Stargate SG-1: Emancipation

This first season episode brings us to the ancient Mongolian civilization (albeit via a race of Mongolian descendants who have been transplanted to another world by the evil Go'auld) and a world in which women are viewed as slaves and/or merchandise to be sold or traded or married off at will. The obvious message in this episode--preached via our heroes Jack, Tealc, and Carter--is that women should be free to fulfill their own destinies, to show their own faces, and to live their own lives as they see fit. This is a good message, and I think that any Christian should be willing to support it. (After all, the Bible says that in the kingdom of God, there is neither "male nor female," so I would think that a believer in Christ should be the first to challenge a view of women--or anyone--that calls for their enslavement and oppression.)

However, there is an underlying narrative here that I want you to be particularly aware of as you watch this or other episodes like it across the genre spectrum. The underlying message is this: that after millennia of ignorance, we in the past two centuries have finally seen the light and have lifted women out of the status of dependence and second-class citizenry. This is a common theme in our society, and it is touted heavily in both our schools and our entertainment media.

The problem is, the message is flawed. I have spent the better part of my life studying ancient and medieval history, and I can tell you with some confidence that almost no women from those periods, despite what we would view as apparent evidence to the contrary, would have seen themselves as second-class citizens. Women, after all, were the bearers of children, weavers of fabrics, and chieftains of everything that had to do with the home (which included management of workers, motherhood, and a degree of manual labor that most of us--including men--would find completely overwhelming). They had power that most women today would find impossible to wield in their households, for the simple reason that the agrarian structure of the family, as expressed during the ancient and medieval eras, necessitated a clearly defined family unit. The husband/father was "chieftain" of the family unit, in charge of everything that his sons and daughters did, the protector of the family unit, and (as circumstances dictated) an elder in his community. The wife/mother was in charge of the household, the daily manual labor involved in keeping the household running, and the daily responsibilities of parenting.

The best way to translate this structure of the home is to use the model of a platoon. Every platoon has a commanding officer, but there is also a second officer who takes care of the daily responsibilities of keeping the unit operational. In ancient and medieval societies, it was understood that the woman held this "second in command" position in the home. The reason she was "second in command" and not in charge of the home itself was simple: childbirth. Until the past century or so, childbirth everywhere on the planet was a deadly serious enterprise for women with immense risks for the new (or not so new) mother. Forget what we today consider the common ailments of pregnancy. Pregnancy and childbirth for women during those centuries was potentially fatal, and the very least a mother could hope for was to be somewhat incapacitated for nine months. Hence the need for men to be protectors and leaders--without the possibility of becoming pregnant themselves, men could literally stand guard over their wives while they were in the process of giving birth.

Many people within the Christian community talk about the evils of feminism. I personally don't think that feminism (even with some of its excesses) is to blame for the breakup of families or any other major social ills we are experiencing in America and the West today. The fact is, feminism itself is simply a symptom, a symptom of man's abandonment of a lifestyle that had served him for 5800 years for a new, technologically driven, unnatural lifestyle in which no one farms but everyone expects to eat. Without the old ways of tilling the ground for our food, we have simply lost any real reason to keep the family structure the way it has been for thousands of years. As a result, men began to leave their homes en masse in the nineteenth century for factories. Their wives and daughters followed shortly thereafter in the twentieth century, having realized that there was no reason for them to be at home. Now the family unit is breaking down, and increasingly, we are seeing people grow up without a real sense of what family is.

Yes, we've made advances as a society. However, we also have a tendency to see the way we do things today as "better" or "smarter" than the way people did things 20 or 30 generations ago. That arrogance keeps us from seeing just how vulnerable we really are, and how little we would have if it were not for a simple flip of a switch. The Bible tells us that God has a special plan for families. That plan is not a plan of oppression or domination, but it is also not the plan currently held to be right and good in our society today. It may be that if we want happy homes and happy families, we may need to reevaluate our own perspective on the generations of the past. Their wisdom, as different as it may be from our own, is wisdom we dare not ignore.