Feminism Goes Back to the Fall

ABSTRACT: For all their differences, the three waves of feminism share a common rejection of God’s design for men and women as outlined in Genesis 1–2. The main voices of the feminist movement, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Judith Butler, have opposed not only sinful male domination but also all ordered relationships of authority and submission between men and women. Feminism, then, is the philosophical and social actualization of Genesis 3:16 — “your desire shall be for your husband” — in our late-modern world.

Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you. (Genesis 3:16)

Feminism is notoriously difficult to define. Each of its multiple so-called waves has its own agenda and ideological framework. For all their variety, however, the various expressions of feminism have a common core. One might think of these expressions as so many fruits on a single tree: Each differs from the other in significant ways, but they all spring from the same root.

My thesis is that feminism is a series of ideological movements that materially actualize the words of God to the woman in Genesis 3:16: “Your desire shall be for your husband.” Thus, the common root of the various waves of feminism is the rejection of God’s good design for properly ordered relations between men and women in the world. As such, feminism is out of step with nature itself, as created by God. To the extent that feminism has made inroads into many of the most basic aspects of societal life, its effects have hindered human flourishing in light of God’s design in creation.

This essay proceeds in two parts. Part 1 focuses on God’s design for mankind as male and female according to Genesis 1–2 and how the fall of man represents, in part, a departure from that design (Genesis 3). Part 2 surveys the various waves of feminism to demonstrate that they all come from a rejection of God’s good design in fulfillment of his words in Genesis 3:16.

Male and Female in Creation and Fall

When God created mankind in his image, he made them male and female, man and woman. To mankind he gave dominion over the rest of the earth. This dominion was not given to the man alone nor to the woman alone. It was given to the pair, the man and the woman. Created according to the same kind (mankind), sharing a common human essence, the man and the woman were both made “in the image of God.” They shared, therefore, an essential equality and an essential dignity that men and women still share today (Genesis 1:26–31).

Equal Yet Different

This essential equality does not negate the very real differences between men and women. Without undermining their shared humanity, God wrote the inviolable distinction between male and female into human nature itself. Every human is either male or female, not neither and not both — “Male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). In other words, while universal human nature (essence) is shared by the man and the woman, each instantiates that nature as an existing human in an irrevocably distinct way. The difference between male and female is grounded in human nature, even while both share that nature.¹

Genesis 1–2 indicates that the differences between men and women cannot be reduced to their complementary biology. Rather, there is a clear difference in their respective duties and responsibilities. The man, whom God made first, is given the command to cultivate and keep the garden and to abstain from eating the fruit of the forbidden tree (Genesis 2:15–18). The woman is made second and is designated as a helper to come alongside the man and assist him in these God-given duties (Genesis 2:18–24). Jesus and the authors of the New Testament treat the opening chapters of Genesis as paradigmatic for properly ordered relations between men and women according to God’s design (Matthew 19:1–8; 1 Corinthians 11:3–12; Ephesians 5:22–31; 1 Timothy 2:11–15). God has designed men and women such that, in ordered relations of authority and submission between the sexes, the man occupies the place of authority and the woman the place of submission.

What are these ordered relations of authority and submission? In the home, wives submit to their own husbands while husbands exercise headship by leading their wives through self-sacrificial love (Ephesians 5:22–31). In the church, the office of elder/overseer/pastor, an office of leadership and authority, is limited to qualified men while women are not permitted “to teach or to exercise authority over a man” (1 Timothy 2:12). In both the church and the home, the specific ordered relations of authority and submission are explicitly grounded in the creation account of Genesis 2:18–24. Given this grounding in the natural order, it is not surprising to see this pattern exemplified in Scripture, even in broader societal structures. Throughout God’s word, when God appoints leaders and officers among his people, the figures appointed to such prominent leadership roles are ordinarily men, not women. It was Moses, not Miriam, whom God appointed to lead Israel, with Miriam serving in a complementary helping role. God appoints priests and never priestesses to serve the tabernacle and temple, kings and never queens to rule over his people.² The list could go on. The point is that God’s design for a clear difference in duties and responsibilities between men and women is rooted in nature, not mere social convention, so that we see it expressed broadly in the world and across a variety of covenantal epochs, not merely in the narrow spheres of marriage and the church.

Disorder and Disobedience

The temptation of Eve in the garden of Eden stands in stark contrast to the ordered relations God intended for the man and the woman. God appointed mankind to rule over “every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28), which includes the “beasts” (see Genesis 1:25),³ but Genesis 3 opens with a “beast of the field,” a serpent, seeking to bend mankind to his will. More specifically, the serpent craftily approaches the woman with his words of temptation, not the man who was with her (Genesis 3:6). Rather than instructing his wife in their joint calling to rule over the serpent, the man listens to her as she tells him to eat the fruit (Genesis 3:17). The catastrophic sin of Genesis 3 came about, in part, from the failure of both Adam and Eve to live according to God’s design for their ordered relationship and their joint failure to rule over other creatures. Adam failed to lead; Eve assumed Adam’s role and became the de facto leader; both failed to reject the serpent’s words.

After this great sin, God drew near to pronounce words of judgment on the serpent, the woman, and the man. His words to the woman are particularly instructive for the purpose of this essay: “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16).

Context suggests that the phrase “he shall rule over you” describes a post-fall reality in which men will use their greater strength to exercise dominion over women in a way that is more akin to the relation they ought to have to the animals than the relation they ought to have with women (cf. Genesis 1:28–29). Thus, it describes the sinful world in which some men will dominate women in the form of abuse, sexual exploitation, and other forms of unjust subjugation.⁴ The fact that men have ruled over women in sinful ways throughout history is a major part of the allure of feminism, even though its ideals and proposed actions only offer more problems.

The focus of this essay, however, is on the first part of the sentence spoken to the woman: “Your desire shall be for your husband.” The Hebrew word for desire (təšūqā) that appears here is also used just verses later in Genesis 4. When Cain and Abel bring their offerings to God, he “had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard” (Genesis 4:4–5). When Cain becomes angry, God says to him, “If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire [təšūqā] is for you, and you must rule over it” (Genesis 4:7).

Here sin is personified as a power that desires to master Cain, but Cain is instructed to master it. As sin “desired” to rule over Cain, so women in a sin-stricken world will desire to usurp the authority of men in a manner contrary to God’s design. She will desire to rule over him.

Three Waves of Disordered Desire

In light of God’s good design in creation and the undermining of that design in the fall, how should Christians today think about the various ideological and social frameworks known collectively as feminism? The following brief overview will consider feminism in its commonly recognized three waves, noting major points of emphasis as well as how each wave represents the fulfillment of the prediction of Genesis 3:16 to the woman.

First-Wave Feminism

The first wave of feminism is associated with the general equality of women in the eyes of the legal system, with specific regard to the issue of women’s suffrage. In the popular imagination, the first wave began with the famous keynote address of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention,⁵ “The Declaration of Sentiments.” This speech, crafted to closely mirror the language of the Declaration of Independence, decried the injustice of women being excluded from “the elective franchise”⁶ (the right to vote) and voiced other grievances of a social, religious, and political kind. The convention voted to adopt the Declaration as a statement of its mission.

Stanton continued to speak and write on the issue of women’s liberation from legal and social oppression. She eventually united with her close friend, the talented organizer and social activist Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), to form the National Women’s Suffrage Association. The NWSA lobbied state and federal governments to secure the guaranteed right of women to vote throughout the United States by the ratification of a constitutional amendment. Though Stanton and Anthony both died before their dreams were realized, they are widely regarded as the most prominent tandem force in the fight for women’s suffrage in the late nineteenth century. Stanton famously said of Anthony, “I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them.”⁷ The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which forbids the denial of the right to vote based on sex, was ratified in 1920.

Because the social activism was focused on the presenting issue of women’s suffrage, many today view first-wave feminism as a clear example of women simply seeking equality in the eyes of the law, a desire in no way contrary to the good design of God in the original order of creation. To paint the entire first wave with such a broad brush, however, misunderstands the ideological ethos behind the movement.⁸ Stanton’s argument for women’s suffrage was based not on an equality of essence (such as we see in the Genesis account of creation) but on a rejection of any kind of difference in duties and responsibilities between the sexes, especially the notion that men should occupy the position of authority in relations where an authority/submission dynamic is at work between men and women. In other words, the philosophical and social argumentation of the first wave of feminism was not based on a recognition of essential equality with an ordered difference of roles. It was based on a flattening out of the roles themselves.

First-wave feminism argued for women’s suffrage on the basis of interchangeability between the duties and responsibilities of the sexes in every dimension of life. This was not merely the (right) repudiation of unjust male domination but the rejection of God’s good design. For example, Stanton decried the expectation of women to submit to their husbands in the home: “In the covenant of marriage,” she writes, “[woman] is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master — the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.”⁹ Stanton is likely reacting to sinful practices in which men did, indeed, deprive their wives of liberty and exercise corporal punishment. Note, however, she does not limit her critique to such unjust domination. She is equally critical of a covenant in which a wife submits to (or obeys) her husband. Scripture compels women to obey their husbands without fearing “anything that is frightening” (1 Peter 3:6). Stanton’s rhetoric is intended to frighten women if they follow the biblical design for marriage relationships. Furthermore, Stanton sees the absence of women from positions of teaching and authority in the church as equally egregious. She laments that the man’s world in which she lives permits women to hold only “a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry.”¹⁰

Stanton’s later work was even more aggressively opposed to the teaching of Scripture on God’s design for men and women. Stanton was the leading figure behind the publication of The Woman’s Bible (1895 and 1898), in which the stated purpose was to demonstrate that the Bible is not the word of God but the mere words of men who had a vested interest in the oppression of women. Stanton argued that the Bible “degrades the Mothers of the Race” and “makes woman a mere after-thought in creation.” She goes on to state plainly that the purpose of The Woman’s Bible is to deny “divine inspiration for such demoralizing ideas,” arguing that “the time has come to read [the Bible] as we do all other books, accepting the good and rejecting the evil it teaches.”¹¹

Thus, even the first wave of feminism — celebrated in the popular imagination as a major victory for the emancipation of women from oppression — had in it more than the rejection of unjust male domination, at least in the words of one founder. The ideological ethos of the movement represents a rejection of God’s good design for the distinct order of authority and submission between men and women, articulated most clearly in the economies of home and church.

As God predicted, the woman’s desire is for the man.

Second-Wave Feminism

Feminism’s second wave came into full flower in the mid- to late-twentieth century. If first-wave feminism emphasized the legal equality of women with men, especially with respect to the issue of suffrage, second-wave feminism more boldly called for the equality of the sexes across all spheres of life, including the workplace and the womb.¹²

WORKPLACE AND WOMB

In the workplace, second-wave feminists argued that both work opportunities and wages paid should be equal between men and women. More than ten major legislative acts and amendments between the 1960s and 1980s are seen as major victories in the feminist cause.

The breakdown of societal norms that truly place women under the oppression of men is objectively good. But the call for an end to workplace discrimination and the practice of full employment equality has come at a considerable price. Second-wave feminism’s push for economic equality was powered not only by a rejection of oppression but also by a rejection of the rightly ordered relations, duties, and responsibilities of men and women. The idea that it is fitting — rooted in the natural order — for men to occupy positions of authority was ruled out of bounds a priori by feminist theorists and activists. Furthermore, the idea that it is genuinely good for a woman to be a wife and mother — vocational objectives that inevitably conflict with professional ambitions outside the home — was also antithetical to the ethos of second-wave feminism. Feminists sought to deconstruct the expectation that women will flourish most naturally when pursuing duties and responsibilities in accordance with their divinely designed femininity, the very expectations that Scripture leads women to embrace with joy.

Another major point of emphasis in the second wave of feminism is the so-called “reproductive rights” of women. Ultimately, this means that women must be able to free themselves from the burdens of childbearing and child-rearing while maintaining the freedom to pursue sexual pleasure, whether married or unmarried. Thus, from the vantage point of feminism, the crowning achievement of the sexual revolution of the 1960s was the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973.

With respect to the issue of so-called reproductive rights, conservative Christians have been much more galvanized against the obviously antibiblical agendas of the feminist movement than with the other feminist emphases considered thus far. The deeply biblical beliefs that God intends sex for marriage and that human life (with all its dignity) begins in the womb have proved to be more concerning to conservative Christians than some of the more subtle issues undermined by feminism. What many fail to realize, however, is that so-called reproductive rights go together with economic and workplace rights. If a woman is to be afforded indiscriminate equality in the workplace, she must be relieved of the very structures that tend to conflict with her professional development and productivity — marriage and children. In many ways, the pursuit of license for sexual promiscuity and the right to murder the unborn are imprinted on the other side of the same coin as workplace anti-discrimination insistence, at least as the theorists and leading voices of the movement articulate its objectives.

SELF-DEFINED WOMEN

French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) is one of the groundbreaking feminist thinkers whose ideas gained popularity in the mid-twentieth century. Her thought fueled the later ideas and activism of the second wave. In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir describes the world as a man’s world. She acknowledges the fact of reproductive differences between males and females, but she says this fact alone is not sufficient to define woman: “Not every female human being is necessarily a woman.”¹³ A woman is something female humans become, and not merely by virtue of their growth into adulthood. Rather, they become women by becoming what men define them and make them to be. To be a woman, by definition, is to be made, named, and known only in relation to man.¹⁴

For de Beauvoir, this world designed by men and for men is carefully crafted to take away any sense of autonomy from a woman’s understanding of self. Man is subject; woman is object. Man is essential; woman is inessential. Man is first; woman is the second sex. The majority of The Second Sex is devoted to describing the reality of woman so defined. As an existentialist, de Beauvoir believed individuals are responsible for self-definition. Thus, as women allowed themselves to be defined, so women can change the definition. This summons proved to be very effective at rallying women in a concentrated effort to escape not their distinctive femaleness but being woman, at least woman defined in this way. The ideal is for women to define themselves as the first sex rather than to be defined by others as the second.

Betty Friedan (1921–2006), another leading voice of second-wave feminism, was an American journalist who disseminated de Beauvoir’s key ideas into more accessible terminology. Her groundbreaking work is The Feminine Mystique, a tour de force in articulating the ethos of second-wave feminism in popular American idiom. In that work, Friedan describes the feminine mystique as a set of beliefs and expectations that trap women in their subordinate position, one exemplified by the middle-class suburban housewife.¹⁵

“The common root of the various waves of feminism is the rejection of God’s good design for men and women.”

At least as she told her own story, Friedan was the American embodiment of the ideal de Beauvoir hoped to cultivate. Critical biographer Daniel Horowitz writes, “Her claim that she came to political consciousness out of a disillusionment with her life as a suburban housewife was part of her reinvention of herself as she wrote and promoted The Feminine Mystique.”¹⁶ The claim that Friedan reinvented herself, narrating her own story in a manner somewhat at odds with the actual details of her life, demonstrates just how fully Friedan was living out the existential ideals of de Beauvoir’s call for women to define themselves, to be the subject, not the object.

Mary Kassian describes the joint ideologies of de Beauvoir and Friedan:

The two women pointed to male-female role interaction as the root of women’s discontent. These second-wave pioneers believed that inner wholeness could only be found through women leaving their traditional role in order to emulate men. They argued that women would only be fulfilled by joining the ranks of the professional and educated, contributing something more concrete to society than motherhood and wifehood. . . . Women needed to take control of their own lives, name themselves, and set their own destiny.¹⁷

Kassian goes on to observe that later feminists nearly universally adopted the term patriarchy (from two Greek words meaning “the rule of fathers”) to name the reality of male domination that forced women to be defined and socially expressed in the miseries of a subordinate role, a role women were supposed to despise.¹⁸ For secular feminist theorists, patriarchy is enshrined in the Bible. Thus, rejection of the Bible as the authoritative word of God is critical to the liberation of women from patriarchy.

Contemporary evangelical feminists (“egalitarians”) have carried forward the secular rejection of patriarchy. While they confess the Bible to be the authoritative word of God, they endeavor to reinterpret the Bible to show that the vast majority of its readers have misunderstood its teaching regarding men and women. There is no inherent structure of authority and submission between men and women in God’s ordering of creation. Neither is there a natural differentiation that entails a weakness of one sex in relation to another, which fittingly corresponds to the distinct duties and responsibilities given by God for the purpose of human flourishing. Secular feminists and egalitarians alike reject the conviction that an order exists in creation, emphasizing instead a radical interchangeability between the sexes.

Again, the woman’s desire is for the man.

Third-Wave Feminism

The desire for radical interchangeability between men and women came into its own in the so-called third wave of feminism. This wave is characterized by its denial of the gender binary — the idea that there are only two genders that correspond necessarily to the biological reality of two reproductive sexes. For third-wave feminists, there is an unlimited number of genders according to the will and desire of the individual. Further, they argue that gender bears no natural correspondence to the biological realities of reproductive systems. For example, it is only an imposed societal norm that compels someone with female reproductive capacities to have romantic desire for someone with male reproductive capacities, and vice versa.

GENDER THEORY AND INTERSECTIONALITY

The gender ideology characteristic of third-wave feminism has a complex ideological history. Many point to Judith Butler (born 1956) as providing the intellectual framework for lesbian (L), gay (G), and bisexual (B) persons whose romantic desires are not ordered and enacted in the traditionally expected ways. Butler is also widely regarded as establishing, even more robustly, the Transgender (T) and the Queer (Q) theories of the LGBTQ+ acronym.

Butler’s key idea, introduced in Gender Trouble (1990) and developed throughout her writings, is “gender performativity.” For Butler, gender is not grounded in something real or natural; it is merely a performance. She appeals to non-normative sexual practices like gay/lesbian relationships and drag as a way to demonstrate the instability of gender as a category of reality.¹⁹ Describing the goal of Gender Trouble nearly a decade after its original publication, Butler said, “The text asks, how do non-normative sexual practices call into question the stability of gender as a category of analysis? How do certain sexual practices compel the question: what is a woman, what is a man?”²⁰ Butler’s work ultimately claims those questions to be unanswerable except at the level of performance.

Even in her more recent work, she insists that such a word as woman must be undefinable if it is not to become a weapon to coerce performance: “When feminists ask the question ‘what is a woman?’ we are acknowledging from the start that the meaning of the category remains unsettled and even enigmatic.”²¹

Butler further insists that even the biological sexual binary is socially constructed. It is only because of the societally pressured performance of gender that people force such performative categories back onto biology. Sexual reproductive organs and chromosomes are chosen as the delineating elements between two fixed types of humanity only because of the prevailing expectation of gender performativity. There is no fixed reality behind gender. If de Beauvoir posited a clear distinction between the facticity of biological sex and the social construct of gender, Butler posited a complete de-tethering of the two, denying the fundamental reality of both. If gender is not reducible to a binary, one can conceive of oneself in more traditional terms as man or woman, or one can conceive of oneself in an unlimited variety of other ways. Thus, queer theory — the Q of LGBTQ+ — is born.²²

It is not difficult to see how transgenderism also finds justification in this philosophy of gender. It is a natural step from Butler’s ideas of gender performativity to the belief that traditional gender recognition based on biological sex is a matter of society forcing an expected performance of gender onto children born with certain gonads or chromosomes. Since biological facts (gonads and chromosomes) do not necessarily correspond to gender performance, individuals can be free to perform the gender of womanhood even while the biological facts of their bodies include XY chromosomes and male reproductive organs, or vice versa.

Intersectionality is another ideology that has left an indelible mark on third-wave feminism. Since the seminal 1989 essay by Kimberlé Crenshaw (born 1959), “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” the philosophy of intersectionality has moved into the mainstream of Western civilization in the fields of law, business, education, and beyond.²³ The key idea of intersectionality is that a person’s identity is best understood at the intersection of various factors of oppression. The more factors of oppression that apply to an individual, the more oppressed and marginalized that person is — and the more deserving of special privileges.

Affirmative action and DEI initiatives are mechanisms for the granting of privilege attained by one’s intersectional identity (or identities). Imagine a bingo card in which the person with the most squares marked wins the biggest prize. Minority status is one factor of oppression. Being a woman is another, since women are regarded as being objects of oppression in a man’s world. Third-wave feminism has capitalized on this framework by including various sexual orientations and many so-called gender identities in the grid of intersecting oppressions.

OPENING PANDORA’S BOX

With the emergence of what has come to be called third-wave feminism, Pandora’s box is fully open. The first and second waves introduced into Western civilization particular philosophical ideas and spurred social activism that cracked open the lid. It opened fully with the combination of Butler’s gender theory with Crenshaw’s intersectionality.

Third-wave feminism marks the most complete ideological rejection of the reality of sex/gender as grounded in nature by the good design of the benevolent Creator that Western civilization has seen. It is nothing short of a revolution. Given the wholesale rejection of the natural order of the gender binary and thus an ordered way of living and being in the world according to that binary, it is not surprising to see such an ideology leave a trail of chaos and destruction in its wake: the gross hormonal or physical mutilation of the boy who imagines himself a girl and euphemizing the act under the name of “medical care”;²⁴ legal mandates that prevent parents from insisting on the gender identification of their children that corresponds to their biological sex;²⁵ the concentrated and largely successful efforts of ideologues and activists to normalize behavior that is wildly contrary to God and nature, such as homosexuality, transgenderism, and gender-queer identification;²⁶ the pressure placed on young people to virtue signal to their peers by finding a way to check as many boxes as possible on the bingo card of sexual intersectionality, which inevitably leads to disillusionment, disenfranchisement, depression, and tragically, in many cases, suicide.²⁷

For all its radical rejection of traditional categories of gender, third-wave feminism grows out of the soil of feminism conceived more broadly, which is ultimately an effort to reject the created order of gendered relations as revealed by God in both nature and his written word. It is, at root, yet another actualization of God’s word to the woman: “Your desire shall be for your husband.”

Back to the Beginning

Feminism is a multifaceted and complex web of ideas, thinkers, and social points of emphasis. It has taken many forms over the course of the last century and a half, and many of the ideas and objectives of feminist thinkers contradict the ideas and objectives of other feminists. This makes feminism difficult to define and even more difficult to truly understand.

At its root, however, feminism is the fulfillment of God’s words to the woman: “Your desire shall be for your husband” (Genesis 3:16). The creation of mankind as male and female entails an ordered way of living and being as men and women in the world. Basic to this ordered way of living is the fact that, in ordered relations of authority and submission between the sexes, the man occupies the place of authority and the woman the place of submission. This is on display in the call to self-sacrificial, loving headship for husbands and the call to joyful and beneficial submission for wives. It is further demonstrated in the reservation of the office of elder/overseer/pastor to qualified men for the spiritual flourishing and vitality of the church. The goodness of ordered relations of authority and submission between the sexes is even seen in the way God instructs his people to organize their broader societal structures.

The serpent’s temptation involved an intentional usurping of this order and led to the sin of both Eve and Adam. As God spoke words of judgment to the woman, he predicted the reality of a fallen world in which sinful men would dominate women in unjust and abusive ways, taking advantage of their superior strength — “he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16). God also predicted that women would desire to usurp the proper authority of the man, seeking to take his place in the relational order — “your desire shall be for your husband” (Genesis 3:16).

Feminism is the philosophical and social actualization of Genesis 3:16 in our late modern world. While the waves of feminism have attempted to identify real problems, especially problems of sinful male domination, they have not offered real solutions, for feminism does not merely reject sinful dominion but propagates sinful usurpation. Anyone who has seen the pain, brokenness, and destruction wrought by ungodly men who abuse their strength to subjugate women is susceptible to feminism’s appeal. But the problem of sinful male domination is not found in the sinful pursuit of female usurpation. Rather, the repudiation of both sinful and wicked expressions is to embrace the good order and enjoy the fruit of God’s wise design for men and women.