The ABCs of True Womanhood

Mary Kassian: I just want to show you a few slides from the 1950s.

"The harder a wife works, the cuter she looks."

"Honey, you seem to thrive on cooking, cleaning, and dusting, and I'm all tuckered out by closing time. What's the answer?" "Vitamins, darling, I always take my vitamins. Vitamins for pep; pep for vitamins."

"Wives," (and these, of course, were from the early sixties) "look this ad over carefully. Circle the items you want for Christmas. Show it to your husband. If he does not go to the store immediately, cry a little—not a lot, just a little. He'll go."

And, of course, you've got your toaster, your blender, your waffle maker, your electric can opener. And then at the bottom, it has a message: "Husbands, look this ad over carefully. Pick out what your wife wants. Go buy it before she starts to cry." (Laughter) Can you imagine an ad like that in the paper today?

On the one side of this ad: "The chef does everything but cook—that's what wives are for." And "Christmas morning, she'll be happier with a Hoover."

I just wanted to show you those to tell you that our whole concept and our whole image of womanhood has changed dramatically since the 1960s. That's when it all started to shift. In the course of my lifetime—I'm a 1960s baby. How many are sixties children?

What were we thinking? Those polyester suits. How many of you dated a guy who wore a polyester suit? I did—what were we thinking, really?

The definition of womanhood has changed a lot, and a lot of that has to do with the feminist movement. In this session I'm just going to give you a little bit of an overview. I'm just going to chat with you and give you a snapshot of what's transpired. And then we're going to go over some ABC's, the foundation of what womanhood is all about, why we do True Woman, and how the movement even got started.

How many of you are at your first True Woman Conference? Wow. Okay, that's awesome. So this is just an overview of what is it all about. You may be thinking, Wow, how weird is that. True Woman? Like, is there a "false woman"? Why are we doing a True Woman Conference? What was the impetus behind that? What moved us to do this? How did that all happen?

There are a few factors that contributed to the mind-set in the 1950s. Life was very, very different. I touched on it a little bit earlier in my talk. Most people got married—virtually everyone got married. The average age of marriage for girls was twenty, and for guys, twenty-one or twenty-two—fairly young. If you hit age twenty-three, twenty-four, and you weren't married, you were an old maid, a spinster.

That's really changed. Living together then was so uncommon—it was called "living in sin." It just didn't happen. You had this nuclear family with the idea that the woman's place was in the home. It was the women who did the cooking and cleaning and looked after the home and children, and it was the husbands who went out and provided for the family. That was the model that was generally accepted in society as society's ideal.

There were a few reasons for this ideal, a few reasons why we came up with this cultural image of womanhood equals "Susie Happy Homemaker." World War II had recently ended. My father actually fought in it—I'm writing his memoirs, he's eighty-seven years old—and he fought in Europe against the Russians, with the Germans, in the German army.

World War II was this great upheaval in society, and during World War II all the women went out into the workplace. Then when the remaining guys came back, the women all went back home. That is where they wanted to be. They wanted to have kids and make babies, and there was a rapidly growing economy, and there were a lot of technological advances.

The 1950s was the era where you just had the television starting. TV started at the beginning of the fifties, and it wasn't until the end of the fifties where TVs really came into people's households. In the 1950s there was a big economic boost, post-war. Also a technological boost, because during the war all of the advancements in technology—they learned how to make bombs, they further developed airplanes, and there were all sorts of advances in electronics.

After the war, they didn't have to do that anymore, so they turned that technology toward making appliances. So instead of bombs, you had your washer, and you had your dryer, and you had your toaster, and you had your Hoover. I actually remember the day my mother got her first electric washer—glory hallelujah. She was doing a little jig. She thought she had died and gone to heaven.

Because she could throw the laundry in, and it did this little spin cycle, and you took it out and you didn't have to crank it through those little wheels, and flatten them out. (So now you know just how old I am.) You young girls are looking at me, "Really?" It wasn't that long ago.

But you had all these technological advances that focused on home and how to make home life easier—your appliances, your electric knives, your polyester cloth that didn't need ironing—all sorts of advances at that time.

And then, of course, you had television. Television was the first time you had this mass ability to market directly into someone's home. You had radio prior to that, but television, in terms of images. So the ideal image for promoting all this new technology that had just come onto the market was the happy, stay-at-home housewife, because she was going to be the consumer for all of these goods.

So this image was put forth all the time, that "Women, what will make you happier than a Hoover on Christmas morning? What's going to make you happier than an electric frying pan? What's going to make you happier than getting a nice, new electric washer?" I mean, my mom sure was happy.

So there was this happy housewife image that was perpetuated—it really was an image of consumerism. It was, "This is your ideal consumer. This is what her life looks like. You're going to be happy if you have all this stuff . . . if you have a really nice kitchen, if you live out in the burbs, if you have your white picket fence, if you have your station wagon, your kids, your husband, your appliances—that's going to make you happy."

So that was the culture of the fifties. There were some positive things about it; there were some negative things about it. Actually, when you go back statistically, thirty percent of women were working at that time, so we were led to believe that life was like the ideal. But that was just the image; that wasn't necessarily everyone's lives.

Most women didn't work when their children were in school, but women had education—they went to college. Even June Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver had a college education. Women went to college, they got degrees, but then when they got married, they stayed home with their children and just kind of dabbled in what they were trained for, or perhaps picked it up after their children went back to school or were out of the house.

So you have this cultural image of womanhood of, "You're going to be happy if you follow this 1950s formula." Well, into this walked Betty Friedan, who wrote a book in 1963 called The Feminine Mystique. In it she argued that this formula for women's happiness wasn't working. Women were told they were supposed to be happy if they had the husband, the kids, the vacuum cleaner—that there was really nothing more fulfilling or satisfying than getting the ring off your bathtub.

And yet the reality of the situation, when she started to talk to some of her friends she had gone to college with, that there was this undercurrent of dissatisfaction with their lives. They were living the American dream, and yet it wasn't fulfilling.

And so she came up with this idea, and she borrowed really from the work of Simone de Beauvoir, who was a French philosopher, a cohort of Jean-Paul Sartre—existentialism. She came up with this idea that women needed to throw off this image of womanhood and redefine their lives, that women would not be happy and fulfilled and would not feel that sense of fulfillment and contentment until they self-defined. Until you went out into the work force and until you got a job, until you had as big of a paycheck as your husband, you would not be happy or fulfilled until that happened. This ideology really turned into the whole feminist movement and feminism.

Now let me say that a lot of people define "feminism" in a lot of different ways, but for me, feminism is an "ism," like atheism or humanism or existentialism or Marxism or post-modernism. It's a philosophy. It's a distinct way of looking at the world. This new distinct way of looking at the world was introduced in the 1960s, and then really the feminist movement gained impetus through the 1960s by a group of very, very determined women—angry women—who began to spread their message.

Their message was that women have been oppressed—that there's been this century-old patriarchy in which the men had the benefits and were oppressing the women and keeping the women squelched, and that men kept women in this subservient "second-sex" role by keeping them as wives and housewives and making them mother their children and keeping them confined to marriage and not giving them their freedom in terms of sexuality, in terms of who they are.

And so the idea was, in particularly from Simone de Beauvoir and then Betty Friedan, if you can throw off these traditional roles, if you throw off the traditional role of womanhood, if you throw off the traditional "shackles" and definitions of marriage and morality and begin to define yourself—claim your power and your right to name yourself—then you're going to find fulfillment and happiness.

Now that we've lived "the dream" for fifty years, you know that that's not quite true, is it? Really, the question is a valid one. What is it that will bring women happiness and fulfillment? But the answer isn't the answer in terms of, "Oh, well let's just get a job and education and sleep around, and then I'll be happy and fulfilled." That's the wrong answer.

What's the right answer? It's a relationship with Christ, right? Because it's a spiritual question. It was a spiritual question that was being asked in the early 1960s—how do we as women find fulfillment? How do we find joy?

There were certainly some difficulties in the relationship between male and female—that's undeniable. But the answers or solutions to the problems in this philosophy were ones that, I believe, have taken us further away from God's truth and God's Word rather than closer to God's heart—and to the fulfillment of women.

Betty Friedan really started off this movement, and she keenly felt the unhappiness in her own marriage. Her big thing is that women, in order to self-actualize, need to be the bosses for themselves. No one has the right to tell women what to do. We get to claim who we are, we get to self-determine who we are, and we get to make up the rules. She said we need to define ourselves in a way so that men are not defining us, it's not religion that's defining us—so that it's not anything defining me except me. And that's really kind of into the whole philosophy of existentialism.

So I'm just going to take you for a real quick flyover here through history. [Puts slides up on screen.] Remember Leave It to Beaver? You had your image of womanhood changing so rapidly over the past few decades.

First, you had your Leave It to Beaver—June Cleaver. She's happy. She's a stay-at-home mom. She's got her kids, and she's really quite fulfilled in that role. Then in the 1960s you had that change to Mary Tyler Moore—anybody remember her? She was a single woman, getting older, but she was single and she didn't have any males in her life defining her. Do you remember the theme song? "You're gonna make it after all." You don't need men—you don't need a man in your life. You can make it. You can be a career woman. Go out there and get a job, and you're going to start discovering who you are, and you're going to make it after all.

After that you had Murphy Brown, who was a little more brash and in-your-face, a little bit more feisty than sweet Mary. Murphy Brown was the divorcée, she was a journalist, she was argumentative, she was an atheist. And during the course of the show she gets pregnant. But then in the very last episode of the show, that was hugely controversial—how many of you remember that? She decides that she's going to have the baby and not marry the father (gasp).

It was scandalous at that time. So scandalous that the Vice President at the time, Dan Quayle, made a comment for which he was absolutely crucified, saying that this was inappropriate for television to be putting forth a vision that leaves fathers out of the picture and that it's good for a child to live and grow up in a home where there's no dad. He was taken to the wall for that. It was massive news, because it was outrageous to think that women could just go ahead and do what they want, that they could have babies if they want, and they don't need the men in their lives.

And of course, women have to do that often, but it's not the ideal situation. Dan Quayle was saying, "That's not ideal. Let's not uphold that as a cultural ideal." Because that's what was shifting there—the ideal was shifting. Now we all know that there are tragic situations in which we don't live out the ideal, and yet we want to uphold the ideal as something that's valuable and something we want to attain. It's a better way for the children than the other way.

So you have Murphy Brown, and the ideology was shifting in terms of women get to self-define, women don't need men, women don't need marriage, women don't need traditional stuff. In order to be happy, women just need to do what they want, and that involves making a whole lot of money and self-actualizing in the work force.

There really started to be this looking-down-the-nose at the home, looking-down-the-nose at all those things that were traditional womanhood or that women traditionally did. I'll never forget the moment, just a few years ago, I went down to the local Zellers store—kind of like a Target—and went down this aisle. I'm very familiar with it, because it's just a couple blocks from my home. I'm in there all the time, so I knew exactly where to go to find things. So I went burning around this corner, and all of a sudden, I stopped in my tracks because I was in an aisle of yarn.

I had not seen an aisle of yarn for like forty years, because that was looked down upon. It's making a comeback. But it was really looked down upon—the canning and the making things from yarn—my generation looked down on it and said, "Yuk."

For those of you who lived through it, we went through this period of time when everything that women traditionally did that was womanly really got looked down on, and that was second-class for a woman to even be asked to do that. You asked a woman to cook a meal? She'll take your head off. Or if you say that it's her job to clean the toilet? No way!

So culturally, there started to be this shift in our thinking. (In just a minute I'm going to get to some other things, because I think we need some caveats on some things, but we'll get there.) We were saying, "I get to define who I am. I get to say what womanhood is about. I get to say what relationships are about." And so women started to self-define and then started turning their attention to even defining men and defining what the male-female relationship was all about.

Real interesting, because at that time, really, the whole feminist movement ballooned out through this process called "consciousness raising," which is essentially speaking bitterness. You get mad at the guys for the bad things they are doing. You get in a little group, and you talk to your girlfriends about it. They get mad. And then you get all motivated to go out and fight for political change, and go out and do something political to change the situation.

The 1970s were the golden age of feminism. There were just billions and billions and billions of dollars that got poured into this ideology. On college campuses, universities, in 1969, there were zero women's studies courses. By the end of the 1970s, there were over 40,000 women's studies courses and degrees in women's studies. Women's studies had been integrated into every level of education.

So then after that, you had this idea in the late seventies and early eighties that started coming through, that "It's better for women. The only way women can truly be who they are is to self-define. They don't need men at all—even sexually. That a woman-defined-woman is good for a woman, because then she's truly free of all of the shackles of patriarchy. She's truly free of men defining her life, and she gets to define herself."

That was the whole era when there was a show called Ellen. You find out that though Ellen has a male roommate, she's not attracted to men. She's attracted to women—and that's okay. Again, a huge scandal when that happened. She's in control; she's in power, and she gets to self-define and she gets to decide what her life's all about.

Women being in power and in control, and "let's kick the guys," and "I'm the tough woman" and "I'm the strong one." Do you remember that song? Let's just sing it for the benefit of those who weren't around or born:

I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore
’Cause I’ve been down on the floor, and I’m not going there again.
Yes, I am strong and it’s wisdom born of pain.
Yes, I’ve paid the price, but look how much I’ve gained.
If I have to, I can do anything.
I am strong (strong). I am invincible (invincible) . . . I am WOMAN.

I was twelve years old when that song by Helen Reddy came out. I remember as young girls linked arm-in-arm, walking down my middle school hallway singing, "I am woman, hear me roar!" You know, you've got your go-go boots on and you're singing, "These boots were made for walking, and that's just what they'll do . . . one of these days these boots are going to walk all over you" [stomp stomp].

AND—you girls remember this, right? You started to be taught that, "It's me who's important. I'm going to walk all over you. I'm going to kick your . . . bottom."

This is the image of womanhood that the next generation inherited, that this next generation was raised with this Terminatrix, Kill Bill, the Charlie's Angels, the powerful women who were the ones who were in control and powerful and dominant and bossing the guys around, setting the rules. "You follow my rules."

How many of you ever watched the Powerpuff Girls cartoon when you were growing up? You know, this is really interesting, because you have these three girls and the professor was trying to make the perfect girl, and he ended up spilling Chemical X into the formula. So his formula for "sugar and spice and everything nice" ended up going wrong, but then he ended up with the perfect girl.

And these girls have superpowers, and they go out and they vanquish all of the male "wolves" and male villains of the world. It's interesting because their three nemeses, their three counterparts, are the Rowdyruff Boys. These Rowdyruff Boys were big and mean, and they represented misogyny—they were girl-hating. They were horrible.

These boys were really, really big, ugly, and mean and they were mean to girls. And the way these Powerpuff Girls got rid of these boys, or cut them down to size, was, first of all, they were able to control them with their kisses. They would give them a kiss, and these boys would calm down.

But then these kisses weren't working anymore, and they had to find a new way to vanquish these big Rowdyruff Boys—the enemy. The way that they did that was that they found out that if they insulted these boys and attacked their masculinity, they could cut them down smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until they became nothing.

The archenemy, the ultimate evil, in this series, is a cross-dressing, effeminate character who speaks in a high falsetto voice, and really has woman-envy, and is the ultimate evil. Do you know what the ultimate evil's name is, anyone? Him. That's his name—Him. Him is the ultimate evil. Men (in the series) are the bad guys.

Men (in the series) are buffoons, they're Homer Simpson, they're dumb. It's the women who need to claim the power and have the smarts and the ability and the wisdom for the future of the society, and if we only had women ruling the world, oh what a world we would have. Whoever created the series obviously never worked in a female-dominated work environment. (Laughter)

Then you had Sex and the City and that was huge. Sex and the City said it's all about sisterhood. It's all about being sexually free. You can set your own standards, you can do what you want, your own morality, your own sexuality. "We're free women. We're just like the guys. We just go out and have sexual encounters, have loose morals. We can get married or not . . . don't have to . . . we can sleep around."

And all of this whole ideology of, "If we've got sisters . . . sisterhood is the bond that really keeps us on track. We can self-define and determine who we are as women." So it's really interesting, just this whole transformation that's taken place in our society with regard to the ideals of what womanhood is.

Our ideal that we have now has our whole set of what a good, strong, powerful woman is, that's very different than it was in the 1950s. Now let me say, there are problems with the 1950s ideal—I'm not in any way advocating that we go back to the 1950s. Get that clear—that's not what I'm saying.

But what I'm saying is that there have been these cultural ideals of womanhood that are upheld as the pathway and the root to women's happiness. And in our new "girls gone wild" culture, we see that this third generation of feminists really has picked up on this whole idea that "it's your right to claim power." And this generation says that sex is power, so "I'm going to express my power through my sexuality. And the way I express my freedom is through being sexual."

So that's the whole raunch culture that we see—the whole "girls gone wild" generation that is now really prevalent on college campuses everywhere. You will encounter that.

So we have these images of womanhood, and I think we're starting to see the tragedy of the consequences of what we have done as women, what we've bought into as women. We're starting to see the consequences in our lives and the lives of our daughters—in the divorce rate, in our homes breaking up, in the fatherlessness. If you tell men long enough that you don't need them and you can do without them, well, well what do you think they're going to do?

Tonight it's going to be almost fifty percent of children under the age of eighteen who will go to sleep in homes in which their fathers do not live. The fatherlessness has a crazy impact on the lives of women, on the lives of the daughters who don't have heroes, who don't have men that love them in a non-sexual way and call them out as women and affirm them in a way that's healthy and wholesome.

It's a tragedy—and yet we've all bought into it. I think we've all bought into the culture's image of womanhood sometimes by osmosis. You know, we just don't even think about it. It's in the air we breathe, and just the way we do relationships. The way you do your dating relationships, if you're a young woman, is very different.

It used to be in my day you didn't dare call a guy, and in this day, it's the women who are at the guys, at the guys, at the guys, after them, after them, after them. It's the women who are aggressive, who are the ones who are setting the pace—and it's not working very well.

And you think, Okay, it should work, in theory, but I see it all the time—the carnage that follows that approach. And then you get into marriage, and you're nagging at your husband, trying to control him, and he's like a dog on a leash—you're trying to teach him his tricks.

Then five or ten years into the marriage, you start hating him. Why? Because he's passive, he's wimpy. Well, we make our guys wimpy, I think sometimes, by the way we interact with them. We cut their knees out.

So the whole True Woman Movement—the Lord really started speaking to me and speaking to Nancy. I wrote a book called The Feminist Mistake (it was originally The Feminist Gospel). It's a book about philosophy and ideology that traced the philosophy and ideology of the feminist movement and how it's impacted the church and the culture.

Nancy read that book, and we had the chance to meet several years ago when she started her radio program. And then I noticed, probably in about 2005 or 2006, there was this shift in the wind. I noticed the young women of this generation were starting to ask different questions.

Instead of saying, "Yeah, this is what's going to make me happy," they were looking at their mums and saying, "No, I'm not quite so convinced anymore." Starting to ask those questions again—"What is it that women are looking for? What is it that will make women happy?" And it struck me really profoundly when I was doing a conference over on the East Coast, I think it was North Carolina.

It was a Christmas conference for college girls, and I was asked to speak to the women. There were about a thousand of them in the room and I thought, Man, I'm dead meat. I'm going to tell them what the Bible says, and then I'm going to duck and run, because they're going to kill me. This is not "how to win friends and influence people" kind of material. (Laughter)

But, I just thought, All right, Lord, I'll die for You. So I went into the room and just shared my heart with these college-age girls and finished about three in the afternoon and spent about two or three hours with them. And the presence of the Holy Spirit just became so palpable in that room, and the spirit of repentance among those girls, where they hit their knees and they began crying and weeping and repenting of the way they had been thinking and living their lives.

So profoundly touched were they that twelve hours later, at three in the morning, there were still girls there crying and repenting and getting their lives straight with the Lord. (Applause) And I thought, Wow, that's kind of interesting. What are you up to, Lord? And the Lord spoke to me profoundly that there was going to be a change coming and a shift coming in the churches, in calling His Church back—the women back—to understanding who we were created to be, and the glory of who God created us to be, in His image, image-bearers, that reflect the glory of the gospel in a unique way as women.

So I wasn't totally unprepared or surprised when I heard from Nancy, whom I did not know very well at that point. Nancy phoned me and said, "You know, Mary, the Lord's just been causing my heart to burn, and I think it's time for a movement."

And I said, "Yeah, I know, I think you're right." And it's really interesting, because five years before that we'd just been sitting around Nancy's condo—she had invited me over after a radio session—and she was sick, on the couch, with sniffles and nausea, and there were two or three of us sitting around lamenting—"Oh, man, you know it was like twenty-eight women that started this feminist movement, and who have just totally radically changed our lives and have side-tracked, really, a whole generation of women and impacted families and marriages—twenty-eight women."

We were lamenting the fact that it was so few women who got this ball rolling and changed things—and all the sudden this little teeny voice speaks up from under this cocoon blanket, and she says, "(Sniffle) Well, if a small group of angry women could affect such change, just think what could happen if God's Spirit awoke the Church and awoke a small group of remnant-women who are crazy-passionate about living out truth and living out the gospel of Jesus Christ." So that's really how it started.

We didn't have a big road map or a big plan. We just said, "Okay, let's do a conference." And we did, in 2008, and that was amazing. How many of you were in Chicago in 2008? Yes, some of you were. It was amazing, wasn't it? It was like, "Whoa, what just happened?"

It sold out. We had capacity for six thousand—boom—sold out three months before the event, and then we had another ten thousand listening online. Then ladies said, "We need information, we need information." And then all of a sudden these True Woman groups started popping up all over the nation, and we said, "True Woman groups? Who told them to start a True Woman group? Did you tell them to start a True Woman group?"

But there was just this burning, this hunger, that, "Yes, I need this, my sister needs this, my church needs this, my daughter needs this," in order to just start rethinking and taking a look. Now it doesn't mean we go back to the fifties or do life like the fifties, but it means we take this holy Word of God and what it says to us as women, and we wrestle anew with it on how to live out a godly life in this day and age as a woman. (Applause)

It's not going to look the same. My life won't look the same as my mother's life; we're not in the same generation. It's different. There have been technological advances—there's the Internet. There's all sorts of things that are different, and the questions you wrestle with.

There's no cookie-cutter solution. There's no formula that says, "You have to dress like this, you have to do this, you have to homeschool, you have to raise your kids this way, you have to have thirty-two of them." (Laughter) There's no formula that says, "Don't get an education, don't work, you can't have a career." But we wrestle with all those daily decisions.

The Holy Spirit wrestles with each individual woman as she wrestles with those things, in terms of, "Are you living your life according to the priorities laid out in the Word of God?" That can look different from woman to woman; that can look different in different personalities. It looks different in different stages of life.

It looks different for someone who is married versus someone who is single versus someone who has gone through the tragedy of a divorce. It looks different in different women's lives, and yet each and every one of us can be a God-honoring woman, and we can honor the Lord in the choices that we make.

And so this vision burst on us, and this vision was birthed in our hearts, and just wrestling with what God has to say to us as women. Because I believe, for this generation and probably the generation to come, one of the lines drawn in the sand in terms of our willingness to be faithful to Scripture will be the whole question of gender. It's coming. It's getting more . . .

There may come day when I'm thrown into prison for saying God created us male and female and that marriage means one man and one woman for one lifetime, because we live in an environment that is hostile to God. We talked about the woes this morning—we're doing this revisionism—good for evil, evil for good, even in the church. Even in the church.

It's going to take a lot of guts. God does not want wimpy weak-willed women. (Applause) God wants His daughters to stand up for what is true and what is right. He wants us to be those soft, responder, relater-nurturers, who say "yes" to the right thing and "no" to the wrong thing.

When we're talking biblical womanhood, we're not talking "throw out my brain, come step on me—I'm a doormat." We're not saying that submission means stupidity; we're not saying that holiness means "step on me." We're not talking about any sort of checklist.

What we are talking about is wrestling with the Holy Spirit and the Word of God, saying, "Am I doing life as a woman, Jesus, in the way You want me to and in the way that brings You glory?" That's what the True Woman Movement is about. That's what God has birthed in us, and we're praying for a movement of God in this generation, that He will raise up a remnant.

We see the connection so clearly—and I tried to draw some of that connection for you earlier today—between who we are as women and following the Bible in regard to womanhood and revival. Because for most women, the whole issue of womanhood is the elephant in the room nobody wants to deal with, right?

It's the big hard things and the big sin issues and the big attitude things, because they cut so close to home and so against everything culture is telling us in terms of how we ought to be in terms of our attitude, how we approach men, the way we interact, the way we demand, and are angry and in-your-face. So I think that for many of us as we deal with this issue and as we lay this issue down and really deal with it in our lives, I believe that ultimately revival will break out.

It will cause me to be renewed, and I will impact those in my sphere of influence, in my family, my marriage, my community, in my church, and I see the connection between the two. Because ultimately, living your life as a woman is not about having this new model of womanhood or—"Okay we have the June Cleaver and we have the Sex in the City, but guess what? Here's your biblical model of womanhood! And here's your checklist!" It's not about that.

It's about honoring our design as women and giving glory to our Creator, and ultimately it's about Jesus and not about us. And that's what our womanhood is about—Jesus, and telling the story of Jesus and displaying the gospel of Jesus and displaying it in a way that only a woman can.

And so there is a lot to be learned and a lot to be said—we have ten minutes left—and I'm just going to really quickly go over a passage, and I'm just going to give you ten little quick ABC's about womanhood—ten pillars of womanhood. I'm going to fly over them quickly. I just thought you needed to know a little bit more of that history.

We're going to take a look at a passage in Titus, and actually this is going to be a basis of some of the things that we're working on for True Woman 201—because we did 101—and now we're working on 201, which will be a follow-up. We'll spend time in the New Testament. In 101 we dealt a lot in Genesis.

Let me encourage you—if this whole idea is really new to you, I would encourage you to get hold of True Woman 101. It's a Bible study, and it walks you through creation and Genesis and who God created us to be as male and female. It deals with Scripture. What I love about it is that it deals with it all in a way that can be applied to any age, any stage of life, any kind of combination.

It's not just for women who are married or women who have kids. It's for single women, it's for grandmas, it's for younger women, because it really talks about the principles of womanhood in a general way. So do get that—True Woman 101.

Also, for you younger girls, if you're wrestling with, "What does this mean for relationships? How do I do life now? What does it mean for me as a woman who is just trying to navigate that?" get Girls Gone Wise and work your way through that, dealing with the contrasts between a wild woman and a wise woman. That really gives you a lot of background that I can't cover today.

We're going to take a look at Titus today—Titus 2:1–5, and this is really your curriculum for what women need to know.

But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine. Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness. Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the Word of God may not be reviled.

All right, so the ten important things about womanhood.

First of all is reverence. We need to be reverent woman. This passage talks about older women being reverent—that's because it takes a while to get there, and hopefully by the time you are older, you have gotten there. It takes a while to knock off some of the rough edges and get to the reverent stage. I get that, because that's my life.

What Paul does here, he really cites a part to typify the whole. So he uses a small example to illustrate a much bigger point. He says, "You need to have a God-focus instead of a me-focus, so you need to be reverent instead of slandering—you need to be reverent instead of shooting off your mouth or being slaves to much wine."

So shooting off your mouth—slandering—is essentially making someone else look bad to make me look good. Being slaves to much wine, that's essentially just making me feel good, right? So really reverence is a God-focus instead of a me-focus. That's really important, and that's the first foundation of true womanhood.

Second is discernment—to know and to uphold sound doctrine, to teach what is good. You can't teach what is good if you don't know what is good, so you've got to figure it out, and that takes some intentionality. So, really, some discernment. And I cannot believe how the church, in this day and age, scoffs at sound doctrine. We need sound doctrine. We need to have women who are really grounded in doctrine, in the Word, in knowing what the Word has to say.

Because if we don't get that, then we're just going to pass on this set of customs that our daughters are going to thumb their noses at. We don't want to just pass on a way of life that's just cultural or "that's the way I did it." We want to pass on the Word, because the Word is what endures for generations. The Word is how we can be confident that we can talk about womanhood in a way that will be applicable to every culture and every time and every place in the world throughout history.

We're not pushing an American version of womanhood that can't be applied in other parts of the world—in India or Africa or Asia. There are cultural trappings, but there is sound doctrine. There are some things that are true and that are sound, and so we need to have discernment, to know and uphold sound doctrine.

The third thing is affection—to love and esteem the family. This is particularly important, we're told in this passage, for young women. And that's not to say that it's unimportant for older women, but Paul's hopeful that by the time women are older, you get it. And don't you? Doesn't life have a way of putting things in perspective?

Now that I'm fifty, I kind of get that, and I didn't quite when I was twenty. When I was in the midst of my professional career in rehab medicine and in my self-actualization, and my strong invincible "I am woman, hear me roar" stage, and "I'm so defiant—how dare you." I would have made a really good feminist, honest.

So to love and esteem the family—this talks essentially about being husband-lovers and children-lovers. A true woman esteems the family as the God-instituted foundational structure for all of human life and relationships. She's committed to upholding marriage and family as God's method of putting the gospel on display.

Even if you are not married, you are still a woman. Even if you are not married, you can still uphold marriage and family as valuable. How do you do that? By supporting people who are married, by speaking well of marriages, by not engaging in any thoughts or actions that would take away from the sanctity and the holiness of marriage, by not flirting with the married guy in your office, by not getting sucked into those novels that uphold something as wonderful when it's not and the Bible calls it evil. You uphold the family. You don't talk badly about kids. You don't talk negatively about men. You don't talk negatively about marriage. You don't make those girl-jokes that we do when we get together as women that really are slanderous against God's design.

You don't have to be married or have kids to be a lover of husbands and children. You can support the family unit as God's ordained, foundational building block that really He gave us in order to reflect truths about the gospel and His nature and character. So . . . affection—to love and esteem the family.

Family was God's idea. Manhood and womanhood were His idea. Marriage was His idea, and the reason—and I'm just going to do this real quick and we're going to fly real quick over the rest—the reason history started with a man and a woman and a marriage is because history will end with a man and a woman and a marriage. Who's the man? Jesus Christ. Who's the woman? The Church. The marriage . . .

All of this is just temporary earthly stuff that will pass away when we enter into the reality to which it points, and that's why it is important to get the symbols right. Our earthly symbols are pointing to this amazing story of God—cosmic, eternal story of God. So that's why it's so important that we value what God values—that we love what He loves.

Fourth, discipline, to be self-controlled, to make wise, intentional choices, to be very intentional about living your life and not letting your life live you. These are ideals to strive for—this disciplined lifestyle that is not a burden, but that brings us more joy. That when we lived in a disciplined fashion—and I'm probably the most scatterbrained, undisciplined, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants-kind of person—but there's a joy and a blessing that comes when we are intentional about the way we live our lives and when we live them in an ordered and disciplined fashion.

The Spirit of God is the spirit of discipline—and power. He gives us the power to be disciplined, for which I'm so thankful.

Okay, fifth, character—aim for increased purity. We're to be pure. That's a no-brainer. We can talk about that one . . .

Six, responsibility—to be working at home, maintain the right womanly priorities. This doesn't mean that you're tied to the kitchen sink, you're barefoot and pregnant and that's all you do, that women can't have a job and can't work, can't have a career and an education. This does not mean that.

It means that you have got your priorities straight and that things at home are in order, and that takes precedence. You know, women, and you working women know—and you women who even are at home—you know that there's a state when your home is not taken care of, and when it doesn't get your attention the way that it needs to, everything's out of sync. Nothing's quite right because your private life isn't right.

As women, we have a particular responsibility for the home. That doesn't mean we do everything in the home—that doesn't mean the guys can't cook. My husband makes a mean soup—it's so good—and barbecue, really good. It doesn't mean the guys don't help clean.

It's not a who-does-what list, but it's in terms of just an overall responsibility. Women are nurturers of the relationships. When things are out of order, relationally, I sense that way before my husband does—do you not agree? You know, you have those spiritual antennae. God has wired you with all those neurons—you radiate antennae, and you know it—in your home, in your marriage, in your family. It's usually the woman who says, "You know, there's something not quite right here. We've got to . . ." You raise the flag and start addressing those things.

Women have been given that responsibility in a way that men do not have. Men have been given the responsibility to provide and protect in a way that women do not have. It's like if somebody breaks into my home, it's not like, "Oh, I guess it's my night. I'll go get the burglar. Stand back, honey. I'll take care of it—my shift. I'm strong."

No, there's something wired into us as men and women that's different—a different sphere of responsibility. It doesn't mean a woman can't contribute to the home, or bring in a paycheck, or that there aren't special circumstances, or extraneous circumstances—it's not a checklist. It just means God wired us differently.

As a woman, it's important for you to understand that in your life, home is a huge priority, and that God has wired you that way, and you are happier and more content—and things work better—when you figure that out. Okay? Maintain the right womanly priorities, number six.

Number seven, possess a missional mind-set. It says to be kind. I love the verse, "When the kindness of God appeared, He saved us." Who is the kindness of God? The kindness of God is Jesus. So to be kind, and when you're kind you show that kindness toward others, that missional mind-set for those around you, to introduce them to Jesus Christ.

Number eight—disposition, to be submissive to their own husbands. And again, I think here Paul is using the little bit—the illustration—to illustrate the greater whole. So he's using this softness, this responsive amenability that God has created women with, to represent the whole of a womanly disposition.

God created women to be soft. (And some of you are saying, "Yeah, I'm way too soft.") Do you know in Genesis, when God brought woman to the man, He says, "Ohhh, she's going to be called Isha because she was taken out of the man—Ish." Ish, "man," means strong; Isha, "woman," means soft. Not wimpy soft, but soft in a relational way, in a way that is beautiful and astonishing.

God created us to be responders, and we're going to respond to good things and to bad things, and God created us to have that soft womanly disposition that is, oh, so very, very precious in His sight, according to 1 Peter 3.

There's a lot I could say about submission—there are a lot of misconceptions about that—but I'll leave that for now.

Legacy, nine—be a spiritual mom, to speak into the lives of other women and to pass on the legacy of womanhood from one generation to the next.

And, number ten, beauty. And that's really what it's all about—beauty, to display the attractiveness of the gospel. Every woman wants to be seen as beautiful, but I'm not talking about a beauty that's skin-deep or external, or "I have to do that prime and patch job now, and it comes in stages, and it just doesn't come like it used to." You know what I'm talking about—we have this wiring to be seen as beautiful, and to be beautiful, and to be admired. But what God has wired into us is what He wants us to be—to be beautiful for Him and to be spiritually beautiful and to put the gospel on display—the good news of Jesus Christ.

And that's what we have a particular ability in a unique way to do as women. So, bless you, I hope this has helped. I hope it has given you a little bit of insight and piqued your interest to take things further. There are so many of you that have never been at a True Woman Conference before. Welcome, and I hope you enjoy taking this a step further.

Ask all the hard questions. There's probably not a hard question that you have that I've not asked myself. So go for it, and God bless you, and enjoy the rest of your weekend. Amen. (Applause)