Overturning Roe and the Patriarchy That Blinds US: A Personal Narrative

When I learned on Friday June 24, 2022, that the conservative majority of the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade Decision, calling it wrong to recognize a woman’s right to an abortion,[1] I knew we had been blinded by patriarchy. In all the years I have lived under patriarchy as a 63-year-old white woman in America, what the overturning of Roe reminds me of is a few poignant and personal cases when I have experienced patriarchy. I am willing to share these stories because current generations need to understand the roots of discrimination against women in order to heal, not fight, but to heal the patriarchal roots of discrimination against everyone who is not a white male.

Given that Texas is one of the states leading the way in outlawing abortion, I think it is appropriate that I, as a woman, share some of my most painful experiences of patriarchy, especially those that happened in Texas.

When I attended Texas Christian University 1977–1981, patriarchy was implicit in many aspects of culture. To give what many people think is an innocuous example, one of the Honors Colloquia I attended was named “The Nature of Man.” “Man” is at best an androcentric way to name humankind, and at worst sexist by intention. Exclusively male terminology arises out of patriarchal cultures that primarily give power and rights to men. That has historically been the case in America, as married women did not have the right to own property in their own name and to keep their earnings until 1848 in many states, and not in practice in every state until 1900.[2] The first co-educational college in America did not open until 1843.[3]

Patriarchy not only reserves power and privilege for men, but also arises out of particularly masculine values (traditionally conceived), while rejecting or ignoring feminine values (as traditionally conceived). One example of this would be patriarchal emphasis on the hierarchical exercise of power over others rather than an egalitarian sharing of power. Or, as Robert Bellah observed in his masterpiece work, Religion in Human Evolution, a predisposition to domination rather than a predisposition to nurturance. Bellah shows that nurturance evolved in early humans because primates need to raise dependent offspring for multiple years.[4] Under patriarchy, nurturing is relegated to women, and men often do not have to learn how to be nurturing.

Patriarchy dominated when I was in college because we, as a broader culture, had barely started to be aware of it, let alone to question it. Granted, the women’s rights movement had been going on for a decade and a half or so, but that doesn’t mean the general culture was educated about the nature of patriarchy nor the need for women’s rights. We obviously still are not, or I would not be writing this article.

For example, I don’t think we had the term “date rape,” or if we did, I don’t think it made a big impression on me. I don’t remember any general conversations about healthy dating. I was a virgin through my first year, but most of the college students around me knew what it was like to have sex, and I wanted to find out. The summer after my “freshman” (please note the androcentric term rooted in patriarchal discrimination against women being educated) year, I did (finally) have sex with a nice, considerate man, who was not from Texas.

After that, I dated other men, who always seemed to want to have sex, and almost always expected to have sex. (That never really changed in my adult dating life either, btw). I did go on a few dates with a man whom I believe I met in an Honors Humanities Class. I sometimes wonder why I dated him, since he was from east Texas, a world of values away from most of the values in which I was raised (that’s another story, better than this one!).

Please understand, this narrative is not about disliking men, nor is it about disliking Texans. This narrative is about disliking patriarchy. Back then I liked a lot of Texans, and I still do. I even eventually married one, though he was sexist, too. Since he is deceased, I will mostly leave him out of this personal tale of (mostly Christian) patriarchy and its woeful effects on life in America.

(Trigger Warning: the following story may be triggering for some readers.) Anyway, this guy was probably in that honors class, so he was intelligent. But I think I dated him, if I remember correctly, because he was the kind of guy who did not easily take “no” for an answer, and I probably did not resist much without a good reason. One weekend, I went away with him on a trip, the details of which I will refrain from sharing lest he be identified. I thank God that I don’t remember his name, although I remember the name of a fellow (androcentric/patriarchal term, again) blank[5] major, who was a nice guy, and who appears to have been successful in life.

Anyway, the weekend we went away, we started to have sex, but he began to sodomize me. When I objected (because it was hurting, and because it brought me no pleasure, which seemed to me to be the fair thing to do during sexual intercourse), he clapped his hand over my mouth and went away harder than before, hurting me like hell. Afterwards, I remember walking painfully to the bathroom to clean up the bleeding he had caused.

I had never told anyone this story until quite recently, when I shared it for the first time with a female friend, who also happens to be from Texas, and she told me, “That was rape.” I said, “Really?” I never thought of it that way, because back then, these things just happened, and I simply thought he was a jerk, and that I had gotten myself into that situation. I just felt ashamed.

So many men of my generation were not good at bringing women pleasure, nor even thinking it was necessary, from what I and other women experienced decades ago. Learning how to love women has never seemed to be a big goal in the patriarchal mindset, as far as I can tell. Unless, of course, you are a conservative Christian in a sexual relationship sanctified by marriage, and in that case, some conservative Christian men do seem to honor and love their wives, although that does not necessarily mean they treat them as equals.

You see, we women are the “helpmates,” to put it in Biblical terms. While modern dictionaries may list either women or men as helpmates or partners, the modern idea suggests an equality that was absent in the original Biblical texts. Genesis 2:18 in the King James Version, for instance, states: “And the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.’” Here, the man is the main character, and the woman is reduced to a merely supporting role, that is, as less than but not equal to a man. Maybe it’s that perceived dependency status of women in patriarchal Biblical terms that keeps many Christian men from recognizing our personhood.

For example, if women in America had been viewed as having full personhood all the way back to the writing of the Constitution, we would have had the right to vote from the very beginning of our constitutional democracy. As it was, white women had to wait until 1920 and the 19th Amendment to be perceived as having enough personhood to qualify for the right to vote. African American men had already been technically granted the right to vote with the 15th Amendment. However, African American females had to campaign, work, and wait until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before they finally received the recognition of their full personhood through the right to vote.[6]

Scholar Catherine Keller, in her book From a Broken Web, details at length the struggles of women in the mid-20th Century to gain equality with men both in the home and professionally. Keller helpfully explains that women were seen as dependent on men and most often had to take on the role of wife, mother, and housekeeper, that is, helpmates to their husbands. Ironically, men were perceived as independent, full persons, in contrast to their wives’ supposed dependency. The men were allowed to be full selves, while women had to stifle their selfhood in order to maintain home and family and tend to their husband’s needs. Keller describes men as having the psychological sense of a “separate self,”[7] in which individual males see themselves as not relationally connected to others and as having to be completely independent in order to be a real person. This extreme patriarchal understanding of self as separate renders emotional intimacy almost impossible. A lack of emotional intimacy creates unhealthy imbalances in relationships, based in an inability to recognize the interdependence of equals. This concept of the separate self often leaves women as dependent selves, or as less than equal, and not able to engage in personal decision-making without male approval.

As a matter of fact, women in America did not even gain the legal right to apply for bank loans without a man until the Fair Credit Act of 1974.[8] Moreover, the Equal Rights Amendment only finally received its ratification by a 38th state (Virginia) in January 2020, but the recognition of its passing has still not occurred.[9]

After the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, I am going to insist once again, as I have insisted for decades, that women in America need full recognition of the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. For decades, I insisted that we needed the passage of the ERA, but many women saw no need. Given this ruling overturning Roe, and given the fact that 12 states have still not ratified the ERA, I hope women and men across America will unbind themselves from the (mostly Christian) patriarchal stranglehold on American politics and insist on the recognition of the ERA.

In case you hesitate to blame Christian patriarchy, I was widowed at the age of 28, when my 34-year-old husband died suddenly of a cerebral aneurysm that hemorrhaged, leaving me with a seven-month-old son and a twenty-two-month-old daughter. He had worked for the hospital in which he died. When it came time for me to pick up his personal items from his office, a vice-president of the hospital offered to pray for me, and of course I accepted. After he prayed, this man told me: “Now you are the spiritual head of the household so…” I really don’t remember what came after that.

What I do remember is that I found myself wondering how my husband dying could change anything so fundamental about me that it would somehow qualify me to be the spiritual head of household if I was supposedly not qualified to be so before. I decided it was nonsense of course. If I were qualified now, I must have been qualified before, because nothing in me had changed, just my external circumstances.

This Christian man was just assuming that my husband was the head of household, based on some Biblical texts. [10] He did, of course, know my husband, so I will share just one example of my late husband’s sexism to reinforce that this male vice president’s Biblical sexism was not so far astray from the common thinking among Christian men of 1987.

The Mother’s Day before he died, my husband announced that he thought he would talk with the adult Sunday school class he taught about my ideas about God as a mother. To which I replied, “They are my ideas, let me go talk about them!” He did “let” me, but then he chose to stay home with our two young children rather than to go hear me talk about my ideas.

Both my late husband and that male vice president were steeped in patriarchal Christianity. My late husband grew up Southern Baptist, but he left that denomination over its support for the Vietnam War when he was only 14 years old. I admired that about him.

Despite the male vice president’s (kind, but patriarchal) intentions, I felt called to ministry as a result of my husband’s death. And I got to study feminist theology at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. Finally, I received the rain that my soul had needed all my life so that the Holy Spirit could flourish in me, instead of silencing me.

Later, however, there was a man in Nashville, Tennessee who refused to come to church the day that I, as only the second woman ever to preach in that pulpit, preached for the first time at that church. He believed women were not allowed to preach.

Women and men who believe in taking the Bible literally must, by definition, be patriarchal and therefore inherently sexist in their views on relationships and what is good and right and true. The Bible was written by men living in patriarchal cultures with patriarchal views of God; therefore, most of the Bible is patriarchal, except for the highest spiritual teachings, the most elevated mystical experiences, and the teachings rooted in universal, unconditional, Divine love.

Yet, religious patriarchy focuses on the individual male as superior, supposedly like God, which leads to a separate sense of self. People who have to feel separate from everyone else and who have to maintain some sort of supposed superiority often feel alone, separate, and vulnerable, even though it is mostly unconscious because they are not “allowed” to be vulnerable. If they have had their superiority or competence or independence questioned, they tend to feel threatened by anyone and anything that appears to deny or derail their independence and superiority, so they tend to feel a great need to control, and often demean others, rather than trying to understand them.

One of the toxic roots of Christian patriarchy is the inability of men to empathize with themselves, or others. This toxic patriarchy manifests itself in athletics: “don’t cry like a girl,” “man-up,” etc. It manifests itself in parenting, where boys are taught “big boys don’t cry.”

Competition (a big patriarchal value) is at the center (not the heart), of so much of what we do. It manifests itself in everything we do because we live in a competitive economic system rather than a cooperative one. We could have an economic system that combines competition and cooperation, and cooperation could be at the heart of all we do. To cooperate with each other, we need to be willing and able to understand and empathize with one another, which toxic patriarchy neither desires nor knows how to do.

As evidence of this, the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade represents the most recent heinous and toxic patriarchal act of the American government. Yes, this patriarchal refusal to grant women the right to make choices about their bodies, their reproduction, and their families is rooted in toxic patriarchal Christianity. We need to heal those roots; not cut them, but to heal them or they will grow back just as toxically in the future.

Personally, I never had an abortion. When I was dating that guy in college, which was not for long, there was one point at which my period was delayed by a week. He laughed and bragged that he had had that effect on a woman before. (If I had known what a narcissist was back then, I would have recognized such tendencies here. Side note, I was a psychology major, so why did I not learn about how to recognize narcissism in the psychology of the late 70’s?)

I am absolutely positive that the guy would have expected me to get an abortion if I had gotten pregnant. However, given patriarchy’s resurgence among the American political right, he might well be leading some campaign against abortion these days.

Again, Texas is leading the way in outlawing abortion. So, one might conclude that Texas is full of patriarchal Christians, i.e., fundamentalist Christians who take their Bibles literally (or believe they do). I personally know there are many Christians in Texas who understand their Bibles more metaphorically and who focus on the messages of love.

I have to confess, although I said that I am not a Texan, I not only have two degrees from different universities in Texas, but I also gave birth to both of my children in Texas. Moreover, I felt my “call to ministry” while serving as a deacon and singing in the choir at First Christian Church of Houston. More to the point of my disappointment in Texas for leading the way in outlawing abortions is that my ancestors on both sides of my mother’s family go back at least five or six generations in Texas, and they led the way with bringing a more loving and kind version of Christianity to Texas long ago.

My first Livingston ancestor in Texas was Volentine Livingston, whose obituary was listed in the Gospel Advocate, where he was not only described as having been a “bishop at Blackjack Grove” (now Cumby, TX) but also as having been “a pacifist” during the Civil War. Now, Blackjack Grove was a rough-and-tumble kind of town in the early to mid-1800s. For my ancestor to have been a pacifist, he must have been not only very dedicated to being faithful to the teachings of Jesus Christ, but also very different than the toxic patriarchy that lends itself easily to violence, whether Christian or otherwise.

On my mother’s Gill and McKinney side, my ancestors were kin to the McKinney after whom McKinney, Texas is named. Not only that, but they founded the first Christian church in the state of Texas, in what would later become The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

Now, I am ordained in The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and despite my now universal spiritual faith and practice, I have been seeking to maintain my standing in that denomination precisely because it does not adhere to primarily patriarchal values. In fact, the Disciples of Christ not only elected the first woman General Minister and President of any mainline denomination, but we have also elected the first African American woman General Minister and President, the Rev. Dr. Teresa Hord-Owens.

Disciples of Christ have historically and are currently outspoken as a movement for unity, a movement for wholeness, and now, thanks to Rev. Dr. Hord-Owens, a movement seeking to “imagine God’s limitless love.” Indeed, many of us Christians seek to undo so much that toxic patriarchy has done to separate, divide, and lord it over certain groups of human beings. (And don’t even get me started on how toxic patriarchy in Christianity has led to our current environmental crises.) Because we are a movement for limitless love, I have to ask, what is the point of loving the child, if we are not also going to love the mother?

Now, having named the Disciples of Christ as a movement for love, I do need to admit the outspoken nature of my mother’s way of being a pacifist and faithful follower of Jesus Christ. Another poignant memory that the overturning of Roe brings up for me is that my mother, a quite opinionated and Ivy-League educated Texan, used to say that men who get women pregnant against their will should be put in jail. I remember feeling shocked when she said that, but now, I have to wonder out loud in print, is it only because of patriarchal conditioning that we don’t consider that to be an option? Of course, at least we now, and hopefully not just for now, have laws that require a man to support the woman and her baby.

Finally, in case some of you are doubting my commitment to the highest spiritual values, I need to clarify that I am in no way pro-abortion, yet I am pro-choice, and there is a big difference, and emphasizing this difference, for me, began with a poignant spiritual experience.

At the time of this spiritual experience, I was the Associate Minister of a church in Lansing, Michigan. I was driving along a road into East Lansing, when I thought I saw an anti-abortion bumper sticker, to which I was objecting in my mind. Immediately, I heard Jesus Christ in my head repeat to me his words: “As you do it unto the least of these … you do it unto me.”

I realized that Jesus was saying that I was treating unborn fetuses as “the least of these.” Obviously, I could no longer do that.

What did Jesus mean by that phrase, “the least of these”? He meant the people who were social outcasts. He meant the people whom the popular, powerful, and self-defined as righteous people of his day did not view as having the same rights as others and who were not welcome in social settings, very much like LGBTQ+ people and women who seek abortions in the eyes of many Christians today.

Jesus was objecting to the fact that, under patriarchal culture, there were outcasts at all. Jesus was not nearly as patriarchal as his followers, and as a feminist theological student, I grilled him, metaphorically speaking, and the Jesus I found in the Bible came out on the side of love for all, grace for all, inclusion for all.

To be like Christ, I must also live on the side of love for all, grace for all, and inclusion for all. To be like Christ, I also must respect the needs and rights of unborn children, and I must respect the rights and needs of women who are pregnant. And all of us Christians would do well to remember that the ways we are treating other people are also the ways we are treating Christ himself. No exceptions.

A woman is a person. An unborn baby has not yet gained the independent status of personhood, (even the philosopher/theologian Hegel recognized this[11]), but a woman has independent personhood. Therefore, legally, we must respect the personhood of women. I do believe that a fetus is an unborn soul, and so I must respect the rights of an unborn soul. However, no soul has the right to impose itself on any other soul to its detriment, unless the two souls made a karmic soul agreement in pre-life, and only the woman has the right to decide if that is the case and how she will or will not let that impact her pregnancy, herself, and her life.

As a minister, as a spiritual life coach, and as an energy healer, I have spoken with women who have had abortions. One conservative Christian woman shared with me that she chose to abort a baby, or maybe it was twins, because otherwise she would have had to go on bedrest in the hospital for the sake of her health, and then she would have had no way to care for her young child at home. As far as I can tell, each and every woman I know who chose to have an abortion made the most loving decision she could at that time. And no one has the right to judge that.

I also remember that while I was working on my Master of Divinity degree at Vanderbilt, a PhD student in Pastoral Counseling once said, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” Now, that is not at all how I view a sacrament, but I ask you to hear her point. If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a right all around the world.

In the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe and a woman’s right to an abortion, the court cited the argument that the right to an abortion has not been part of the nation’s history and traditions.[12] However, as an astute article in NPR points out, Benjamin Franklin wrote an American version of a British book, both titled The Instructor, and both of which taught the alphabet and basic math. Franklin, however, added a Virginia doctor’s manual on at-home health remedies, which included herbal remedies for at-home abortions. In other words, as author Molly Farrell wrote in Slate Magazine, Franklin’s book provided “a how-to on at-home abortion, made available to anyone who wanted a book that could teach the ABCs and 123s”[13] back in the 1700s. So, not only has abortion been part of American history and traditions since its earliest days, but it was as commonly accepted as the ABCs.

But with the Supreme Court ruling, I have to ask: “Whose history and traditions are you validating?” Certainly, it appears that the patriarchal justices on the Supreme Court seem to feel free to invalidate women’s history and traditions in America, or was that just an ignorant oversight? Or was it lacking sufficient judicial history? Well, who has traditionally had the power in that history? All we have to do is remember the fact that potentially devastating testimony of two women about sexual misconduct (read patriarchal entitlement) was completely overlooked in the confirmation of two male justices.

In America, patriarchy seemingly remains the unwritten, unspoken, and unacknowledged law of the land. Until we overcome patriarchy, everyone who is not a white male may continue to be at increased risk of being gravely disempowered, wounded internally and externally, deprived of rights, and shot to death.

In the meantime, what if we supported pregnant women better? What if we chose to be truly pro-life in supporting new mothers and their babies with six months federally paid maternity leave, free universal childcare, more extensive breast milk banks, adequate supplies of formula, free college education, policies that kept gunmen from shooting children in schools and other public spaces, as well as policies that brought down African American maternal mortality rates? What is stopping us? Patriarchal values. Without a balance of feminine and masculine values, society is toxic for us all.

If we would like to heal our democratic republic, if we would like to uphold and guarantee rights for all, respecting everyone’s needs, we will have to heal patriarchy. That is not a simple proposition, but it is a necessary evolution in the life of America, or life will increasingly become hell for too many. Unless we heal patriarchy, overturning Roe is just the start of a new kind of hell in American life, for patriarchy not only blinds us to deeper insights, more expansive truths, and higher levels of wisdom, it also binds us from listening and acting with empathy, cooperation, and compassion.

I am a healer, not a fighter. Much of the purpose of my award-winning book Truth and Illusion: The Politics of Spirituality and How One Person’s Lie Is Another One’s Truth aims to heal patriarchal mindsets. In fact, the whole original purpose of Truth and Illusion is to offer us Americans insights into healing the many ways we are divided in American life today. In whatever ways you choose to respond to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I hope you will also join me in healing patriarchy, so that we can heal the life we all share equally in America and around the world.

To do that, we need to begin by listening to and empathizing with each other. Thank you for “listening” to me. I hope you will also empathize with me, with yourself, and with other people who are different from you. Empathy, one step at a time, can help us heal our patriarchal selves.

[1] Kendall, Brent, and Jess Bravin, “Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade, Eliminates Constitutional Right to Abortion,” Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2022.

[2] Milligan, Susan. “Stepping Through History: a Timeline of Women’s Rights from 1769 to the 2017 Women’s March on Washington,” January 20, 2017. Accessed here: https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2017-01-20/timeline-the-womens-rights-movement-in-the-us

[3] https://collegestats.org/2013/01/the-first-10-u-s-colleges-to-go-co-ed/

[4] Bellah, Robert. Religion in Human Evolution. Kindle Edition.

[5] I was going to identify his major, but then I remembered that Amber Heard was found guilty of defaming Johnny Depp even though she did not identify him. I recently met a woman attorney who investigates sexual harassment claims, and she easily critiqued the biased approaches of Depp’s attorney and the judge. In my view, patriarchy struck again!

[6] See, for instance: Megan Bailey, “Between Two World: Black Women and the Fight for Voting Rights,” October 9, 2020, National Park Service. Accessed here: https://www.nps.gov/articles/black-women-and-the-fight-for-voting-rights.htm

[7] Keller, Catherine. From a Broken Web:

[8] Raija Haughn, “The History of Women and Loans,” March 7, 2022, Bankrate, LLC. Accessed here: https://www.bankrate.com/loans/personal-loans/history-of-women-and-loans/

[9] Ibid.

[10] For a one-sided quoting of such texts, without the verses that also admonish a husband to submit to his wife (I think there is one verse like that), nor Paul’s caveat that this is his thinking but not necessarily from God, go to:

https://www.openbible.info/topics/the_man_being_the_head_of_the_house for toxic Patriarchal Christianity.

[11] In the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 21, GWF Hegel clarifies that an embryo is implicitly, but not explicitly a human being, because it is not yet able to be a human being by itself.

[12] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf

[13] Farrell, Molly, “Ben Franklin Put an Abortion Recipe in His Math Textbook,” Slate, May 5, 2022. Accessed here: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/05/ben-franklin-american-instructor-textbook-abortion-recipe.html See also: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099542962/abortion-ben-franklin-roe-wade-supreme-court-leak