Godly Womanhood

(A note on the picture with this post: Just to prove women can be both beautiful and godly, three Barbie “Makeovers” representing characters from Edmund Spenser’s epic allegory the Faerie Queene: Left to right, Gloriana, representing the glory of God, Una, representing Truth, and Goldenberry, wife of Satyrane, a godly knight protecting Una in her forest journey.)

Girls, Ladies, Women, Mses; — What happened to us? We were so busy proving we were as good as men we became harpies, beautiful faces on voracious, soulless killing machine bodies. Yes we did. No, it isn’t an exaggeration. We learned to distrust men, to do without them, to hate them. We celebrated ourselves, we sang ourselves, we roared “in numbers too big to ignore”; (mostly too loudly and a bit shrill), we had “me time,” we went from eyelet pinafores to blue jeans to navy suits, we got most of the jobs, the scholarships, the promotions — and we left all that was important ground into the dust.

Come back with me along the road and let’s pick it up and try to put it back together. What is it? It is our girlhood, our femininity, our love of boys and men, our attraction to the other slightly less than half of the world, which we can no longer deny we desperately miss and need. By following me, by reading this ongoing rant, you give up nothing except stress you were never intended to suffer, loneliness you were never intended to bear, hatred and suspicion no one should ever feel except for really bad people (which most men are not).

You gain — oh, where do I begin? Beauty, mystery, fun, tenderness, excitement, security, protection, power no feminist can imagine. You can set the whole world back to its proper course. That ancient saying that behind every great man there is a woman is true in every possible sense. A woman has the power to make or break a man. Unfortunately we’ve been busy breaking the good ones and making the bad ones. Yes, it is our fault men are the way they are, in large measure. If you don’t believe that, forget about reading this. You can’t fix anything if you won’t even acknowledge that you broke it.

All right. Those of you who want to be ladies, listen up. First of all, we have to fix our conception of what it means to be a girl. Mostly, at first, it means staying away from boys. What? Yes. There’s too much mingling of young children these days. Unisex daycare, unisex PE class, pushing girls into traditionally male sports and organizations (Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, not Unisex Scouts, get it? Marines don’t run unisex boot camps for so many reasons.) Girls need to do things with girls and women when they’re young. Young being most of the way through high school.

Those segregated boarding schools you used to hear about had the right idea. Our modern moral “messedupness” tells us it just creates more desire when you separate boys and girls and drives them to sneak around and “do it” behind our backs. That is not true. Out of sight, out of mind is true. Familiarity breeds contempt is true. You have to keep them apart so they’ll appreciate their proper chances to be together, so they’ll have something to look forward to. Of course they’ll think about each other, wonder about each other, want to be together as time goes on. But you’ll also keep those girls so busy growing sweet and pure and lovely that they won’t have much time to think about boys.

Ah, yes, purity. Time to talk about that. We have reacted against the feminist culture to the extent that girls are struggling to get back to feminine attire again. However, they have few examples of feminine women to copy. Where are those ladies with a touch of lace at their throats and a swish of skirts? I see women in their sixties and seventies in jeans and Tee Shirts. So, girls seem to have got the idea that dressing like a prostitute makes them feminine. After all, those are the women who are attracting the men. So girls pour themselves into sausage skins with glitter pasted on them, cover themselves no farther than between the cleavage and the buttock, and think they are pretty.

So, let’s go back to playing dressup, ladies. I’m going to call all my readers ladies, regardless of age, because that’s what we’re striving to be, if we aren’t there already. Once upon a time, little girls played dressup. They looked in their mothers’ closets and got flowery hats and lacy dresses and high-heeled shoes, and they pretended to be ladies. Do they do that anymore? What do they find in mom’s closet? Jeans, sweats, running shoes, maybe some “look-just-like-the-men” suits. Flowers? Lace? Pooh. Maybe a dress that isn’t big enough to be a slip.

Where did they get that idea that pretty women expose everything they have to men? Please don’t tell me they got it from you. “Shrinky” tops on three-year-olds. Poured on miniskirts on ten-year-olds. Low-rider jeans and low-plunging tops on thirteen-year-olds. Where is that child’s mother? Standing right there, so happy that her little girl is “growing up.” Stepping out, did you say? Step back and look at that child. She’s not a whore. Don’t let her dress like one. And don’t you, either.

The first thing about dressup is the clothes are never too tight, right? It’s mommy’s dress, and it flows down to the floor. It doesn’t grab your bosom in a death-throttle and try to pop it out in everyone’s face. Do you expect to see your mother’s bellybutton on a daily basis? You shouldn’t. Only daddy should. Frankly, nobody but daddy or husband should see anything much below the shoulders or above the knees, ever, beachwear excepted and then, still, a one piece suit with a properly-covered bosom and a bit of skirt goes a long way toward expressing modesty. So loosen up your clothes, ladies. Cover yourself, and leave some space between skin and fabric.

Dressup is where you learn beauty and modesty. And it’s a “girls only” pastime. Spending time with other girls and your mom, trying on modest, pretty, feminine clothes is quality time. Learning what’s decent, what’s proper, what’s truly beautiful. So many women, even good women, have lost the ability to care about what they look like. Some women even think it’s a waste of time to be pretty, to wear makeup or jewelry. And some women will wear it to work or to go places but not for their husbands. They’ll bag around the house in sweats and never think about who the most important person to dress up for is.