Word: feminist
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Updike's Gertrude is a feminist well ahead of her time. "A good woman," she muses, "lay in the bed others had made for her and walked in the shoes others had cobbled." A princess, she must marry the man her father, for dynastic reasons, chooses for her, even though she feels no love for him. She does her duty, becomes a queen, bears an heir, Hamlet, and resigns herself to a life she sees as "a stone passageway with many windows but not one portal leading...
...nature, men wouldn't have spent so much of the past millennium dodging women by enlisting in armies, monasteries and all-male guilds and professions. Up until the past half-century, women only fantasized about their version of the same: a utopia like the one described by 19th century feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, where women would lead placidly sexless lives and reproduce by parthenogenesis. But a real separation began to look feasible about 50 years ago. With the invention of TV dinners and drip-dry shirts, for the first time the average man became capable of feeding and dressing himself...
...frozen-and-thawed ova have been tricky to fertilize because their outer membrane gets too hard. But a new technique called intracytoplasmic sperm injection makes frozen ova fully fertilizable, and so now Guy Land can have its ovum banks. As for the incubation problem, a few years ago feminist writer Gena Corea offered the seemingly paranoid suggestion that men might eventually keep just a few women around in "reproductive brothels," gestating on demand. A guy will pick an ovum for attractive qualities like smart, tall and allergy-free, then have it inserted into some faceless surrogate mother employed...
...feminization of mainline Christian denominations simply drive more traditional churchgoers to Evangelicalism? No doubt, at least in the short run. Yet there are feminist undercurrents in conservative places as well. To be sure, in 1984 the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution sanctioning women's service "in all aspects of church life other than...leadership roles entailing ordination." But the convention cannot dictate to individual congregations, and the number of ordained Southern Baptist women has increased each decade. Although most females attending Baptist seminaries (up to 40% at some schools) have no intention of targeting a pastorate, many other Baptist...
...here that the feminist impulse merges with an equally dynamic strain in American religion: the empowering of the laity. All sorts of Christians (and Jews and Buddhists) are tempering the CEO model of leadership with one that allows churchgoers to be pastoral counselors or high-ranking administrators. Again, women have rushed to fill...