And the goals that young evangelical women have set for themselves reflect this worldview. In 2007, only 0.3% of women at non-Catholic religious institutions said that their probable career was “full-time homemaker.” There was also little difference between the goals of women at non-Catholic religious colleges and those at other schools when it came to pursuing advanced degrees. Surveys of college freshmen don’t necessarily reflect perfectly the choices that young people will ultimately make, but they do give a sense of the values that they have learned at home. Evangelical families now seem to expect their daughters to have careers.
Which is not to say these young women don’t place great importance on having a family. At secular schools 73% thought raising a family was very important, versus 80% at non-Catholic religious schools. Meanwhile, the percentage of women who said that being “very well off financially” was among their important objectives was also similar across the board — 69% at secular schools and 63% at religious ones. These goals are seen as no more incompatible for religious women than they are for secular ones. In fact, religious women may have a better chance of “having it all” than their secular counterparts. Since they tend to get married and have children earlier in life, they are less likely, Mrs. Palin notwithstanding, to have to have to make difficult choices between highly demanding mid-career work and the needs of a young family.
The reasons for these developments are many, but perhaps the most salient one is that evangelicals are an increasingly educated and upwardly mobile population. Evangelical colleges have grown at a rapid pace in the past 20 years, and the ratios of women to men there are even higher than at secular colleges.
So have evangelicals accepted the sexual revolution? Yes and no. While they generally agree that women should have careers, evangelical women and men still have some traditional social views — that sex should be reserved for marriage, that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that the possibility of abortion on demand, far from being a key to women’s happiness, is simply wrong. In other words, like most Americans, they have rejected the more radical elements of feminism. Another newsflash for the pundits, perhaps.
[blockquote](I)t seems that Ms. Quinn and her colleagues in the media are operating from an outdated picture of the evangelical community and its “values.”[/blockquote]
Christians need to keep this point in mind. The world (media in this case) does not have and never did have a true picture of the Christian community and its values. Sara hit the nail on the thumb with her comment regarding who she intends to please – it was [b]not[/b] the media.
So what exactly is the point of this study? I was having trouble following the conclusions.
I noticed one odd thing, which surely the author of the piece got wrong. She writes:
Evangelical men and women agree that women SHOULD have careers? Like a woman is being a bad person in some sense if she decides to be a homemaker?
I agree that this is a view common to the people who move in the WSJ writer’s circle, but I am doubtful it is what evangelicals (or traditional Catholics or Eastern Orthodox, for that matter) believe.
What might be the case is that evangelicals now believe that women should have the opportunity to pursue careers — but that’s very different from saying all women SHOULD pursue careers. Even the opportunity issue isn’t as simple as it sounds — traditional Christians do not take the view that a woman’s opportunity should be completely unfettered in terms of obligations to her children, which is the modern view (having a baby, then dropping him off at day care in 6 weeks to race back to the law firm and pursure that goal of being made partner).
Perhaps the advice that old Father Tom used to give to the girls who showed up for chapel is most valid. He advised them to finish their degree to set up a safety net should bad things happen to their families. His reasoning was much like the old motto “Be Prepared”. An educated widow has a better chance of supporting the family or an educated young mother can get a better paying job than one who lacks that education. He then followed it up with anecdotes of people who did and didn’t prepare for potential disasters in their lives.
Bill in Ottawa, just a thought. This may have had some merit before tuition rates skyrocketed. If instead of paying the outrageous prices for an “education”, a girl put the tuition in the bank (in high rate CD’s) and then worked for more savings during the time she’d be attending school, then eventually if something happened to her husband she wouldn’t necessarily need to work at all. Of course, if she would have been taking out huge loans to attend school “just in case”, what a gift to her husband to not have those loans to pay off. What about putting the money into life insurance policies? Just another way of “preparing”. And really, how many jobs are there that require a college degree that one got 10 or 20 years earlier and hasn’t worked in the field since? I’m not sure that is a very good safety net nowadays. Degrees aren’t all they’re cracked up to be without all the added work experience, but hefty bank accounts are very nice for widowed ladies.
Do these liberal feminists read anything other than their own writings?
Sally Quinn said on Oreilly tonight she was sorry and was wrong.