Youve come a long way, baby!

In the late 1960s, the Morris Tobacco Company introduced the slogan, Youve come a long way, baby, to launch
Virginia Slims, their new womens only cigarette. In the ads, staged black and white photos picturing the
miserable state of women prior to the womens movement were juxtaposed against other photos of far happier,
modern women who demonstrated their emancipation from male dominance by smoking Virginia Slims.
In the ad on the left, there are three black and white scenes that depict an arrogant, overweight husband
impatiently ringing a bell to have his wife bring him food, a newspaper, and slippers. The caption reads, With
this ring, I thee wed: ring for supper, ring for paper, ring for slippers. The full-color, happy, modern, Virginia Slims
woman pictured in the forefront rejects the male-defined institute of marriage. Youve come a long way, baby.
The ad at the bottom states, Back then, education taught men to run the world and woman to run the home. It
depicts miserable, bored women sitting at old-fashioned desks learning about home economics. The blackboard
proclaims that there will be a laundry quiz on Tuesday and that their homework consists of several cooking and
cleaning assignments.
The full-color, happy, modern, Virginia Slims woman on the adjoining page knows that running a house is a lowclass, demeaning job for someone with a university education. She wants to get out of the house and do
something really important, like run the world. Youve come a long way, baby.
In the top ad, an old-fashioned, black and white scene depicts women working hard and their male boss holding
his lapels, taking all the credit. The caption reads, Virginia Slims looks back upon the self-made man and all the
women who made it possible. The smug Virginia Slims woman in the foreground holds lapels of her business
suit in the same manner as the boastful, male boss, but there is no one propping her up. She is a self-made
woman. She makes herself possible. Youve come a long way, baby.
The final ad features a large, black and white photo of two policemen forcibly removing a woman from a public
beach for wearing an immodest bathing suit. The woman is screaming, You just wait! Someday, well be able to
wear any bathing suit we want! Someday, well be able to vote! Someday, well even have our own cigarette! The
policeman retorts, Thatll be the day.
But the happy, enlightened, Virginia Slims woman has the last word. It will be the day, when she has the right to
set her own standards of sexual conduct, morality, and propriety. Shes aiming for the day when she dismantles
all the rules. Youve come a long way, baby.
In the past fifty years, women have come a long way, but a long way isnt necessarily the right way or a
good way. Up until the middle of the last century, Western culture as a whole generally embraced a JudeoChristian standard, Judeo-Christian framework on gender and sexuality and the purpose and structure of the
family.
Heterosexual marriage and marital fidelity were highly valued concepts and the norm of societys practice. Most
agreed that the primary responsibility of the male was to lead and to protect and to provide for his family while
the primary responsibility of the female was to nurture and care for her children and her home.

Differences between male and female were accepted and seldom questioned, and for both man and woman, the
sense of duty and responsibility to family was far greater than the quest for personal fulfillment. Though they
may not have been able to identify the source of their values, individuals had a sense of what it meant to
be a man or a woman and the appropriate outworking of gender roles and relationships.
The speed and magnitude with which all this has been deconstructed is absolutely phenomenal. Its
mind-boggling. Consider the image, the cultural image, of women back in the 1950s, represented by the popular
TV sitcom, Leave It to Beaver. The Cleaver family exemplified the idealized, suburban family.
In the series, there are four things that are presented as requisites for happiness for both man and woman:
marriage, children, education, and hard work. In typical late-1950s fashion, June worked hard at home all day
taking care of the house and serving the community while her husband, Ward, worked hard outside of the house
to financially support the family.
When Ward came in the door after work calling out, Im home, June, wearing a pretty dress, greeted him with a
smile and a kiss, a clean house, and a hot meal on the table for supper.
In the show, adults who didnt follow this pattern of marriage were depicted as troubled or missing out. Life for
women was very different fifty years ago, very, very different. Almost everyone got married. The average age for
getting married was twenty years old for girls and twenty-two ears old for men.

Once married, a woman could normally count on her husband to financially support her and the children.

The divorce rate was very low.

Chastity and virginity were virtues.

Scarcely anyone lived common-law because it carried the stigma of living in sin. So few couples lived
common-law at that time that statistics for this phenomena wasnt even recorded. They didnt even keep
statistics.

Having a child outside of wedlock was also considered shameful. Now, one American child is born
outside of marriage every twenty-five seconds; and tonight, more than forty percent of children will go to sleep in
homes in which their fathers do not live.

Only thirty percent of women were employed outside the home in 1960. Very rarely was there a woman
who had under school-age children who went out and worked outside of the home.

There was no birth-control pill.

Abortion was illegal.

Pornography and rape and homosexuality, sexual perversion, sexual addiction, sexually transmitted
diseases were uncommon and rarely encountered.

Men regarded it as their responsibility to protect and provide and care for their families.

That was the world that I was born into, and it wasnt all that long ago. Weve come a long way, baby. Our ideas
about what it means to be a woman have come a long way.
By the late 1960s, the image of June Cleaver being happy at home in her role as wife and mother had fallen by
the wayside, replaced by the 1970s Mary Tyler Moore image of a pretty, single woman in her thirties pursuing a
career at a television station. The show was lauded as a breakthrough because it had the first, independent,
attractive career woman as the central character.
It discreetly implied that Mary was single, she was on the pill, and she was also sexually active. But the focus of
the show was on her career, not on her association with men. She truly was on her own, without a recurring
father or husband or boyfriend or anyone looking out for her. Every episode, the theme song proudly alluded to
her autonomy. Youre gonna make it after all. Okay? A lot of you women remember that. You remember that.
Youre shaking your heads.
In the 1980s, were introduced to Murphy Brown, an investigative journalist and news anchor for FYI, a fictional
TV news magazine. In contrast to the gentle sweetness of Mary Tyler Moore, this character, Murphy Brown, has
a loud mouth, is brash, driven, self-assured, self-absorbed, and highly opinionated. She is a divorcee and a
proud atheist.
During the course of the series, Murphy becomes pregnant but chooses not to marry her babys father. A man
would cramp her style. She has the child nonetheless and leaves the baby in the care of a revolving door of
nannies so she can pursue her career. The child is merely a side in the plot that revolves around Murphys selfactualization in the workplace.
In the mid-90s, enter Ellen, a woman who doesnt work for someone else but who independently owns her own
business, a bookstore. Ellen lives with a man, but the relationship is platonic. Hes just her roommate. Shes not
sexually attracted to him, and gradually we discover that Ellen isnt attracted to men at all. Shes a lesbian, a
woman-identified woman. She has the right to define her own sexuality and her own morality, and no one has the
right to judge her for it.
Shes out, and shes in charge, as are virtually all the women portrayed in the media in the past decade. From
childrens cartoons to television series to movies, women are portrayed as having an in charge, dont
need a guy, Im powerful, traditional marriage and family and morals are outdated, I have the right to
rule, how dare you tell me what to do mentality.
In the past decade, weve been inundated with the message that when it comes to relationships, women can
hook up, be in a casual or long-term relationship, live common-law, get married or not, get married and then get
divorced, get pregnant or abort the babies, sleep around, live with a guy or a girl, have sex with a guy or a girl,
and participate in a whole assortment of immoral and perverted behavior as long as they are friends.
In other words, woman makes her own rules and sets her own standards, and as long as she is nice, it
really doesnt matter what she does. Who are you to judge?
The epitome of this is reflected in the most popular sitcom recently for and about women, Sex in the City.
Nowadays, the epitome of empowered womanhood is to live a self-serving, self-righteous, neurotic,
narcissistic, superficial, and adulteress life. The main character in Sex in the City series wraps it up well

when she counsels women that, The most exciting, challenging, and significant relationship of all is the one you
have with yourself.
So in a few short decades in the span of my lifetime, the ideal of a happy, fulfilled woman has gone from
one who serves and exalts her children, her husband, and her community to one who serves and exalts
herself and has a very different type of commitment, very different type of idea towards men and women. This
begs the question, how did this all happen?
The factors are many and complex, but a very large piece of the puzzle is feminism. Feminism is a distinct
philosophy that shook the underpinnings of society in the early 1960s like a tsunamic earthquake shaking the
oceans floor. Feminism is a distinct worldview. Its a distinct worldview with its very own thoughts, its ideologies,
values, ways of thinking. Whether or not you would admit it, all of us in this room have been profoundly
affected by feminist thought.
Now, some of you may think that what were doing this morning as an intellectual foray into past philosophy is an
exercise in futility. But ladies, its the student of history who understands current culture and is equipped
to envision a path for the future.
During a time of national turmoil, the nation of Israel was served by the men of Issacher, men, Scripture tells us,
according to 1 Chronicles 12:32, who understood the times and knew what Israel should do. So my purpose
this morning is to help you understand the times.
I want you to understand the times so that you know what to do and you know how to live. Im praying
that God is going to raise up a counter-revolution of women, women who hold the knowledge of our times in one
hand and the truth and the clarity and the charity of the Word of God in the other; women whose hearts are
broken over the gender confusion and the spiritual and emotional and relational carnage of our day and who, like
those men of old, know what to do.
Now Im going to take you back to the 1950s and paint some broad brush strokes of how the philosophy of
feminism developed and was integrated into culture, and then were going to end on Scripture. What do we do?
What do we do about that?
First, geo-politically, the world was witnessing an era of revolution. The American Revolution, French Revolution,
Russian Revolution had been based on the enlightenment idea that all people are equal and no one group has
the right to rule over any other group.
The word revolution, from the Latin revolucion means a turnaround. Its a fundamental change in power that
takes place in a relatively short period of time.
Revolutionary fervor was in the air. The fight for rights was in the air, and it spread from political to
social structures.

Workers demanded their rights and formed unions.

Students demanded their rights and marched against the oppressive educational structures.

Attention was drawn to racial inequality between blacks and whites. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give
up her seat on the bus, and the Civil Rights movement was born.

During the 1950s, there was a French philosopher, and her name was Simone de Beauvoir, and she
proposed that a revolution in gender roles also needed to take place.
She argued that in the relationship between men and women, women were the second class and men were the
ruling class. They got all the perks. They had the power. They had the authority, and they got to say what the
world looked like.
De Beauvoir argued that in order for women to live as full human beings, they needed to demand their rights,
collectively rebel against men, and overthrow all of the societal structures that men had constructed to keep
women in a state of servitude. Most specifically, de Beauvoir encouraged women to get out of the home and
deconstruct the Judeo-Christian ideas about marriage and motherhood and morality.
In the late 1950s, an American political activist and journalist, Betty Friedan, picked up on Simone de Beauvoirs
thinking. She constructed a questionnaire for the fifteen-year reunion of her college class. She asked her
college-educated, female colleagues about the level of happiness and fulfillment they were experiencing in their
marriages and in their roles as wives and mothers. Friedan noticed that there was a level of discontent and
dissatisfaction present.
She interviewed dozens of other women and concluded that a discrepancy existed between what society told
women would make them happy and fulfilled and how happy and fulfilled they actually felt.
In her resulting book, published in 1963, Friedan argued that women were trying to conform to a male-dictated
image of womanhood, the feminine mystique, but that doing so left them with vague feelings of dissatisfaction
and that yearning and emptiness and that feeling that there had to be something more to life.
She identified this as a common problem amongst women. It was a female problem, a problem without a name.
She concluded that the dissatisfaction that women were experiencing in that time in their role was a problem with
the role itself.
She suggested that in order to find fulfillment, American women should begin to question and challenge
and rebel against being wives and mothers. A woman could only be fulfilled if she had a life plan for
herself that included education, a career, and work that was of serious importance to society, and each
woman needed to name herself and take control and take charge of her own life and develop a vision for her
own future.
Heres the underlying presupposition behind Betty Friedans ideas and the ideas of feminism as a whole. We
women need and can trust no other authority than our own, personal truth. We need and can trust no other
authority than our own, personal truth.
Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock called The Feminine Mystique the book that pulled the trigger on history.
Indeed, once woman accepted this very basic premise of needing and trusting no other authority except her own,
personal truth, she set her foot on a path that would take her, and ultimately the whole of society, in a direction
diametrically opposed to the heart and the purposes and the ways of God.

Simone de Beauvoirs and Betty Friedans writings gained popularity amongst North American women. Evidently
many women were experiencing feelings of frustration and discontentment, and many eagerly yearned for the
"something more" proffered by these feminists.
A problem had been exposed, and feminists were convinced that it was the problem. They hadnt yet found a
word to adequately describe it, but that came quite quickly. In the 1960s, late 60s, feminist author Kate Millett
used the term patriarchy to describe the problem without a name.
Now patriarchy derives its origin from two Greek words, pater, meaning father, and archi, meaning rule.
Patriarchy was to be understood as the rule of the father. Feminists argued that patriarchy is what caused all
the heartache of woman. Patriarchy, the condition of having male in a leadership, authority role is what
caused womans heartache and heartbreak.
It wasnt just an abstract concept of men having more power and authority than women. It was woven throughout
our entire societys family and social and political and religious structures. It was laced throughout our social
etiquette and our customs, our rituals, our traditions and laws, our entire system of education and division of
labor, and all of these things were responsible for keeping men in a dominant position.
Patriarchy was seen as the ultimate cause of womans discontent, and only the demise and the deconstruction of
all patriarchal structures would lead to her freedom. Only when woman broke free from the traditional, maledefined, Judeo-Christian roles and rules would she find meaning and fulfillment, and thus, the trigger was pulled.
In the first phase of feminism, women claimed the right to name themselves. Their goal was to shed the
differences that made women weak and vulnerable to become more like men. They began to dress like
men and smoke and drink and swear like men and to claim sexual freedom and participation in the work force.
Newly established feminist groups like NOW, the National Organization for Women, began public lobbies and
demonstrations in order to further the feminist agenda, which consisted of these points:

Full self-determinationwoman needed to decide who she was and needed to have the legal right to
act independently of her husband.

Freedom from biologythat prompted feminists at that time to lobby for birth control, for legalized
abortion, state daycare, reproductive technologies, such as test tube babies, anything that took the burden of
bearing and caring for children off of a womans shoulders and put it more on society as a whole.

Economic independencepay equity, equal pay for work of equal value, changes to financial practices,
total and equal integration, affirmative action.
Women began to seek these things with passion and fervorsexual freedom, changes in adultery and decency
laws. Feminists picketed outside New York Times building in opposition to the male-segregated help wanted ads.
They organized a splashy protest of the Miss America contest. But although the awareness of a womans
movement was spreading, allegiance to the feminist perspective was not yet widespread, and feminist theorists
concluded at that time that woman as a whole needed education.

They needed enlightenment. They didnt get it. They didnt know how bad their situation really was. They didnt
know how bad men really were and how repressed they were to be just seeking happiness in motherhood and
childbearing and being wives.
They needed a tool to show women and how to educate women how oppressed they really were, and
inadvertently, quite inadvertently, they unearthed one.
Feminists in New York discovered that if they gathered women together in small groups and got all those
women talking about their hurts and grievances against men, then all the women in the group would
begin to get upset with men, even those women who didnt have any hurts and grievances themselves,
and then their anger could be directed into action. They could be empowered to rebel against the authority of
the males in their homes and also in society as a whole and change the rules of the game, and this technique
was called consciousness-raising.
It wasnt new. Consciousness-raising was actually a political technique used by the revolutionary army of Mao
Tse-tung. His slogan was, Speak bitterness to recall bitterness. Speak pain to recall pain. Together, the women
found the strength to act and to confront their situation and the resolve to be active in forcing change, and that is
how Mao Tse-tung got his revolution.
In the fall of 1968, feminist leader, Kathie Sarachild, organized a guide and a manifesto to consciousness-raising
and presented it to the first Womens Liberation Conference held in Chicago forty years ago.
Consciousness-raising encouraged women to change their beliefs and behaviors, to make demands in
their relationships, to support the womans movement, and to become politically active. Some of you will
remember an old commercial for hair products that went, And she told two friends, and she told two friends, and
she told two friends. The commercial started with a picture of one woman and then added the pictures of the
two women that she had told and then the women that they had told, and soon the screen is full of hundreds
upon hundreds of pictures of women, and thats exactly how feminism spread.
There were only about 200 women at the first National Womens Conference in Chicago in 1968, forty years ago.
But with the help of consciousness-raising, women across the continent began to claim the right to name and
define themselves. By 1970, 20,000 women marched proudly down New Yorks Fifth Avenue identifying
themselves as part of the Womens Lib Movement. Betty Friedan summed up the tenor of the movement when
she blazed, There is no way any man, woman, or child is ever going to escape the nature of our revolution.
The feminist movement began to shift in mindset at this time. Women began to see themselves as a sex class
and as a distinct class of people that needed liberation, that needed freedom, and that needed freedom from
oppression. The first phase of the movement viewed womens differences as weaknesses. The second
phase viewed their differences as a source of pride and confidence. I remember that song. I sang it as a
young girl.
I am strong.
I am invincible.
I am woman.
Hear me roar in numbers too big to ignore.

Women turned their attention at that time from naming themselves to naming the world. History was just
arbitrary. It was all the rules and all the ideas that men had made. It was his-story, and it was time for that to
change. So woman took it into her own hands to change that from economics to politics, psychology,
linguistics, relationships, religion. Women needed to change that which had been construed for male
advantage.
Women began to institute womens programs in colleges and universities. Prior to 1969, there were no womens
studies courses. By the end of the 70s, the number of womens studies courses had mushroomed to over 30,000
across the United States. Educators modified gradeschool curriculum, continuing education courses, and
courses at technical schools.
This was the golden age of feminism. At the opening of the decade, there were very few women who would call
themselves feminists, but by the end of that decade, feminism had dispersedthe ideology had dispersed
to affect almost every member of society. Many women had claimed the feminist right to name self and to
name the world, and soon, both in secular and religious circles, they started to claim another right that logically
followed, and that was the right to name God.
When Helen Reddy accepted the Grammy Award for I Am Woman song, she said, Id like to thank god
because she made everything possible. Betty Friedan, earlier that same year, had predicted that the great
debate of the next decade would be, is God He?
Feminists had named themselves and their world, and in the final phase, they began to turn their attention to
naming God. They concluded that if God is male, then the male is God, so of course God isnt He. Well then,
who or what is God? According to feminism, women decide, and ultimately, that means that they themselves
are Godfollows logically.
The feminist metaphysic teaches that each woman contains divinity within her own being. New Age philosophy,
Wicca, goddess worship are all expressions of this feminist spirituality. Have you ever wondered how and
why advertisers named their new womens shaver after a goddess and market their product as being able to
provide stubble-free legs worthy of the goddess in you?
The fundamental premise of feminism is that women need and can trust no other authority than our own
personal truth, and that was a really quick fly-over of just where weve come from in the last forty, fifty years.
It was a philosophical quake that shook underground. The implications of that have come back over society in
wave after wave after wave, and the carnage in young womens lives, in older womens lives, the carnage is
unbelievable. We are so broken.
We have been taught that we ought not to bow and submit to any external power, but thats not the message of
the Bible. God created us. He created us male and female, and thats not inconsequential. That means
something.
The Bible informs us that there was an essential difference in the manner and the purpose of the creation of the
two sexes. The New Testament reiterates that there are basic differences between men and women that
are to be honored as part of Gods design.

By refusing to honor these differences or by defiantly shaking our fists at God and saying, It cannot be so! we
define or we claim the right to name for ourselves. We take authority into our own hands. Naming is a right which
belongs to God. It is God who made the earth and created mankind upon it. We have no right to question the
wisdom of His directives for our behavior.
God spoke through Isaiah,
Woe to him who quarrels with his maker, to him who is but a potsherd [thats a broken piece of pottery] among
the potsherds on the ground. Does the clay say to the potter, What are you making? Does your work say, He
has no hands? Concerning things to come, do you question Me about my children, or do you give me orders
about the work of My hands? It is I who made the earth and created mankind upon it (Isa. 45:1012).
Paul repeats the admonition in Romans.
But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to Him who formed it, Why did you
make me this way? Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for
noble purposes and some for common use? (Rom. 9:2021).
The Creator fashioned the two sexes differently, and this is a fact that we dare not overlook or trivialize. In 1
Corinthians 11:9, 12, we are told that, The man did not come from the woman, but the woman from the man.
Neither was man created for woman but woman for man.
Furthermore, The woman is not independent of man. Nor is man independent of woman. For as the woman
came from man, so also man is born of woman, but everything comes from God. It's very unpopular to read
these Scriptures nowadays, isnt it? Very unpopular.
But I am crazy enough to believe that God knew what He was doing, and what He was doing was good.
Indeed, it was very good.
Our identity as male and female is important. As John Piper says, It speaks to the glory of God. Who I am as a
woman and who I am in relationship to my husband, how I relatepeople should look and say, Wow! I see
Jesus.
Women, I believe that Gods instructions for us in His Word are not only right, they are also good and
pleasant and desirable. Our problem is, we come and try to present a whole list of dos and donts. We
dont capture womens heart for the beauty of the vision of what womanhood is all about, and its our only
hope for wholeness to understand that our whole purpose is to live for the glory of God.
So whats the answer to the question feminism posed almost fifty years ago? It was a spiritual question, the
whole question of, Well, whats going to bring women happiness and fulfillment and joy in life? Do we reel the
clock back, go back to the 1950s? Is it true that woman will only find satisfaction when shes the mom and a wife
and has a station wagon and a white picket fence? Is that true? Thats not true.
There is no man on the face of this earth that is going to fill your needs and desires. We need to turn that
desire to the right target. We were created with needs and desires in order to point us and to draw us and
to lure us and entice us and make us fall in love with Him to whom those desires point. That is true.

It was forty years ago that 200 women gathered in Chicago at the first National Womens Convention. There
were only 200, and at that time, they instituted a program of consciousness-raising, of speaking bitterness, of
being angry and rebellious.
Forty years later, and here I stand before an army that God has called. An army that knows it is not by might, not
by power. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. They have divine power to demolish
strongholds and bring evil to its knees.
The Lord isnt so concerned about whether or not were married, whether were single. Those things, ultimately,
are an outworking of His plan and purposes in our life. What He is concerned about is that we have hearts
that say yes to Him and that love Him and that are willing to be crazy enough to say, What He has made
is beautiful, and crazy enough to say, Selfless living, sacrificial living, laying down my life in emulation
of the Christ I love is worth it!
In that, and only in that, am I going to figure out the path to happiness and fulfillment. So women, what are you
going to say yes to because we have been inundated with images. Every day its in our face. What it is, the
worlds solution to our happiness, the worlds solution to that problem, that yearning, that discontentment.