it up.

The 40s saw another world war, and the men all left, starting a new wave of what would ultimately become a new era for women.

The War Efforts and Aftermath

Through no fault of their own, and certainly no desire for most, women were suddenly being called upon to serve their country in a way they had never had to serve before. The men were gone, and the need for workers increased rather than diminished.

Women had a lot of work being demanded of them. The children still needed raising, Victory Gardens needed growing, homes needed tending, and now arms, munition, and food needed to be sent en mas to the front lines. And on top of all of that, almost every women in the United States was missing a loved one, and often doing all their own work, and the work of a father or husband entirely on her own.

But what choice was there? Every man, woman, and child played their part to bring their boys home. Hollywood, the government, the school system, every societal system we had built up until then was leaned on while we made it through one of the worst wars in recent history.

But eventually, the Germans were defeated, and the men came home. Life was expected to return to normal, but there was no way it ever fully could.

The women who had been in the workforce suddenly returned home to a different man than the one that had left at the start of the war, if there was a man at home at all. For those who survived, PTSD ran rampant, and mental health care was abysmally slow in catching up to the needs of the shell shocked soldiers coming home. No family was untouched. Fathers coming home missing limbs, brothers returning with severe nightmares, and many simply never seeing their families again left a lot of broken homes.

Some women had no choice but to seek work once again, but they were no longer welcomed with open arms like they had been during the war efforts. While the war had changed the men fighting, it had changed the women and children as well. Some women had been on the front lines alongside the men, many had suffered great losses, and all had felt the rush and bustle of wartime. Drudgery had been the norm for generations at this point, as the war came off of the Great Depression. Many women were hardened to it, and demanded to be treated with the same dignity as the returning soldiers. After all, had they not played their part as well?

Homes in the 1950s attempted to put back a sense of normalcy into America. The American dream was suddenly a nice car, a nice house, a picket fence, and mom and dad both able to be around.

But many homes remained broken. Mothers who had no husband were forced to find work, while still trying to maintain an orderly, or at least usable home, making it difficult or impossible to make ends meet. Fathers who were able to work spent a lot of time demanding silence from the women and children, scarred by the war. Children were insulated as parents worked their hardest to hide the horrors of just a few years prior from them, and it resulted in what would be one of the first generations of children to not be expected to be a useful member of the home, but rather a home was built around the needs and desires of the children.

With the rise of Better Living Through Chemistry, and the need for many households to have faster, more efficient methods of cleaning, things like automatic washing machines, microwaves, and vacuum cleaners began to take the country by storm. With so many women needing to work, the search for easier ways to keep house also rose, making women's jobs easier, but also making a lot of women fortunate enough to be in the home, quite bored.

The truth is, most families did not look like what we think of as a 1950s family. In many parts of America, poverty, inaccessibility, or just regular life kept a lot of families still looking a lot like they had 30 or 40 years prior. Poodle skirts, bright red lipstick, and a perfectly coifed hair-do were about as common as an Instagram model is now.

Remember, most of what we think we know of an era comes from the media, and they've been known to portray the 'ideal' rather than the reality.

While some women were in fact begrudgingly earning less than their male counterparts at work, in the 1950s, a lot more women were returning to a more conservative and old-fashioned way of life. Feminism was out there, but it was hardly at the fever-pitch it had been at during the Suffrage era. For most women, they were simply grateful to be alive after the war. But that quiet breath after the storm wasn't going to last for long, as the 1960s ushered in an all new version of Feminism.

The Sexual Revolution

The 1960s is pretty hardwired in our minds to represent modern Feminism. Free love, Civil Rights, Roe V Wade, Woodstock, The Equal Pay Act; the 60s was a turbulent era, with a very abrupt cultural and political change, some much needed, some devastating.

Coming off the fake perfection portrayed by the media of the 50s, a lot of young people were reaching the age of maturity, and bringing their fresh and moldable minds into Universities. Women were heading to college in droves during the 60s, and like colleges today, were learning ideas that their parents were closed off to.

Not that it was always a bad thing: the Civil Rights Movement had a lot of supporters from college campuses, and rightly so. Although the Suffragette Movement has

all but died by this point, the dawn of the 60s still saw that Black men and women were unable to cast a ballot legally. It wasn't until 1965 that Black women were afforded the same right to vote that White women had had for nearly 50 years.

As Jim Crow laws lifted, Black families were finally seeing governmental shifts in the treatment of them and their communities, although hold outs of racist ideals would sit in pockets of the United States for many years to come.

A new law was also being past thanks to rising demands; The Equal Pay Act. Prior to this, even during the War and subsequent fall out, employers were not legally required to pay women the same as men for equal or similar work. While a good many good employers would naturally do so, plenty of bad apples left a lot of women disenfrachised, especially when husbands and fathers didn't return home after the war. Thanks to the outcry from the rising working class, the US finally decides to pass a law requiring women be paid equally for equal work.

But aside from Civil Rights and demands for equal pay, college campuses were rife with a relatively new phenomenon: Free Love and the Sexual Revolution.

Gone were the days of sex outside of marriage being a taboo. Public nudity, pornography, easier access to contraceptives, and sex were fast becoming a cultural norm; at least among a loud part of the culture.

Much like previous eras, we often have a narrow view of times gone by. While Woodstock did have a massive turnout, and drugs and sex were a huge part of the gathering, there were still huge swaths of the United States that held traditional values. Catholicism, Christianity, and traditional Judeo-Christian western values were being pressed, and they pressed back. While some women did sneakily start taking the Pill to avoid pregnancy, a lot of women still accepted their role as wife and mother, and many young women still decided that abstinence until marriage was the way to go.

But it wasn't enough to stop a quickly degrading culture. As women gave up their virtues that had long been the cultural norm, they instead gained a lewdness and a brashness that would have made even the most hardened Suffragette blush. As women were pressed into believing that sex was the same as empowerment, so too came the consequences of that idea; STDs and Pregnancy.

Roe V. Wade

Roe V. Wade was passed in 1973, and with it, the culture shifted once again. In the 60s, there was still a lot of women who viewed being a homemaker and having children as a woman's main duty, but the 70s saw the rise of Latch-Key kids as women left their homes to go to work. This time, it wasn't because of war efforts, instead it was the result of the previous generation's efforts to bring 'equality' into the picture.

The new Feminism, what we now refer to as Second Wave Feminism, had been building in frenzy since the 60s. No longer was the roll of a housewife revered, now it was seen as something to get away from. No longer was it seen as essential for a mother to be home with her children, now careers needed to be tended to. All those women who went to college in the 60s were now mothers, or even still single, and didn't let anything stop them from being just like the man next door.

Single mothers also began to spike, as the Free Love movement inevitably had to lead to. As it turned out, having lots of sex leads to lots of pregnancy, and though abortion was now legal, many women still instead chose to give birth and raise their children on their own.

Young people, both male and female, were entrenching themselves in a culture of sex, drugs, and violence. The Punk Rock culture began to grow by leaps and bounds, leading to a fight against "The Man". Thinking they were the new counter culture, these young people expanded the Free Love idea into an even more dangerous way of life, using the excuse that they were fighting the good fight, although in reality, "The Man" was hardly ever anything concrete, and instead it was a vague, overbearing power that often took the form of their parents and grandparents. Free Love was no longer the mantra of the day, but now casual sex expanded beyond psychedelic drugs and Woodstock into heavy drugs, alcohol, violence, and yet more sex.

We have to remember though; just because the culture was beginning to shift, not all families followed in the new trends.

Conservative families still pushed back, but they were being drowned out. Many children born in the 70s and 80s can attest to growing up in a world that would have been completely foreign to their Grandparents. While some women were still choosing to stay home with children, marry and submit to their husbands, and follow a religious life, they were no longer considered the societal norm. What was once the radicals in the 1950s were now the moderates of the 1970s and 80s, and the build towards Third Wave Feminism was rising.

Third Wave Comes Crashing In

From the mid 1800s, when Suffragettes first introduced the idea of modern Feminism, to the early 2000s, American culture had seen a shift more abrupt than any era previous. We went from simply wanting the right to vote, to accepting that our roll of mother, wife, and homemaker is secondary to all else. We went from wanting equal pay when life demanded we must work, to demanding the right to kill our unborn children so we could continue to have consequence free sex. Things had changed, and there was no going back.

So now that women had the same rights as men, what else could Feminism dig it's claws into? This seemingly innocuous and innocent movement had already ravaged through households, turning them upside down and shaking the beating heart of Homemaker out of them and into the workforce, so what other things can it find to uproot the social norms of?

The Third Wave hit hard in the 90s and early 2000s, as women no longer were simply championing the right to vote, or equal pay, now they were taking on the complex matters of consequence free sex, gay pride, and the body positivity movement.

While these hardly seem like issues pertaining to just women, American culture no longer was pervaded by primarily Judeo-Christian values; now Tolerance was becoming the leading religion of the day, and Feminists gobbled it up.

Citing the Civil Rights Act, Feminists became ever more militant in their search for perfect equality among all; not just between men and women, but between races, classes, sexes, and sexual identities.

Gay Pride was now coming out in waves as well, throwing more sex-positivity into the already sex-obsessed culture. Body Positivity was encouraging women to love all bodies, and in the process, show them off. Consequence Free Sex meant the need for easy access to abortions, contraceptives, and no need for a family unit during young life, so the average age a woman decided to get married got increasingly older.

So was this it? Were women just going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, have sex with strangers, refuse to marry, and have careers and abortions instead of homes and families?

Like always, there were women who pushed back. My mother was one of them during this era, and when I was young, she pulled me out of school, gave up the Feminist teachings that had been instilled in her from her youth, and turned her heart to home. She had a long way to go, however, because Black women were targeted twice as hard in her youth with the Free Love flavor of Feminism, and she faced a lot of people assuming she was a single mother in my youth, simply because she was black. Her parents grew up in the 60s, and had been in their prime during the Civil Rights Era, and her mother was proudly one of the Feminist women who championed not only Civil Rights and married a black man in the early 70s, but also championed her right to leave her home in shambles and her children to fend for themselves as she sauntered off on an unfulfilling career in factories and gas stations (no hate to my grandmother, she was very much a product of her time).

Women who were raising families in the 90s and early 2000s who felt the call of traditional womanhood had very little to look on as a guide. Their mothers had been among those who fully embraced leaving anything traditional behind. My own mother was born the same year Roe V. Wade was passed, and never knew life before women had access to abortion, and sex was deeply permeated into the culture she grew up in.

By the time I was born in the mid 90s, we were already rushing headlong into Fourth Wave Feminism, and a movement which hardly even resembled the First Wave Suffragette movement at all.

The Death of Tradition

Modern times are so vastly different from the era of our grandmothers and great grandmothers that they would hardly even recognize us anymore. Biblical womanhood is mocked relentlessly by not just the media, but by other women. You're seen as weak-minded and brainwashed if you have the deeply biological desire to raise a family and be protected by your husband, because Feminism is no longer about simply fighting for the rights of women to do as they please, but now it's fighting to make sure that women are not treated as, viewed as, or acting like women. Case in point, the recent controversy where a man wrote into a magazine asking for advice on how to convince his wife to return to work after a year of maternity leave, only for her to realize she preferred to stay home. He was given the very culturally accepted advice that a woman staying home with her own children is 'selfish' and 'setting a bad example for their child'. Here's the entire Twitter thread, if you want to dive into that mess.

Certainly, there are pockets of 'traditional femininity', but it's often still mired in sex and perversion of womanhood. The term submission no longer brings to mind a gentle wife who defers to her husband's judgment on a matter, now it's about whips and chains and degrading sex. Women who act 'feminine' tend to lean heavily on their sex appeal to men to achieve the attention and affection they should be getting from their husband. Trad-Fem has gained a lot of traction in the last several years, but it's mostly an aesthetic, rather than a lifestyle. Picnic baskets, soft pink, flowers, and sunshine are all part of the aesthetic taking hold, but it's not truly feminine, and it's not just for women. Soft boys have invaded a formerly female space, and feminists who look like a woman, but act like the women of the Feminist movement; harsh, brash, and still demanding abortions for all.

On the flip side, as the 2000s and 2010s wore on, women were being pushed aside by biological men who wanted to be in the female space. And why not? If women can step into every male-dominated space, why can men not enter women-only zones?

This did not simply extend into formerly female-held jobs like mothering and housekeeping. As the LGBT movement was championed by Third and Fourth Wave Feminists, Transgender Feminist began to creep their way in, to the horror of some feminists as well.

The biological men were starting to be discontent with the way the world was treating them; women were taking front and center stage everywhere, with demands to be treated 'fairly' and 'equally' but still enjoy the privileges that come with being a woman. Women were given preferential treatment in the family court, divorce court, and still expected to be protected by men, while also pushing their way into a workforce that demanded more of them than they could physically handle. Firefighters suddenly had to lower their entrance tests because women demanded to be let in, and claimed it was unfair they they couldn't keep up with the men. Female soldiers were held to different standards than men. Even women entering the mundane office world were suddenly complaining and demanding change because men kept the AC too low.

As time wore on, there was no sacred place for men any longer, as Feminism had firmly taken root in every aspect of society, even in churches where women took lead of the pastoral duties. And so, backed into a corner, more men began to take on the roll of women. Male makeup artists got more views on YouTube than female makeup artists, people like Jeffree Star, James Charles, and Shane Dawson taking the formerly female dominated makeup world by storm. Male fashion designers dominated the field. Men were staying home with children as their wives took to the corporate world. Things had not only changed, the world was flipped on it's head.

And now, in modern times, Women are nothing, and Men are nothing. Being a woman is a feeling; one that can change drastically by the day. Being a woman can be wearing makeup and dresses one day, and wearing leather and chains the next. Even the bare basics are under assault; pregnancy and nursing. Biological women are choosing now to live their life as a man, but still deciding to get pregnant and carry a child, leading the media to praise the 'brave men who are pregnant'. We are told that menstruation can happen to anyone and are instructed to call them 'period havers' instead of girls, we are told that 'pregnant person' is more acceptable than pregnant mother, and that 'chest-feeding' is better than breastfeeding because not all breastfeeding people have female breasts.

If it all sounds a little insane, it's because it is. Men are not women, and women are not men, and never ever were we designed to fulfill the same rolls.

But surely desiring the right to vote couldn't have led us down this slippery slope into womanhood meaning absolutely nothing, right? How could wanting equal pay have brought us to a day and age where equality simply means that nothing is sacred and nobody has a special purpose anymore?

It's not the right to vote that brought us here, but rather, that was a symptom of questioning God's authority and his plan for us.

The Root of the Problem

It might sound radically backwards of me to say that women gaining the right to vote led us to murder, sex, drugs, and violence, and it's certainly a gross overstatement of the single act of voting. Women's Suffrage itself is not what got us here, it's what Women's Suffrage stood for.

For most of human history, the majority of women were perfectly content to fulfill their duties within the home, within Judeo-Christian cultures. It wasn't a question of children getting in the way of her higher calling; children were the highest calling. She didn't have to weigh the pros and cons of marriage, or the ramifications of changing her last name because she wasn't thinking about anything else as an option.

It sounds entirely backwards and abusive to us now, that women didn't have other options. Of course, they did. Women have always had options outside of marriage, in ministry especially, but as nurses, midwives, teachers, and helpers in many rolls. That being said, the main goal of women throughout most of human history has been the same; marry a good man, have children with him, raise those children to start their own families, and keep a good house. That might have looked slightly different through the ages, but the core of the goal was the same, in particular among Judeo-Christian cultures.

America was founded on Judeo-Christian values, that is to say, many of our ancestors came here to escape persecution by the Catholic church and the Church of England. The sudden degradation of society is hardly sudden or surprising at all; no culture has ever been able to withstand the test of time without God at the center.

And why is that? The Bible doesn't leave women out when discussing the way we should treat each other. Women are a protected class, because we are the weaker sex, but equally, we are not seen as lesser than men. Our roll in society is completely different but equally as important.

Women were given inheritance in the Bible (Numbers 36 as an example) and given free reign to choose a husband of their choice. Women were also given gifts by their families and future families, that were purely and entirely for them (Genesis 24). In this chapter in Genesis, Rebecca is asked by her mother if she wants to go with Abraham's servant to marry Isaac, giving her the choice, just as in Numbers, the daughters are told to choose husbands of their own. But do you know where women were not allowed to inherit? In England, during the 1700 and 1800s. Once a woman was married, all her possessions then belonged to her husband, and if they became tied up in any legal matters, could easily go to the first male family member, bypassing the daughters entirely and leaving a widow and daughters destitute (both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen are good examples of women's issues of the day).

Women were also given specific rights to leave, or divorce, their husband in the Bible. If a man decided to take a second wife, he was not allowed to decrease the things she is owed (food, clothing, or the marital rights, which would include sex and children), and if he does suddenly stop providing for her because he's moved on to another woman, she is allowed her freedom with no consequences, and allowed to return to her father for protection (Exodus 21:10-11). Women were demanding the right to divorce their husbands in the 18th and 19th century during first wave feminism, although it was already their God-given right in specific circumstances. After feminism got ahold of a right that should already have been afforded women, no fault divorces was the next logical step, which was never God's plan for us, and led to a massive spike in both men and women being discontent and leaving their spouse to chase after fleeting pleasure.

Women were not given their Biblical rights by the law or society, and took these matters into their own hands. Rather than turning to scripture to solve this issue, they followed their emotions and let their anger lead them, creating a new movement of feminists who would ultimately demand far more than was their right.

From simply wanting the legal right to leave an abusive spouse (which was already their biblical right), to wanting the right to have their own possessions (which was also their biblical right), to wanting to right for their voice to be heard in the land in which they lived (which was a right afforded to a very select few and not merely withheld from women), women certain have had grievances and suffrage throughout history. But rather than demanding that the men in charge read their Bible and follow God's law, they wanted new laws written, quite simply, because mankind has always been intent on following their own wills rather than our Creator's.

Feminism, Free Love, Abortions, Suffrage, the right to vote; none of it will solve the problem of an unfair or degrading society. We were already given a perfect law, one that made allowances for wives to air their grievances, to demand to be cared for, to inherit, to raise families, to live a life that was fulfilling and free from the petty issues we still deal with to this day. The answers that the world gives us has lead to discontentment, broken men and women, and murder.

The only cure for our broken society is a full turn back to where God intended us to be. The Law isn't merely a list of 10 Commands, it's in depth protection for the poorest among us, for women, for children, and even for men. No human can ever account for the full depravity of a human's heart, but God can, because He is the only one who can see our hearts and understand what extent humans can and will go to when left to our own devices, and so only He was able to create laws that would cover all the bases.

Any society, including Israel, that turned their back on God's commands were ultimately destroyed by their own evil-doing. It's not enough to say that we can rely on our own moral compass; we are inherently flawed, and especially as women, we go through so many emotional and hormonal shifts in a brief 28 day period that we can't rely on how we feel to govern us. We must rely on a perfect source. We can't ask fallible humans to guide us, because they have guided us time and again into sin.

It's never what we think it's going to be, we never start by murdering our children in cold blood. Eve didn't go looking to break God's one and only law; she was out talking to a serpent. And serpents abound in our world. As soon as we take matters into our own hands, as soon as we think we know more than the one who created us, as soon as we think we are more wise than God himself, we start right back down the path to destruction.

And what is God's law? It's the Torah.

So What Are We To Do?

I will assume that you've read this far because you, like me, hate our modern culture. You cry for every lost child, every degraded woman, and the abounding sin our culture tries to force us to accept. You might be struggling alone, or have a small community built around you, but either way, you've seen the writing on the wall and you know that Woman isn't just a feeling, and Wife isn't just an abstract idea.

We, as women, are called to something greater than ourselves. We are called to serve, and for many of us, that's serving our husband and raising our children. If the idea of submitting and serving your husband gets your ire up, you're not alone. I felt the same way many years ago in the beginning of my marriage. But since I have chosen to fully turn my life over to God and follow His design for me, I have also realized there is a great peace in being who I am supposed to be.

I am not saying it's easy, to be like the Proverbs 31 woman. And I am not saying I even come close to getting it right all the time. But when you read the Scripture, when you apply it to your life, and when you stop looking to our broken culture for answers, things work out much easier.

I certainly have faced backlash from my choice to be a mother and wife. I've never been to college, I got married at 18, and had my first child before I turned 20. I stay home with my children now, I homeschool them, and I follow the lead of my husband, even if it's not something I particularly desire to do. And because of that, there is a deeper peace in my home, and my heart. I've had people tell me I'm being brainwashed, ask what my backup plan is in case he abuses me or I don't want to stay married, tell me I'm insane for what I'm doing, and that I've set women back 50 years. They've criticized my age, my choices, my religious beliefs, and tried to tell me I'm harming myself and my children by being a submissive wife, or by trying to be what a Biblical woman looks like.

The World will always try and stop you from following the Bible. Everything the World loves goes against Scripture. Feminism isn't just about equality; it's about breaking up families, flipping homes upside down, and shaking us all out into the streets because a person is easier to attack if they're alone. Strong family units make it harder for bad ideas to creep in.

I do not have all the answers. I am not perfect. I sin and fall short often. But I want to follow God's plan for me, as a woman, and that means going against a culture that tells me that being Anti-Feminist, being Anti-Abortion, not supporting sexual perversions, lies, and things that God calls sin makes me sexist, racist, homophobic, and a million other 'bad' buzzword phrases. I've been hesitant to share this post for over a month now, constantly rereading and editing it because I know backlash for this type of wrong-think is inevitable.

But God didn't call us to get cozy in the World. He will come back one day, with a sword to judge us. I have a lot of friends and family out there that I care deeply about, and if sharing things like this, that make everyone uncomfortable, can get brains firing or plant a seed to think about things, to read your Bible, and to realize we've been tricked and lied to by the World since the Serpent and Eve, then it's worth it.

Read your Bible. Shut out the world. Decide who you serve; the God of the Bible, or the Fallen World?

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