In August 2023, I posted an essay that explored the biblical characteristics of marriage, focusing on the institution’s theological context, civic role, and hierarchical structure as revealed in Scripture. The description of marriage I offered differs significantly from the one assumed in modern Western culture. Yet Western Civilization was deeply shaped by the Christian worldview of the institution. So, how have our families, neighbors, and even some of our fellow congregants come to see biblical marriage as aberrant and radical?
While numerous factors have contributed to the current situation, feminism has undoubtedly played a major role. Since the late eighteenth century, modern feminists have been working to restructure society away from traditional norms. In some cases, those cultural expectations needed to be changed, but they also rejected biblical norms in the process. This became most clear in the twentieth century. Since the Roe v. Wade verdict and the Stop ERA campaign led by Phyllis Schlafley in the 1970s, conservative Christians have largely agreed that Second Wave Feminism (beginning in the early 1960s) was antithetical to a Christian worldview.
Second wave feminists famously rejected the institution of marriage as having “entrapped, frustrated, and oppressed” women.[1] Some, like Betty Friedan, called marriage a “comfortable concentration camp” while others, like Kate Millett, embraced lesbianism as the culmination of feminist thought on relationships with men.[2] They argued that women are better off having nothing to do with men, embracing unfettered birth control and abortion, and celebrating all manner of deviant sexuality. There was little common ground to share with Christians other than opposition to sexual exploitation of women.[3]
On the other hand, first wave feminists of the nineteenth century often are lauded even in conservative circles for their labor to garner expanded economic, educational, legal, and political freedoms for women.[4] While first wave feminists certainly offer many successes that are worthy of our support, philosopher and intellectual historian Carrie Gress rightly argues that they fundamentally misdiagnosed what was ailing women. They believed the source of women’s suffering was in being perceived as different from men. Their solution was to eliminate those differences as much as possible by ignoring their womanhood.[5] As a result, the definition of woman has been slowly erased to the point that Daily Wire contributor Matt Walsh had extreme difficulty finding anyone in the West to provide an answer to his question, “What is a woman?” in his 2022 documentary.
For this reason, Gress has rightly argued that while we need to celebrate and preserve women’s legal protections against abuse and discrimination along with their ability to pursue educational and economic activity, we need to reassess the foundational ideas of feminism put forward in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is not a mission to undermine the wellbeing of women. Rather, she seeks to show that “feminism has not been the boon for women that it has been presented as.”[6] Along similar lines, this essay will consider how the earliest leaders of feminist thinking like Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gougues, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton approached the subject of marriage. Gress explains that when we take time to look into the writings of these women, we find that “feminism wasn’t hijacked by the second wave, making it into something new” but rather that the seeds of the most radical aspects of twentieth and twenty-first century feminism were sown over two hundred years ago.[7]
Breaking Marriage
The earliest foundational writings for modern feminism were produced in late eighteenth-century Europe. Numerous Enlightenment thinkers argued that marriage was a superstitious practice that harmed both men and women. William Godwin, well known atheist, anarchist, and the husband of the foundational feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft believed that monogamous relationships unnaturally enslaved male sexuality. Instead, men and women should set aside religious sexual prescriptions and embrace free and open sexuality without commitment.
Wollstonecraft agreed, even though she knew from personal experience the physical, emotional, and social trauma that flowed in the wake of unfaithful lovers and bearing a child out of wedlock.[8] She and Godwin set aside their “rational” principles and wed in order to avoid the unpleasant consequences of their abstract theories. However, they continued to maintain that marriage unnecessarily constrained sexual desire—an idea their only daughter, Mary, adopted when at the age of sixteen she took the married Percy Bysshe Shelley as a lover and then drew her stepsister into the sexual relationship.[9]
Wollstonecraft believed that the key characteristics of humanity were reason and political action.[10] Thus, she argued that marriage was bad for women because it served as a “cage” that kept them from actualizing their freedom as human beings by limiting their pursuit of intellectual and political accomplishments. She eschewed the “homage” they received from men for their beauty, constancy, and feminine grace, even within the bounds of marriage, and demanded to be treated with the same respect that was shared between men.[11]
For Wollstonecraft, marriage serves only to burden women with domestic responsibilities and children, which keeps them from becoming fully human.[12] Thus, in part, Wollstonecraft’s dissatisfaction with the institution was motivated by her refusal to consider women as different from men in any sense other than anatomy.
A contemporary of Wollstonecraft’s, the French revolutionary and early feminist thinker Olympe de Gouges also despised marriage. However, her perception of the problem was much more militant. She argued that the whole history of humanity was a narrative of sexual warfare, with men systematically oppressing women through the institutions of marriage, the church, and the state.[13] Like Wollstonecraft, Gouges found nothing rational or beneficial to women about marriage other than avoiding social scorn for children born out of wedlock.
The work of Wollstonecraft and Gouges influenced the thinking of many men and women as the tenants of the Enlightenment were adopted by middle- and upper-class Europeans and then Americans during the nineteenth century. Their thinking on marriage clearly informed the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a group of other radical female social reformers in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.
An adaptation of the American Declaration of Independence, theirdocument consists of a brief preamble only slightly adjusted from their model, a list of offenses, and some specific resolutions. To conclude the preamble, Stanton wrote, “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”[14] In another context, her critique of marriage was even more direct and trenchant, arguing that the institution was “nothing more nor less than legalized prostitution” which gave free reign to men’s lust for sexual gratification and power.[15]
Broken Women
Carrie Gress has wisely incorporated biography into her treatment of feminism, compassionately describing the shattered lives of early feminists. Many of these women had very bad experiences with men as fathers, lovers, and husbands. Wollstonecraft came from a horrific home where her mother was regularly beaten and raped by the man who was supposed to love her sacrificially as a spouse. Before marrying Godwin, Wollstonecraft was seduced, impregnated, and then abandoned by an American businessman. Her daughters fared no better with men. As Gress shows in The End of Woman, Wollstonecraft’s family is only one example of many that can be found among leading feminists of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.
The suffering of these women at the hands of men should never be minimized but should also inform how we receive their critiques. They did not have a full picture of what the relationship between men and women could be. Gress notes that other educated and intellectually active women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries disagreed sharply with Wollstonecraft and her followers, arguing that marriage had brought them great happiness and left them with no desire for “a further degree of liberty.”[16]
For their part, even the women of Seneca Falls admitted that “they had never been subjected to the full brunt of the wrongs they set forth” in their list of grievances which they imagined to be broadly representative of all women’s experience.[17] In fact, they took quite a long time to form the list they eventually put together.[18] At first, their meeting produced only abstract complaints about rights and privileges without many specifics. Eventually, as feminist historian Sally McMillan explains, Stanton’s husband, Henry, who had a background in law, “helped Elizabeth locate particular laws to ground their concerns in reality.”[19] This context does not mean their list of grievances should be disregarded out-of-hand, but it does mean that we should be cautious about how much legitimacy we give to every concern raised by them.
Conclusion
To avoid any confusion, my critiques of feminism are not intended to undermine the value of women in society or limit their current freedoms. We should be thankful that women have much more opportunity in our modern world to pursue property ownership, education, labor outside the home, and political action. However, as Carrie Gress argues, “it is also possible to lament the way those opportunities came about.”[20]
In their pursuit of social change, feminists have rejected God’s design for sexuality and marriage, as well as other issues that we have not addressed in this essay. Instead of calling for a more Christlike relationship between men and women, they have sought to destroy the very institution that can best provide the love and respect they desire.
[1] Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 13.
[2] Carrie Gress, The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2023), 74, 88.
[3] Even this slight area of agreement between second wave feminists and conservative Christians was lost in the 1990s when third wave feminists embraced pornography and prostitution as symbols of feminine power rejecting the moral standards of society.
[4] For a good example, see Carrie L. Lukas, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism, Politically Incorrect Guide Series (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2006).
[5] Gress, The End of Woman, xxiv.
[6] Gress, The End of Woman, xxi.
[7] Gress, The End of Woman, xxii–xxiii.
[8] Gress, The End of Woman, 11.
[9] Gress, The End of Woman, 25, 33–34.
[10] For a discussion of Wollstonecraft’s thought on the humanity of women and its relationship to the pursuit of reason and political action, see Elizabeth G. Sledziewski, “The French Revolution as the Turning Point,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in A History of Women in the West: Volume IV, Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War ed. Geneviéve Fraisse and Michelle Perrot (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1993), 44–46.
[11] Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (Dublin: James Moore, 1793), 65, 66, https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_a-vindication-of-the-rig_wollstonecraft-mary_1793/.
[12] Gress, The End of Woman, 17.
[13] Sledziewski, “The French Revolution,” 43.
[14] Elizabeth Cady Stanton et. al., Declaration of Sentiments, reproduced in Sally G. McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement, Pivotal Moments in American History Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 237–241.
[15] McMillen, Seneca Falls, 119.
[16] Sarah Trimmer to Mrs. M., July 12, 1792, in Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Trimmer, with Original Letters, and Meditations and Prayer, Selected from her Journal (London, 1814), 2:354–55, cited in Gress, The End of Woman, 18.
[17] McMillen, Seneca Falls, 89.
[18] Gress, The End of Woman, 48–50.
[19] McMillen, Seneca Falls, 88.
[20] Gress, The End of Woman, xxii.
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