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Personal Testimonies
When I was a young girl, I asked my mother one day, “Why don’t you wear a bra like some of the other Moms do?”
“Because,” she told me with a grin, “back in the sixties we burned our bras, and mine are still burnt. Save the women – burn the bras!”
To be fair, my mother made no strong attempt to push her feminist ideologies on me as a little girl; she just lived them. Mother never interfered with my naturally girlish and old-fashioned ways to try to mold me into a feminist until adolescence…and that part of the story comes much, much later. For the time of my young childhood, she let me be what came naturally – a girl.
I am always intrigued when I look back to see how clearly the Lord gave me a vision for my life at a very young age, despite me knowing nothing about Him. Our family was not in any way religious, and yet from the tiny amount of religious instruction I picked up here and there, I developed a deep yearning for God. As a very young child I knew that this was God the Father in heaven, but later on I became a confused. It is in looking back to these very young years that I can see how God-given femininity comes naturally to young girls – and how God’s specific plan for my life was already in motion.
One strong memory which stands out now is how fascinated I was by babies – even as a toddler, according to Mother. At around the age of seven I used to go through magazines and catalogues, cutting out pictures of babies. I would draw a great big house with many rooms and paste the babies into the rooms. A big house full of babies! I was satisfied and absorbed by this activity, little knowing just how prophetic it really was.
As I grew through the primary years, I would accompany any person going to church to any church at all if I could, choosing friends to stay the night with who I knew would be going to Sunday school the next day. Unfortunately, I also went through phases of taking an interest in the old pagan religions and new fantasy. I swung back and forth, uncertain. With a lack of true Christian teaching, I came to see God the Father as a frightening and vengeful character and used to fear Him – but not love Him. Sometimes I would turn from Him altogether, and at other times I would come back to Him sorry. A dear saint from the Scripture Union sent me back issues of Bible materials after I rang her on the phone and explained my interest. (Whoever you were, thank you – I’m sure you prayed for me. Someone must have!).
Adolescence brings storms, change, and contradictions. At twelve I was an old-fashioned girl who loved Anne of Green Gables and all things innocent and girlish, and I believed in God. At thirteen I read The Mists of Avalon – a book which paints a picture of Christianity as an evil religion allowing men to rape and exploit women, and which romanticized goddess worship. I then picked up The Female Eunuch from off my mother's bookshelf and read that. I already knew about my mother's abortion. I chose to believe that this must have been an OK thing to do. Then, encouraged by my finally getting less keen on Christianity (she had been very concerned about that), she gave me a truly perverse and evil book. The book was a combination of hatred for Christianity and all patriarchy, information about goddess worship and poisonous “scholarly” writings "proving" the inaccuracy of the Bible. That did it, I was pagan. I burned my Bible.
I fell in with girls of similar interests, all feminists and goddess worshipers, and quickly fell into sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. The only piece of guidance I had received from my mother about sex was, “When you’re sixteen, if you want to, then you can” -- woefully inadequate preparation. The following years are almost too ugly to think about in any great detail. I wish I could round up every teenaged girl and say, “Don’t do what I did – you are worth so much more!” It was our feminist ideals which led us there – we could do anything, we could have it all, be outrageous, wear mini-skirts, be outspoken, enjoy our sexuality. And suffer.
Suffer broken hearts, when deep down we wanted true love but always missed it. Suffer mood swings from the pill. Suffer terrible rows with parents – terrified by how off the rails we were with no idea how to fix it. Suffer drug addictions, sexual abuse, emotional abuse – because we were out there totally unprotected. Some of my friends had abortions, some were raped because they were out alone. I had left home and was living with a boyfriend by sixteen, and he was a junkie. All my role models, the women I admired, were strong earth-mother types and true feminists. My deepest and oldest yearnings were still there, though. I wanted a baby and to cook dinners and “play house,” and I knew that was what I wanted. But God in his mercy did not let that happen yet.
Instead, I became more and more involved with witchcraft, which is naturally attractive as a feminist – to worship the female, and to control others through your own will. My life went from one disaster to another through that time, and when I finally left the relationship I was in, from one broken heart to another. At nineteen, I ended up living with some Rastafarian people. I was secretly practicing “white” witchcraft, but I had to keep it to myself, because I knew they were opposed to that. I was opposed to the Bible, which they were all reading, so I just kept quiet. Around that time, my brother got saved. I thought he was nuts!
Somehow, being around so much biblical talk awoke in me a vague yearning for something I remembered from the past, and I decided to read the Bible. I realized as I read through the first five books that it wasn’t “a collection of mythologies” as I had been lead to believe, but a true account of the history of a people. (I wasn’t too sure about the first few chapters of Genesis – but I learned more about that later on). This started off a huge internal struggle about which way to accept. My brother was praying for me by now. Eventually I heard the gospel, about how to be born again, and by then–-by some miracle-- was actually interested enough to want to do something about it. I had already put all my witchcraft items away in a box while I thought about things, and that day I threw them in the trash for good. I was twenty years old...and about twenty five weeks pregnant.
I didn’t get married then, but I left the Rastafarians – the light of being born again showed me I needed to take a different direction. I had long since parted company with my baby’s father anyway. God moved very fast in my life, bringing me into fellowship with such wonderful believers and bringing magazines like Above Rubies along to encourage me as a young solo mother.
I quickly embraced the vision of the fruitful Christian mother and submissive wife, struggled briefly with modesty but eventually realized the goodness of it. I simply felt that those things were part of the Christian walk – I even naively thought all born-again Christians would agree with those ideas – until I was shot down in flames at some Christian ladies' coffee mornings! I didn’t know there was feminism in the Church yet then, because to me they were mutually exclusive. I knew exactly what I had to give up (outwardly – inwardly there have been huge struggles) – which made it simple in a way. I know some girls who have been raised as Christians who’ve been subtly affected by feminism and found it hard to identify and decide what needed to be rejected, because it came in Christian disguise. At least for all I’d been through, I was spared any confusion. The division was obvious.
And God's vision for my life? It has only just begun. He did have a wonderful husband for me--another person saved from out of the world, who also knew the difference between living God's way and the world's way. We were married before my son turned one. Like I told you, God moved quickly in my life once I was saved! I would love to say that the teachings of feminism miraculously melted away, but in truth it was hard, and much of the rebellious spirit was still alive. I knew how to be outwardly the nice Christian lady and have babies, cook dinners, etc.; but I had to un-learn everything I had learned just to get along in harmony with another human being and make marriage work out.
It took me years of marriage to learn how to be a wife first and a mother second, and to learn not to hold out for my rights, to let go of the “I, I, I” and “Me, me, me” of “independence,” which every woman is supposed to have. I had to learn not to fear that I was under someone else’s control, or dominated, just because I didn’t earn any money of “my own.” To be honest, if it weren’t for the sound Biblical teaching from Above Rubies, Keepers At Home, and LAF, I would have struggled for a lot longer.
However, the more I have embraced my role, the destiny God always had for me, the happier I have been. My life as a feminist was miserable, very sad. God's grace has brought me to a life I don’t deserve--a much better life. It is, after all, the life I longingly dreamed of as a little girl all those years ago. I hope and pray I will be able to teach my daughters that their natural femininity is God-given and beautiful, and that their own girlhood dreams are worthy and true.
© Copyright 2002-2009 by LAF/BeautifulWomanhood.org
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