What is womanhood? On this question the public is more divided than ever.

Over the last century, womanhood has undergone a historic transformation. If a woman from Middle America who died in the 1920s could somehow return today and observe what womanhood looks like now, she would likely be bewildered. Many of the values she took for granted are now considered narrow-minded or outdated by a large segment of society.

Her sense of happiness would have been rooted in a very different set of expectations and priorities. She would have tied her identity and sense of meaning closely to her role as a wife and mother within the family. Marriage and motherhood would have been central to her understanding of womanhood, and a desire to work outside the home would likely have seemed foreign to her.

Placing her children in day care to pursue a career would probably have struck her as fundamentally wrong. She also would have viewed her role as complementary to that of her husband, whom she saw as the family’s breadwinner and provider. She would have valued modesty, caregiving and domestic responsibility. Concepts like reproductive rights, personal autonomy and feminism would likely have been unfamiliar to her.

If she could watch the last hundred years unfold like a movie, she would witness a historic inversion of womanhood. Selfish ambition has largely supplanted the place of devotion and self-sacrifice toward a husband and nurturing children and family. To bring about this monumental shift within the home—and, consequently, within society—she would observe a relentless uprooting of biblical values. The more society has rejected the Bible and its teachings, the further womanhood has drifted from what she would have considered its proper foundation. We have moved away from God’s purpose and design.

She would observe how higher education has come to shape the mainstream of thought on womanhood, promising new freedoms that, frankly, have never materialized. Why? Because those ideas were built on falsehoods. Over the last 100 years, womanhood has undergone a colossal but failed experiment. In the process, the foundation of society has cracked.

Unfulfilled Promises

Encouraging women to abandon the home and their children in pursuit of self-fulfillment has dealt a devastating blow to the traditional family.

Educator Herbert W. Armstrong said that the destruction of the traditional family was more dangerous than the hydrogen bomb. He taught that the family is the bulwark of society—and a preparatory type of the God Family.

German rationalism and Communist criticism have hollowed out Western education, substituting depraved human reason for biblical values informed by God’s revelation—establishing new but harmful definitions and values for what it means to be a woman. Expectations have been changed, yet purpose has given way to emptiness, and reinvention has not led to greater fulfillment and happiness.

Cut loose from the moral foundations of the Bible and traditional family values, society has been thrust into a disturbing social experiment—one that began by promising “freedom” for women and has ended in the town square of Sodom and Gomorrah. Today, so-called enlightened scholars of society can’t even define what a woman is. Now we hear of a “menstruating person.”

The Bible forecasts a fiery end to this collective societal madness. When society embraces lies, abandons truth, and moves away from God and His principles for family life, these consequences follow.

While it is true that women today possess greater professional and corporate opportunities than their mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers—along with increased educational opportunities, material prosperity and independence—these changes have not produced the promised universal step forward in personal happiness for her or for the human family. In fact, study after study points to rising levels of dissatisfaction, anxiety and emotional distress.

While researchers continue searching for the explanations, the Bible presents the underlying cause with crystal clarity.

God’s Answers

Genesis 1:27 tells us plainly, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” God deliberately, purposefully, strategically divided human beings into two groups.

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth …” (verse 28). Physically, male and female need each other to fulfill this command. Other physiological differences suggest different roles and purposes God intended men and women to fill. Instruction throughout the Bible reveals details about these roles.

Before we can delve into different facets of biblical womanhood, it is essential to first establish God’s perspective on the subject. His perspective serves as the plumb line by which all understanding on this subject should be measured and evaluated. He alone created the woman and set her responsibilities in motion.

God’s thoughts are far above any human thoughts. When the principles and laws He established to govern human life are ignored or violated, this leads to a range of debilitating and negative consequences, including unhappiness, anxiety, fear, worry, discouragement and depression.

When God’s design and criteria for womanhood are embraced—the truth about womanhood as presented in Scripture—life is set on a firm foundation, and a more fruitful, satisfying and meaningful life will result.

God Designed Womanhood

Again, we ask: What is womanhood? Why did God make the woman? It’s no accident that a woman is designed as she is! There is a reason God fashioned her differently from a man—why she is appealing and gloriously beautiful in his eyes. There is a reason she was created with a unique capacity for insight, common sense and understanding that a man needs and should deeply appreciate.

Yes, God created the woman to fulfill a beautiful and significant purpose—and she will never be happy nor successful until she discovers what it is.

Why did God make the woman? Why womanhood? The answer comes only by God’s special revelation. The Bible reveals why the woman was created and also gives laws and instruction for how she can live out her purpose and reach her full, glorious potential.

First in order, God is a Family into which all human beings may be born. Because of this incredible fact, human family and home life were deemed necessary.

Animals reproduce. But animals do not marry! Animals are born with instinct. They need little or no teaching as they mature. They certainly don’t form families or assume tremendous and far-reaching responsibility within it.

The newborn human does not get up and walk immediately to its food. The tiny baby is helpless. It has a mind—but at birth there is no knowledge as yet in its mind. It must be taught! It needs parents to teach it! It matures so very much more slowly than other creatures! Yet its potentiality is infinitely higher! And for this higher purpose, parental guidance and family life are necessary!

Human babies—born helpless—need the tender care, the loving instruction, the patient training and discipline, and the warm affection and love of a mother and father. They need the warmth, protection and security of family and home life. And they are of supreme importance—for they are the potential heirs of God!

Animals have never been given family relationship as humans experience it. Angels have never enjoyed family status. The family relationship is a God-plane relationship, not an angel-plane relationship. And God bestowed it on man because man is to be born into the God Family! Of all life forms—whether plant, animal or angel—in all God’s creation, man alone was created for marriage, for home and family life!

In other words, because God is a Family, there is womanhood. When these truths are fully comprehended together, they present a stunning understanding as new vistas of knowledge and purpose open up before the reader.

The Invisible Spiritual Dimension

The transcendent, ultimate purpose of family is to prepare us for God Family life. To enjoy the full benefits of this institution, a woman must pattern her physical life after the God Family. Yet Satan, the woman’s adversary, knows the sacred and high purpose of womanhood. His attack has been relentless, touching every facet of her life.

To really understand what is happening to your life in modern society, and what is behind the movement to redefine womanhood and family, you must come to recognize this other spiritual dimension: the spirits that are fiercely fighting against God’s family plan.

Every facet of our society today, including marriage, is built upon a false educational foundation. That false foundation is the theory of evolution, an attempt to explain the creation without the Creator. Most educated people embrace this theory without question and wholeheartedly reject the Bible as a source of knowledge. Many people outside of God’s Church cannot make marriage work because their knowledge about marriage is not based on the Bible. Human beings reason that if there is no God, then there is no reason to look to the Bible for solutions to our social problems.

Consider the feminist leaders who urged war on men and the family in an effort to convince your mother or grandmother to pursue what they saw as “fulfillment”—prioritizing career advancement alongside or over family life.

Countless women have sacrificed their lives—and their marriages—on an empty promise of self-fulfillment. Women report feeling no closer to the deep or lasting sense of satisfaction promised, and few people in the Western world have remained untouched by the broader cultural changes that followed.

Despite these problems, many women enter marriage with the expectation that both partners will continue working, even after having children. The sad reality is that many young and older women today don’t know where they are going or how they are going to get there. Deep down, they are miserable—searching for fulfillment. All women will have to come to the realization that they can never discover solutions to human problems or find happiness through feminist values.

Many children have seen their mothers be abused mentally, emotionally and physically. Because of this, many people, especially women, have become anti-men and anti-marriage.

Women also carry the weight of past hurt and difficult experiences that have shaped how they relate to others. In a world that can feel cold, unkind or unsafe, some become guarded as a form of self-protection. At times, these wounds may even come from relationships that were meant to be safe and nurturing, leaving deep and lasting scars. Healing from those experiences can take time. Letting go of past pain, resentment and fear is often a gradual process.

How can you, as a woman, become truly fulfilled? God invites the woman into a fulfilling life. He desires that she become His daughter and, as a concerned and doting Father, lovingly encourages her to embrace her assigned roles in life, such as wife and mother, with love, wisdom and a willingness to serve others as she grows in His grace and knowledge.

A physical family is a type of the God Family! It represents in incredible detail the wonderful future that God is preparing for mankind! It truly satisfies.

This is God’s purpose! This is His master plan! This is nothing less than the gospel! That is why family has such towering importance in God’s mind. And because it is so significant to God, it also stirs the greatest passions of another spiritual and evil force.

Mr. Armstrong explained that the Kingdom of God starts with a family relationship: first, physical human families; second, the unified Church; and finally, when the Church is changed to immortality, the God Family—which is the Kingdom of God. Satan’s relentless effort to undermine the biblically ordained family has reached into every area of life of every female, both young and old. For that matter, no one—man, woman nor child—has escaped his harmful attacks on Christ’s true gospel. Satan has a deep hostility toward God the Father and the true gospel of Jesus Christ. And whether the man or woman realizes it or not, every woman has felt this pressure in her life—shaping her attitudes toward God, marriage and family, and influencing her choices about clothing, dating, sexuality and modesty. The gospel comes under intense assault from every direction in her life.

The only true spiritual protection a woman can obtain is submitting to God in order to receive a deep and penetrating understanding of the true gospel of Jesus Christ and God’s expectations for her life. God has unsearchable wonders to show her.

This means placing womanhood in its proper biblical context.

To understand the woman’s role in God’s plan for all mankind, we must begin with God—and God is the Father of a Family!