Raising Girls To Be Godly Women In A Confused And Conflicted Culture -- By: Nina Fry

Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 14:2 (Fall 2009)
Article: Raising Girls To Be Godly Women In A Confused And Conflicted Culture
Author: Nina Fry

Raising Girls To Be Godly Women In A Confused And Conflicted Culture1

Nina Fry

London, England

Never before in our history have we been so eager to tear up the blueprint of biology and redefine our roles as men and women, mothers and fathers.2


I have watched with growing concern as girls have been molded, influenced, and, in many cases, damaged by a false worldview that has permeated western society at every level. As a teacher on playground duty in the 1990s I saw little seven- and eight-year-old girls forsaking their skipping ropes for the opportunity to sing and dance along to the latest Spice Girls song. They knew the lyrics by heart, and the dance routines were copied exactly as their pop idols had modelled them on the television. The fact that the girl-power lyrics were beyond their understanding and that the sexualized dance routines were performed in all innocence by these little children did not take away from the fact that they were being given a view of womanhood that would affect them deeply and influence their behavior and attitudes in untold ways as they grew up. Even secular commentators are now concerned about what is happening to girls and women in our culture. Maggie Hamilton writes,

Alongside the fragmentation of family and community due to relationship breakdowns, greater mobility, long working hours and time deprivation, we have seen the rise in the power of the media and the new technologies. These forces are exposing girls to concepts way beyond their years. They make it easy for girls to lead lives that their parents know nothing about. What was once the domain of adults has become part of the lives of our children. The need to appear “out there” helps to explain why girls are pushing the sexual boundaries so young, why pornography has so much appeal to girls, and why there has been an alarming increase in sexually transmitted diseases amongst our teenagers.3

There is obviously more to the decline of womanhood than simply the imbibing of unhelpful lyrics in a pop song. There is an alternate worldview working against what the Bible teaches about womanhood.

A worldview is a way of interpreting the world. It seeks to explain events and set life in a context. Every worldview has its own narrative that can be broken down into 3 parts: (1) Creation—origins/how things began; (2) Fall—how things have gone wrong/obstacles to progress; (3) Redemption—how things can be put right/the way forward. A person’s worldview can be discovered in the answers he or she gives to 4 key questions:

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