Should Women Keep Up With Current Events?

It seems every few weeks I find something else from that “Titus 2” blogger/influencer that makes me cringe.  Last week was another one I sent to my girls…naturally with the eyeroll emoji.  Not very mature of me, but I digress…this week’s topic was when the lady in question reposted a screenshot of a tweet from a fundamentalist pastor who said, in summary, his wife is too busy raising his 6 kids to fret about whatever “psyop” the news wants her worrying about.  Now, I can understand being busy and not watching the news.  Sometimes it is good to take a break from whatever is going on in the world.  But I don’t think we should totally check out of things, for a lot of reasons.

It isn’t just the original post that made me roll my eyes.  Sometimes the comments and the “Titus 2” lady’s replies are worse than the original post.  Despite the fact that this woman says she only teaches women (because that is Biblical) there are many men who love to hate on women who follow her and absolutely love her take on what submission looks like.  In this case, a man commented, “The husband should keep up with current events, and let the wife and children know only on a need-to-know basis.”  The original poster replied, “Men generally handle the news FAR better than us women!”

I almost don’t even know where to start with this.  The “Don’t worry your pretty little head” attitude and the woman agreeing with it seems to imply that women don’t have the intellectual or emotional capacity to think rationally and deal with the world.  But both men and women were made in God’s image, and as such, have the capacity for rational thinking.  To imply that women should let their husbands tell them what is important seems to put women on a lower intellectual tier than their husbands, and this oftentimes leads towards abuse and misuse of wives and daughters.

I was raised to be very intellectual (thanks, Dad!)  God led me to an excellent homeschool support group full of women who, with their husbands, are informed about current events and involved in political activism.  I have always gravitated towards a more intellectual crowd.  My three girls are the same way.  Being interested only in cooking, child rearing, makeup and shopping just isn’t us.  Some of us enjoy various aspects that would be considered the female sphere, like cooking, sewing, knitting, and making handicrafts, but all four of us have a very intellectual side and favorite academic things to study.  And we have, as a family, been very involved in political campaigns and pro-life, pro-family causes for more than 20 years. 

This influencer also believes women should only vote the way their husbands tell them to and let the husbands vet political candidates, but I can tell you that this would never work in my house.  We discuss the candidates and vet them together, either by attending forums, asking people we know what they think, or by poking around the internet to see what we can find to make a decision on the people that best represent our views.  We both generally vote the same, but that is more because we think a lot alike and have hashed out the pros and cons on the candidates together.  Sometimes we might split in a primary, but that usually happens when we could literally toss a coin and one candidate isn’t obviously better (or worse) than another.  *Or, on a more recent occasion, when the names of the candidates were similar as well as their views, and neither of us could remember which one was which when we went to the polls and which one we put slightly ahead of the other.*

Also, it seems that this puts an awfully full burden on the man to not only work but look into all things intellectual to decide what his wife and children need to know about. There are things that stand out to me in the news that I have brought to my husband and children’s attention that don’t wind up on the radio news blurbs.  Sometimes they are issues we all need to email our local representatives about.  And I can testify to the influence of godly women intervening in local legislation.  One year there was a bill put forward to do something or other with children (a reaction to a horrible abuse case) and some language curtailing homeschool freedom was inserted into it without one of the main sponsors realizing it was happening.  When a female journalist with libertarian leanings posted on social media about it (because she reads the bills) a bunch of intellectual homeschool moms started working their political connections and in short order got the bill amended and the anti-homeschool language removed.  If the mamas weren’t paying attention and waited for their busy husbands to tell them what was going on, it would have most likely been passed into law before anyone noticed.

I think what bugs me the most about this is that we are in a culture war of epic proportions, and it seems to me that it is all hands on deck at this point.  I have no Bible verse to throw out there at this point to back me up, I’m purely going on personal experience and the way things work at our house. I often think about the Revolutionary War and the impact Abigail Adams had on the way things went.  Mrs. Adams was very intellectual and full of common sense and good advice.  She even edited some of her husband’s closing arguments, because he valued her input on every level.  Several of the other Founding Fathers found her advice so valuable that she was included in dinner invitations so they could get her perspective.  It is clear from this “Titus 2” influencer and the men who love her, however, that there is still a segment of society that wants to treat women as intellectually inferior to men, and that is something no one in my house believes to be true. 

I’m sure that makes me a feminist in her eyes, but I think we all need to help each other keep up with what is going on and fight the battles that need to be fought together, or everything Abigail Adams, her husband, and his fellow Founding Fathers fought for will disappear forever. And, like Mrs. Adams, we fight these battles alongside our husbands in the way we are individually equipped to fight.  And that means some of us cannot just turn away from keeping informed about current events.