Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women's Movement by Sue Ellen Browder

Author:Sue Ellen Browder [Browder, Sue Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Religion, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Christian Life, Spiritual & Religion, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Women's Issues
ISBN: 9781681496658
Google: caGuCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2015-11-15T23:34:48.343928+00:00

The two Cosmo editors with her try to pretend they don’t know her.

“I guess it was quite a sight. . . grown woman screaming at tiny infant,” Helen admitted. “When I told [my husband] David this story his first words were, ‘Oh, my God, what if she was a Cosmo reader!’ ”2

Years after I heard this story, I found myself wondering: Was Helen’s bizarre behavior, her angry eruption over a little baby crying in business class, born of her own unacknowledged post-abortion wounds? Helen admitted late in her life that during her early days in Los Angeles in the advertising business, when she was earning money to support herself, her mother, and her wheelchair-bound sister, she’d been a kept woman. She didn’t go to college and, in fact, had to drop out of secretarial school for lack of funds. How many abortions did she feel compelled to have to keep her various jobs before she met and married David, who urged her to write Sex and the Single Girl? Helen has justifiably been called one of the architects of the culture of death.3 Her ideas and the propaganda she invented to spread those ideas were certainly deadly. And yet on a personal level, was she just a talented, small-town girl from Green Forest, Arkansas, who’d managed to make it big in the world by having one or more abortions along the way?

I was relieved to be living far from the day-to-day dreariness-mixed-with-angst I had encountered while working on staff at Cosmo. With God’s grace, I was beginning to learn that a life spent chasing transitory pleasures will never satisfy the human heart. It was at home that I first began to taste the true freedom born only of lasting love, the type of freedom Friedan and the Mere Fifty-Seven seemed to have overlooked that fateful night in the Mayflower Hotel.

Although the NOW-led women’s movement made much of who does the dishes and who mows the lawn, Walter and I refused to waste our time fussing over day-to-day sex-sole duties. There was more than enough drudge work to go around, and we split it up along the lines of who could do what most efficiently. Since Walter knew how to repair a car, fix a flat tire, and mow the lawn, those were some of his jobs. Since I loved baking, I did most of the cooking. Oddly enough, Walter ironed better than I did. The dishes got done when the dishes got done. We settled into a comfortable routine that left us both plenty of time to retreat to our studies and write. We didn’t ask ourselves who was doing the most work or who was getting the short shrift. We made no attempt to divvy up the work so we would be “equal.” We both just dived in and worked as hard as we could. Our marriage wasn’t a 50-50 deal. We both gave 100 percent and tried to do whatever we could to set one another free. Together, we made a great team.

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