The first essay of I’ll Take My Stand is by John Crowe Ransom and entitled, Reconstructed but Unregenerate
I have already mentioned my emotional state while reading the chapter but now I would like to zero in on one particular passage which I found compelling. It begins on page 9 in my copy and continues on to the top of page 11. Interestingly, it falls nicely into the Titus 2 role of this blog which kinda sounds lame considering the content of the quotes.
It begins with this statement:
Ambitious men are belligerent also in the way they look narrowly and enviously upon each other; and I do not refer to such obvious disasters as wars and the rumors of wars. Ambition of the first form was primary and masculine, but there is a secondary form which is typically feminine, though the distribution between the sexes may not be without the usual exceptions.
Delivering a knock-put punch with this sentence:
If it is Adam’s curse to will perpetually to work his mastery upon nature, it is Eve’s curse to prompt Adam every morning to keep up with the best people in the neighborhood in taking the measure of his success.
Perhaps you aren’t cheering your husband out the door demanding he make more money to keep up with the neighbors in the way described by Ransom. But there are other ways, as SAHMs, that we crack the whip upon our husbands’ backs. When we fail to have simple tastes and simple needs we are hurting our husbands. We may like to think that we are just following some speaker’s advice but in many cases it comes down to feminine ambition. We may kid ourselves into thinking we are enhancing our husbands’ trophy case but, forsooth, we are just making a nuisance of ourselves. Being gracious in the Southern sense does not always mean having the nicest clothes but it does mean carrying yourself with grace no matter what you are wearing, even if it is the same dress you wore the past 3 Sundays.
There are a million other ways that Christian women provoke their husbands to do better wrongly.
Then this paragraph really struck my heart :
“The feminine form is likewise hallowed among us, it seems, under the name of Service. The term has many meanings, but we come eventually to the one which is critical for the moderns: service means the function of Eve, it means the seducing of laggard men into fresh struggle with nature. It has special application to the apparently stagnant sections of mankind, it busies itself with the heathen Chinee, with the Roman Catholic Mexican, with the “lower” classes even of American society. Its motive is missionary, its watchwords are such as Protestantism, Individualism, Democracy, and the point of its appeal is a discontent, generally labelled “divine.”
Ladies, do you see what he is saying? Service can be another word for ambition. History tells us that many of the former feminist advances came on the heels of do-good women’s issues. Abolition was essentially a feminist movement allowing women to leave their own sphere of sovereignty to stick their noses in other peoples’ business. Prohibition comes to mind; Carrie Nation self-righteously destroying bars. When women leave their own dominion and self-righteously begin to serve outside their sphere, bad things happen in society. From current events Mary Landrieu comes to mind. It is just sickening to watch that woman.
And fictional literature has not failed to give us the do-good woman as a caricature of true womanhood. Charles Dickens, himself a reformer, has no end of “missionary” minded silly woman in his tales.
That is why, I think, the patriarchy movement has been so dead set against progams in churches. It isn’t just that our children are getting negatively socialized….because sometimes they are not. It is that so many church programs deteriorate into woman-run do-goodism. A woman should be busy at home not busy at church. This is not to say that works of service are not a part southern womanhood. They are just performed within the proper sphere.
Now a quick reminder that I am a global thinker. I am much better with big ideas than small details.
