Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

by Rebekah Merkle

In the same way that the out-of-bounds lines and the fixed and unchanging ten-foot hoops in basketball are what create the court itself, and therefore the ability to play the game, so too the boundaries of gender are what create the possibility of excelling as a woman.

problematic.

He doesn’t want us to run away from the world; he actually expects us to charge at the world. To change the world. The last instructions that Christ gave to His church before He ascended into Heaven were to go and “baptize the nations.” Those are our marching orders. We’re not supposed to baptize a few people from every nation, we’re supposed to baptize the nations. That involves winning entire cultures over to Christ, not just a few individual hearts.

The Great Commission is the New Covenant expansion of the Creation Mandate given to the human race in Genesis. Initially our job was to fill the earth and subdue it (Gen. 1:28). Now there’s an additional component: we need to convert and baptize the world (Matt. 28:19).

It would involve disciplining ourselves in the small, seemingly inconsequential areas of our lives—what we admire, what we try to get good at, what we strive for, what we prioritize, what we love.

How did it come about that our obviously natural, creational, biological role as women has become an awkward disqualification from being a respectable human? A role that, if we can’t shake off completely, we must at least have the decency to keep distant and mostly invisible? At some point, American motherhood became reduced to one of those brainless, menial jobs that no college graduate should ever have to demean themselves by accepting.

But a woman raising her children is not only shaping the next generation, she is also shaping little humans who are going to live forever. The souls she gave birth to are immortal. Immortal. And somehow, our culture looks at a woman who treats that as if it might be an important task and says, “It’s a shame she’s wasting herself. She could be doing something important—like filing paperwork for insurance claims.”

Susan B. Anthony was born in Massachusetts into a Quaker family, although by the end of her life she was thoroughly agnostic.

Sanger was the daughter of an atheist socialist, and she herself became involved in the radical leftist politics of the pre-World War I Greenwich Village set.

The mere fact that her book was so successful shows us that America was full of disillusioned, disenchanted, and unhappy wives (it wasn’t the men buying her book, after all), and the widespread, enthusiastic response in some sense vindicated her argument.

We tend to want to look at the ’50s as that moment when America was happy and healthy and wholesome—before the radical ’60s bundled us all into the handbasket and launched us on our journey to Hell.

The moment when the wife finally snaps and leaves her husband is not the first moment in which she became unhappy.

The seeds of our current feminism, therefore, go back farther than Friedan and her theories about the feminine mystique. She never would have gotten traction with this argument unless the women of America were already eager, ready, almost desperate to hear it!

According to the World Bank, the total fertility rate (or average number of children per woman) in America in 1960 was 3.65. There was a dramatic drop in the ’60s, and by 1976 it had dropped down to 1.74—less than half of what it was a mere sixteen years earlier. That statistic has roughly hovered a little below 2 ever since.

If we, today, somehow managed to successfully recreate the ’50s, we would also have unavoidably recreated the preconditions for the ’60s. Those two decades are a package deal.

Getting bored and fussy about God’s blessings is not a small deal, and sometimes when we demand more from God, He gives it to us and we choke on it.

When Paul was wrongly imprisoned, he didn’t commence organizing a prison riot or, for that matter, go on a hunger strike. And yet, aggressively demanding that everyone give women what is owed to us has been the entire campaign strategy of the feminist movement from Day One.

One of the reasons that feminists took the route they did (that of demanding respect rather than deciding to earn it) was that they believed, along with Friedan, that the home simply did not offer the scope for anything. What was there to do in the home besides change diapers and dust?

Trajectory matters, and the trajectory of the feminist movement has been opposed to Christianity since Day One.

Out of the feminist leaders whom we have looked at, each and every one of them was not just a generic unbeliever who had never thought about religion one way or another—each one was philosophically opposed to Christianity, and that is not an irrelevant detail.

The feminist cause has been advanced for the last two centuries in large part through the diligent efforts of sincere but muddle-headed Christians who never bothered to ask how and why, and jumped on board anyway—and now they’re confused by all the consequences they never saw coming.

Is this true?

And if God designed women for a specific purpose, if there are fixed limits on the feminine nature, then surely it would follow that when we are living in accordance with those limits and purpose we will be in our sweet spot.

So the first thing we should note about the creation of Eve is that she was created specifically to assist Adam in his work, because he was insufficient for the task of conquering a world alone.

We live with the reality of our fertility monthly. This is not a minor part of our design, it is our design. And the feminist agenda has been systematically attempting to separate women from their creational purpose in this regard for the last century and more.

And having one person chosen to be the “head” (1 Cor. 11:3) makes us assume that those responsible for placing that person in charge must think that person is inherently better at certain things—that must be why they were chosen for the task.

Are not men better at certain things? And women also better at certain things?

Man was created as the image and glory of God, but then along came the woman—second—in an even more concentrated form. The glory of the glory of God. If men are the beer, women are the whiskey. The most potent, strong, and intoxicating version of the glory of God, not the weakest and most watered down. And ironically, this is exemplified by her being created second, as an equal but a helper, as an equal who willingly submits to her head.

Is this true?

Women need to stop being so offended about being asked to submit to an equal. Christ did not consider it robbery to humble Himself and submit to an equal, and neither should we,

We can take the love of a man and woman and turn it into a fat little baby—a separate and distinct living picture of the oneness of his parents.

Pride here? God does the weaving in a woman’s body, not the woman.

We embody, we enflesh, we multiply, and we transform cultures. Eve is fruitfulness.

This is why the cultural fruit of feminism is as intentionally ugly and barren as lesbianism. When submission leaves, the glory and the beauty and the fertility leave right along with it. If glory is a flame, submission is the oxygen that it needs in order to burn.

If there is a household, the wife and mother of that household is the one who should be running it.

The Proverbs 31 woman is an impressive, hardworking, high-achieving, high-earning woman—but it is all aimed at her people.

We don’t know all of this from the text.

I would never say that a wife’s place is in the home, but I would absolutely say that a wife’s priority should be her home.

Her home should be what she is pointed at, not the thing that she’s trying to escape. As soon as a job (or anything else) begins to pull us away from our families, then we need to stop and reevaluate, remembering where God wants us to be focused.

Practically speaking, how could any job outside the home not pull a wide away from her family?

This more distinct separation of the spheres (combined with a substantial jump in standard of living) eventually led to a trivializing of the woman’s traditional role, which had come to be seen as less difficult and less profound than the work being done “out there” by the husband.

Our society may have iPhones, but it is rootless, disconnected, isolated, and unhappy. We have airplanes, which means that we can drift and wander more quickly and efficiently. We have Twitter and Snapchat, but no family tables and no loyalty.

We need to stop assuming there is a fixed limit to what can be done in the home—I’m convinced the boundaries are much farther out than any of us realize.

It’s all too easy for us to work in order that we may have leisure, rather than working because we’re convinced that we’re building something phenomenal—and that mindset makes absolutely all the difference in the world.

To quote Henry V, “I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country’s fashion. We are the makers of manners, Kate.”

Let’s say that you’re confronted with a house that’s less than ideal in some way, or circumstances that make it difficult. It’s tempting to give up and resent your lot in life, but actually, complication and difficulty are the soil in which true innovation and artistry grow. “Necessity is the mother of invention” is not just a truism, it’s actually true.

a real challenge is also a real opportunity for satisfaction in your work.

When women, as a group, left their battle stations and wandered away, the one thing we can’t say about them is that they were being bold and fearless.

The home is the beating heart that powers everything else. The home nurtures, feeds, provides rest, gives shelter, and creates a loyalty to itself that is one of the strongest and most compelling of all human emotions.

When Titus says that women should be keepers of the home, it’s important to realize that a home is bigger than the walls of the house. The home is made up of the people that house shelters, and that is where the true focus needs to be. Because of that, there are many ways in which a woman could work outside the home in a way that makes the home itself more potent, more glorious, more compelling.

Fruitfulness and fertility are what Eve was created for.

The Bible is pretty clear that one role women are not to fill is that of preacher or elder in the church, and this has caused a great deal of angst among women who would like to be both Christians and feminists. Paul really could not be clearer on the subject: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man” (1 Tim. 2:12 nkjv).

Our jobs are important because they are poetry. Because they shape loves and they shape loyalties, they teach and they convict. They’re important because they take glorious truths and make them incarnate, make them visible, and weave them into the souls of the people around us.

Wives are told in 1 Peter that they are capable of winning their husbands without a word—and that’s because we can be compelling, powerful, and persuasive without it (1 Pet. 3:1). If wives returned to their battle stations in this way, I think they would find that their husbands would suddenly start performing a whole lot better themselves.

You take the truth of the gospel and you translate it into beautiful and compelling and incarnate life which preaches the goodness of God to everyone surrounding you. Every Christian woman is called to this, regardless of her particular station in life.

As soon as women start demanding “equality” at the top of their lungs they kill the glory, because the essence of glory is dependent on difference. Imagine a poignant, bone-chilling vocal harmony—and then imagine what would happen to it if the equality police came in to insist that everyone sing on the same note instead. We have to be willing to embrace the fact that women are different from men.