Brave New Family by G.K. Chesterton - Part 2

G.K. Chesterton is better understood in bite-sized chunks so I greatly appreciated the editor of Brave New Family compiling G.K’s wisdom on the subject into digestible paragraphs and chapters.

In my last post I quoted a few of his thoughts on marriage and this week I want to highlight his insights into motherhood, especially the idea that mothers should work and let someone else raise their children. (Although written 100 years ago, his words are quite contemporary.)

The State thinks think they can do a better job and leave the mother to do something more meaningful. The actual effect of this theory is that one harassed person has to look after a hundred children, instead of one normal person looking after a normal number of them. Normally that normal person is urged by a natural force, which costs nothing and does not require a salary, the force of natural affection for his young... If you cut off that natural force, and substitute a paid bureaucracy, you are like a lunatic who should carefully water his garden with a watering can, while holding an umbrella to keep off the rain. (p. 56)

A woman's function is laborious, because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the bigness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness. (p. 113)

And my favorite: Progressive people are perpetually telling us that the hope of the world is in education. Education is everything. Nothing is so important as training the rising generation. They tell us this over and over again, with slight variations of the same formula, and never seem to see what it involves. For if there be any word of truth in all this talk about the education of the child, then there is certainly nothing but nonsense in nine-tenths of the talk about the emancipation of women. If education is the highest function of the State, why should anybody want to be emancipated from the highest function of the State? If education is the largest thing in the world, what is the sense of talking about a woman being liberated from the largest thing in the world? (154)

Brave New Family by G.K. Chesterton - Part 1

I just finished reading the horribly depressing, The Flipside of Feminism by Venker. (My review on Goodreads is here.) Thank heavens I could balance it with Chesterton’s humorous and insightful Brave New Family. BNF is an anthology of his writings on marriage, sex, and motherhood. Chesterton cannot be improved upon so I without further ado, here are some of his choice quotes on marriage.

Of all human institutions marriage is the one which depends upon slow development, upon patience, upon long reaches of time, upon magnanimous compromise, upon kindly habit. (p. 23)

I have been requested to write something about Marriage and the Modern Mind. It would perhaps be more appropriate to write about Marriage and the Modern Absence of Mind. In much of their current conduct, those who call themselves "modern" seem to have abandoned the use of reason; (31)

They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words: 'free love,' as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. (p. 51)

I was pleasantly surprised at Chesterton's frank discussion of sexuality (100 years ago!) and appreciated this quote:

The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant. (p. 187)

Stay tuned for more in my next post. . .

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

Have you ever watched  a movie in which the wife is married to a jerk?  When the man of her dreams comes along, you wish with all your heart that she could leave her slob of a husband and find happiness with the new man?  I. Hate. Those. Movies. Because they manipulate me into elevating my flimsy feelings above what I know to be right.

I had similar feelings as I read Catching Fire, the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy.  Yes, there is the same heart-thumping action as book one.  Yes, the themes of self-sacrifice are very real and powerful.  But the love triangle is starting to wear on me. Katniss has strong feelings for Peetah because they’ve been through hell together in the arena, but she reserves her romantic feelings for Gale, her lifelong best friend.  When she has bad dreams, however, she allows Peetah to hold her through the night.   Blech.  She hates herself for using him, but she can’t help it...  You feel so sorry for her.  She’s got so much to worry about - keeping her friends and family alive, etc.  But I don’t like being manipulated into thinking that what she’s doing is justifiable.  

And do you really want me to believe that this handsome hulk of a guy holds her through the night with nary a sexual impulse? Is this some feminist theme - that men are there for our needs, but we don’t need to be there for theirs?  Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want sex in these books.  I just think it’s weird that this guy loves her so much that he can pretend that he doesn’t have hormones.

Off my soap box now.  There are things to really like about Katniss.  She eschews the empty-headed people from the Capitol who care only about clothes, tattoos and outlandish hairdos.  She scorns “playboy”  Finnik, comparing him to the lascivious Cray.  She feels pity for the morphling addicts who need the drug to escape from reality.  (She, herself, gets drunk once, but this is shown in a negative light.)  In addition, she is constantly reaching out to the kind of people whom the world rejects.  The main theme of book two is Katniss’ determination to give her life in exchange for Peetah’s.  So aside from her ambivalence toward the men in her life, she is a very moral character.  

Catching Fire has more gore than Hunger Games (book one) and more mentions of people in various forms of nakedness (no details though).   I’d think twice before giving this to a young girl to read. Although the book ended with a great twist, I'm going to resist checking out the third book until I read a few others with less adrenaline-based plots.

The Lost Art of True Beauty by Leslie Ludy

The subtitle of The Lost Art of True Beauty is The Set-Apart Girl’s Guide to Feminine Grace, which implies the spiritual aspect of beauty. Ludy strongly urges her readers to find true beauty as they separate themselves from the values of the world and draw closer to Christ. The thoughts I’ve woven together below are taken from the author’s own words.

She rightly points out that we live in a culture that lifts up a standard of beauty impossible to achieve in real life. “We are constantly assaulted by a world that insists we aren’t alluring enough – we need to change our bodies, our clothes, and our personality in order to be more appealing.”(p. 26)

“Love yourself, take care of yourself, transform yourself” are our mantras. But as Ludy points out, these are totally contrary to scripture. Christ said, “Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.”(Mark 8:34) The word “deny” here literally translates: to forget one’s self, lose sight of one’s self and one’s own interests… The secret to becoming radiant and beautiful is to forget about self and become completely consumed with only one thing – Jesus Christ…. (p.30)

The first step to discovering true feminine beauty is exchanging all that we are for all the He is. If we rely on something that we possess to make us beautiful, we cannot receive the supernatural, transforming beauty of Christ. True beauty is impossible outside of Him. (p.22)

God’s pattern is the very opposite of the “bad girl” image so applauded in our modern times… Somewhere along the way, as the culture became more cavalier toward sin and selfishness, the idea of being dignified, refined, ladylike, gracious, and socially selfless faded into the background. Now young women seem to get far more respect if they are loud, boisterous, rebellious, obnoxious, and sexually aggressive than if they are sweet, polite, graceful, refined, modest and thoughtful… (p.44)

[But] true beauty, in a nutshell, is found in a soul completely surrendered to Jesus Christ, a heart consumed by Him alone, and a life eagerly poured out for His sake. (p.168)

(I wish someone had given me this book as a teenager.)

Save the Males by Kathleen Parker

My world view includes the idea that men and women were created differently to complement each other. Obviously, I worry about the push in our culture to emasculate our men and de-feminize our women. In the name of equality we seem to be losing our unique identities.

It’s no wonder that the book Save the Males by Kathleen Parker caught my attention. Frankly, it’s a book I’d recommend only to those who are concerned with the de-gendering of America because it is both profane and sexually explicit – things I abhor in books. Nevertheless, Parker is right on target in many of her assertions and I managed to skim the less savory passages to get to the main ideas. Chapter Seven on women in combat is worth the price of the book. I have never read so many clear cut reasons for not allowing it. One example is the ambivalent attitude of Radical Feminists concerning violence towards women:

“Feminists recognize the vulnerability of women when they are concerned with the plight of women who are victims of domestic abuse…. [yet] their position on integrating combat ranks puts them in the position of saying that violence against women is a terrible thing unless it is at the hands of the enemy, in which case it’s a welcome tribute to women’s equality.” (p. 183)

She concludes the chapter with, “Women historically have been excluded from combat for civilized reasons – not because they were deemed unworthy, but because they were deemed too worthy to be sacrificed to grisly men from hostile nations. The combat exclusion wasn’t an act of sex discrimination, but an act of decency.” (p. 184)

My conclusion: Everyone understood these things not too long ago and it’s astonishing how muddled we’ve become in our thinking. I recommend this insightful book to those who are troubled about the blurring of gender distinctions in our present day world.