Women in our society have traditionally been treated with a unique honor and respect. Were we always treated fairly? Not entirely -- there was a time when we couldn’t vote. There was a time when women couldn’t own property. True. But since forever men have been showing us, even in small ways, that what we have to offer society is paramount. We can make babies and without babies, mankind cannot fulfill even the most basic mandate -- multiply and fill the earth.

In my misspent youth I found Gloria Steinem inspiring and myself ill-used. This phase petered out quickly because my life as a stay-at-home, go-to-night-school wife and mom was really pretty nice. And the more history I read, the more of the Bible I digested, the more I came to appreciate that I was doing the most important thing I could be doing -- raising amazing children.

We humans seem to have done that “filling the earth” thing well, and for the most part, at least in western civilization, we have raised our children well.

But things changed during the 60s and 70s. The birth-control pill followed by Roe vs. Wade in 1973 set off massive alterations.  Yes, those alterations gave us the freedom to bear only as many children as we wanted, when we wanted, but it also left us dealing with a different mandate -- to have sex whenever with whomever. Our precious place as God’s assistant in the giving of life evaporated.

Time was when a woman had a valid and compelling reason for saying “No.” It was an understandable reason.  Time was when marriage was necessary to provide for the inevitable pregnancies in a long-term relationship, but now it’s just a cultural quaintness, a last vestige of romantic protocol. 

In fact, romance in general (once the headquarters of feminine thought) has shriveled in this atmosphere of sexual immediacy. Romance thrived on sublimation, on hesitation, on a sense of the significance of such intimacy. But no more. Women are now just a partner in a game called coitus and gone is the mystery, the anticipation, the delight.

Since people could have sex without the burden of children, without the blessing of children, we no longer see that act as particularly important, personal, or affectionate. It lost its mystique, its romantic panache, its profundity. Women went from fertility goddesses to buddies who could play the sex game -- a purposeless game.

The game is now purposeless because life, with the mandatory Darwinian mindset, is just happenstance and nothing more. In fact, Darwin’s misapprehension of our origins may well be at the bottom of most, if not all, of our societal and individual malaise. It can be argued that Darwin and his attitude about the superiority of the male has leaked into masculine condescension toward women in the workplace. Was the glass ceiling of Darwinian origin?

Nevertheless, in the past, women have been the recipients of male deference. Men have opened our doors, taken off their hats, pulled out our chairs, and walked on the street side of the walkways. Those are little things, but they blossomed out of a concern for female abilities and weaknesses, from a recognition of our special place in the scheme of things, from male tenderness and respect.

We women have robbed ourselves of those tiny privileges. Too many of us felt that these politenesses demonstrated a contempt, a condescension that couldn’t be tolerated, but by rejecting these niceties, we have offended those who would have been our protectors, and, even worse, in so doing we have robbed men of their manly identity. It’s no wonder that men now wear skinny jeans and man-buns, carry purses and sip lattes. I recently heard a news clip of a modern woman bemoaning the fact that all manly men were conservative. Well, of course. A conservative man still sees women as special and precious and essential. A leftist rarely does.

In the past women had dormitories and bathrooms to ourselves, female-only prisons, sports teams for just women, clubs and organizations just for women. Why? Because our vulnerabilities are different from men’s. Because our purpose in life is different from men’s. Because our interests are different from men’s. Society has long since placed women in an exalted position. That may be uncomfortable sometimes, but it is valuable nevertheless.

That pedestal position has been a limitation for those of us with other ambitions -- this is true. But in Sweden, where workplace opportunities carry no restrictions at all, studies find that men and women naturally segregate themselves into more-or-less traditional roles. So maybe those traditional roles are anchored in something other than “white male patriarchy.” However, in being free to follow our dreams, have we neglected our children?  Since the world is so heavily populated now, are children anything necessary?

Apparently, children are now a threat. They say we’ll all “carbon” ourselves to death if we keep having children, because they will keep having children and our numbers will continue to increase. If you believe the globe is warming, or whatever it’s doing, then this has to be alarming. Are children (and therefore women) merely carbon footprints like cows and their indiscriminate flatulence?

It appears from the recent urgency about sex change for children that reproduction has gone out of style -- a condition that doesn’t bode well for our species. There’s a serious misapprehension afoot that feels comfortable with the idea of depopulation, and yet both history and logic show that once that downward spiral gets started, it builds momentum and pretty soon there aren’t enough workers to produce all that needs producing. Who will do the farming? Who will fix our roads, fight our fires, teach our children? And whose children are the ones that do get born? According to our president, they don’t belong to the women who bore them. They belong to the state. And now several states are drafting legislation that will allow the state to take children away from their parents if the parents object to those children being neutered. That’s the lowest blow anyone can hit a woman with -- the state-sanctioned kidnapping of her child for the purposes of mutilating that child. Is that where women’s lib intended to go? I don’t think so, but here we are.

So if our children aren’t even ours, women will be even less likely to bear them. And that will render us useless. Our special mystique can hold no sway in such a society. We no longer are a protected group and neither are the kids. If the Titanic sank today, would women and children be first on the lifeboats? I doubt it.

Already women have lost privacy in personal hygiene. We are no longer protected from male muscularity and aggression. We are no longer protected from sexual assault and even the Me Too movement has done nothing to solve that problem. Women nowadays are merely available and disposable. 

It's not as if males playing dress-up ever really look like women. Actually, most of the drag queens I’ve seen publicized look more demonic than they do feminine. They look like mean-spirited, giant caricatures of women, like an attempt to erase women. In fact, women are being erased. John’s Hopkins University has even removed the term “woman” from its glossary, replacing it with “non-man.” That’s quite a demotion.

Are we too far over the waterfall to pull things back? Maybe, but I believe that with God all things are possible.  The key phrase there is “with God,” and we started losing Him also in the 60s when we formally outlawed prayer in schools. We may have a generation left to right this, if enough of us want to, if enough of us pray and enlist His power, then maybe. 

Deana Chadwell is an adjunct professor and department head at Pacific Bible College in southern Oregon. She teaches writing, logic, and literature. She can be contacted at dchad_02@charter.net. 

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