Join Dr. James Dobson as he concludes his thought-provoking conversation with the late Diane Pasno about her book, ‘Feminism, Mystique or Mistake.’ Pasno, who once embraced the feminist movement, later questioned its core principles after years of reflection and spiritual guidance. This episode delves into the transformation of feminism from a quest for basic rights to a force that often challenges traditional values, particularly surrounding motherhood and marriage. College students engage with insightful questions, revealing the internal struggles young women face as they grapple with cultural pressures while seeking clarity about their identities and futures.
Well, hello, everyone. I’m James Dobson, and you’re listening to Family Talk, a listener-supported ministry. In fact, thank you so much for being part of that support for James Dobson Family Institute.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, welcome to Family Talk. I’m Roger Marsh. Today, we’re continuing Dr. James Dobson’s classic interview with the late Diane Pasno about her book called Feminism, Mystique or Mistake. Diane passed away earlier this year, this past April, at the age of 79. Prior to that, she met Dr. Dobson when she served as focus on the family’s first female vice president for over 27 years. Now, in part one of their conversation, Diane shared her own journey from embracing feminism as a student at UCLA in the 1960s to questioning its core assumptions. She explained how what began as a Christian movement advocating for basic women’s rights had transformed into something very different, something that often dismisses the value of motherhood and marriage while promoting an agenda that can often leave women feeling confused and unfulfilled. Today, we’re going to hear the rest of this important conversation. But first, let’s listen in now as Dr. Dobson sets the stage for today’s discussion.
SPEAKER 10 :
We’re going to hear the second half of an interview that is controversial and that other programs might not be willing to talk about or deal with. This one focuses on the subject of the women’s movement and a book that was written by Diane Pasno called Feminism, Mystique or Mistake. And in that book and on this program, she shared her view of the modern feminist movement in a very critical way and how it has really failed women. Truth is unity, and when you get it right, there will not be a contradiction within it because it all comes from the Creator Himself. And I think there are principles in the Scriptures that we need to look at before we swallow all of the ideas and concepts that came along in the late 60s and 70s and are still very much with us today, having to do with the roles of women and how they should see themselves.
SPEAKER 02 :
Those insights from Dr. Dobson set the stage perfectly for what we’re about to hear today here on Family Talk. Now, what makes this program especially powerful is that during the original recording, the audience contained a large group of college-age students. Today, we’re going to hear many of the thoughtful questions that they had for Diane, questions that reveal the real struggles young women face as they navigate cultural pressures and seek God’s will for their lives. So let’s kick off this important discussion with a question from the audience.
SPEAKER 06 :
What responsibility is there for Christian scholars, women, to step into the academia and just try to have an influence that counters the feminist ideology and philosophy that’s Good question.
SPEAKER 04 :
It’s a wonderful question. I think it’s very scary, first of all, because it’s a David and Goliath situation because you will be in the minority and you need to understand that. I think my first bit of advice to you would be, so it’s not so scary, is to get involved in a Christian organization on campus, Navigators, Campus Crusade, Young Life, so that you’re not David and Goliath. You’re several Davids against Goliath. Because if you can mobilize women who are like-minded to confront issues the women’s studies department and a university and say, you know, you’re one sided. You’re giving me one side of this issue. Your teaching is not open minded. It doesn’t consider my worldview. And my advice to you is just to get together with some of your Christian friends and and Go in force. You’ll need comrades.
SPEAKER 10 :
Getting to the heart of her concern is that there should be hopefully, women on those university campuses that share the worldview of some of the students. I know when I first went to the University of Southern California, I was registering as a graduate student and scared half to death. There were 30,000 students around me. I didn’t know what I was going to be expected to do. I didn’t know what contradictions to my faith would occur. And you always wonder if you can make it in that environment. And that very night, A professor who was just a few years older than I am but had gone on and gotten his Ph.D. was on the faculty there at USC in my field. And he recognized me and came up and said hello to me and said, come on up to my office. And here’s a guy who believed exactly what I believed. who essentially put his arm around me and said, you know, God’s put you here and we’ll work on this thing together. Boy, you talk about an oasis in the midst of a desert. That’s what it was for me. And so to have these godly professors, even though they’re in the minority, there to assist and give encouragement to students who are trying to make it there is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? Are you thinking about being such a woman? Are you really?
SPEAKER 06 :
I was considering psychiatry actually as a career, but I think that’s as a trying to avoid, I don’t know, just the vulnerability of being a mother. I mean, I say vulnerable because I feel like it’s such a… a lower position, a lower place in society. Do you believe that? No, I don’t. But it’s hard when you’re not supported. Here I feel supported to say that I want to be a mom and have kids, but I feel so demeaned if I’m with other people that are challenging me with all these other ideas and philosophies.
SPEAKER 10 :
And you know what’s happening over and over now is that young women hear this message and they either postpone or decide not to have babies. And then at 33 and 34 and 35, they start to panic and they realize they’ve missed an opportunity and it’s getting very late. And there are many childless women today who would love to hold a baby And they were sold a lie, I think, in the early days. And I resent the lies that are being told to the young women that are out there. Because in 20 years, they will regret it. Many of them will regret it.
SPEAKER 04 :
And it’ll be too late. I resent the lies that are fed to the young men as well. Because we have a generation of men who don’t know anything. what it means to make a commitment, who don’t know what it means to protect a family, who don’t know what it means to cherish a woman and remain pure until marriage. The feminist movement has distorted so many things that were precious and that the Lord said in Scripture were precious.
SPEAKER 03 :
Next question. My question is, what can men in today’s society do to reestablish the roles of men and women in society as they were intended by God?
SPEAKER 04 :
I think the best person in the world to answer that question is James Dobson.
SPEAKER 10 :
Well, God will give you the opportunities to defend the things that you believe, and you have to be ready to give an answer. You have to know what you believe. You have to have thought it out. And it has to be consistent with Scripture and then grab the opportunities the Lord gives you. You’re not going to change the whole world. I’ve been guilty of trying to do that on occasion. You can’t change the whole world, but you can sure change your little corner of it and be useful to the Lord. And if no one responds, you’ve still done what he asked you to do. I think if you keep your eyes and ears open, you’ll have an opportunity to do that. I just wish that more Christians saw that as their responsibility to defend the things they believe. Diane, they get intimidated by that same politically correct notion and keep it to themselves because they don’t want to get hurt and embarrassed and ostracized. Who’s next? Okay.
SPEAKER 08 :
What is your advice to young women like myself who, I’m not ready to be a mom and, you know, a wife, and I have aspirations and I do have longings and hopes and desires to do things. And, you know, is there a balance for that future or your advice to me now as all of us, you know, just as singles and who have built with passions to serve the Lord and to do different things?
SPEAKER 04 :
Good question. Yes, it’s wonderful. You have opportunities that women of my era never had. And so I can totally understand when you say I’m really not ready for marriage. I don’t even have a boyfriend. And actually, I’m really looking forward to taking my education and having a great career. My caution to you would be this. Career isn’t everything. And always use discernment in your professional life. Are you doing what you’re doing because you’re getting plaudits from your parents, from people you went to college with? Are you climbing up the corporate ladder because what you’ve been told is important? Just remember to submit yourself daily to the Lord, and He will guide you to where He wants you to be. Because serving Him is all that really matters, really, when you get right down to it.
SPEAKER 10 :
And until that relationship comes along, the person that you love, the person you want to marry and have children with, and maybe be a full-time homemaker or not… Until that occurs, you would support her desire to press toward a career that uses these talents and skills that she’s learned in school and let the Lord lead, wouldn’t you? Let the Lord lead. He says he will be a lamp unto your path. What that means to me is that he never reveals the horizon to us. There’s not a big headlight on your hat like a miner would have that shows far out into the future. He shows you one step at a time. That’s all you see. He’s a lamp unto your path. And you walk in the light that you have. Right now, there’s no man in her life. and she has this desire inside to use her life productively, you would, I’m sure, suggest that she press ahead.
SPEAKER 04 :
You have gifts that are unique to you. And if you give them to the Lord, He’s going to make you shine like the noonday sun in whatever you choose to do. I would never, ever have anticipated being where I am today At your age, at your age, I was going to have marry my husband, have adorable babies and maybe teach when they were raised. I never anticipated a career. But the Lord does surprising things when you submit to him. He orchestrates your days. But it’s an act of submission. And you have to get yourself out of the way and let him work.
SPEAKER 09 :
Yeah. Next question.
SPEAKER 01 :
I would have to admit, even when the ladies are introducing themselves to our class, we always say what our career goals are. And it’s almost intimidating to say, well, when I grow up, I want to be a wife and a mom. And so it’s almost like we’ve killed our hearts if we do have that desire and we’re scared to say that. But you had mentioned that it has infiltrated the church. So my question is, how can the church bring back the heart to women, or what’s the church’s role in this?
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s a difficult question because of a dynamic in the church. There’s this incredible tension between moms who stay at home and raise their children and moms who work and pursue a career. So when you ask what the church’s role is, that’s a difficult question because you do have that subtle battle going on within the church and you’re not going to get a consistent response. A lot of passion on both sides. Exactly. That’s a hard question. Do you have anything you can add, Dr. Dobson?
SPEAKER 10 :
Well, you’re right, Diane. It is controversial. And if we bring homemakers in here to the studio and we talk about what their lives are like and we try to support them, we’ll get an avalanche of mail from angry women who are angry at the women who are staying home and pointing a finger at them. On the other hand, if we bring the working women into the studio and we’ve done that, Then we get beat up from the other side. It is amazing what tension there is throughout society. And the church is really a product of the culture at large. And what that means for women this age right here is they’re going to hear about everything in the church. And you have to decide what God’s saying to you.
SPEAKER 04 :
You’re going to hear about everything. And what Dr. Dobson said is precisely true. You have to hear what God is saying to you. Because to say that all women in a congregation should stay home. with children negates the ability of the Lord to orchestrate the lives of His people. There might be women in that congregation who He wants in the workplace for very viable reasons to further His kingdom on earth. And so you cannot put people in boxes.
SPEAKER 10 :
And we’ve got to be respectful to each other.
SPEAKER 04 :
Exactly.
SPEAKER 10 :
Whatever the decision is made. Mm-hmm. Don’t we? I mean, we’ve got it fixed so that everybody loses. The working woman feels guilty because she’s not home taking care of her kids. And the woman who’s home taking care of kids feels like she’s wasting her life. Everybody loses. And God didn’t intend that. Next question.
SPEAKER 05 :
I understand that your book addresses post-abortion stress and how you think that is going to affect the abortion issue.
SPEAKER 04 :
I think that is the deepest, darkest secret of the feminist movement that women are suffering after having an abortion. They keep it a secret. I think Christians keep it a secret, too.
SPEAKER 10 :
But they write to us, don’t they?
SPEAKER 04 :
They write to us. And Christians who work in crisis pregnancy centers, who are running post-abortion trauma classes, are seeing women now who had abortions before. back in the 70s when it was first made legal. And they are still suffering the after effects emotionally from that experience. But it’s a secret. No one wants to talk about it because to talk about it means that feminists were wrong about it. And their love affair with abortion is so important to them, they’ll protect it at all costs, including that lie. They will lie to women to protect it.
SPEAKER 10 :
And, you know, Diane, I really believe that many pastors won’t talk about abortion, not because they’re afraid to deal with the legal and moral implications of it, but because they know there are women throughout their congregations who have had abortions, who have been hurt by them, and they don’t want to hurt them more, and so they don’t raise the issue. But it’s better to turn a little light on. You know, sunshine is a marvelous healer, and it’s better to take that to the Lord and cleanse it and let Him have it. Mm-hmm. And I think it’s a mistake not to tell people that. Next question.
SPEAKER 07 :
My concern is similar to Katie’s in that I have a strong desire right now to pursue a career and to pursue higher education. And my question is I wonder if you had any practical advice for a woman, a Christian woman in the workplace, on how to actively and even confidently pursue a career without falling into the trap of the feminist mentality or to even be associated with that because it can be so destructive.
SPEAKER 04 :
I think the most miserable women who I’ve ever worked with are those who accept what feminists say is important in the workplace and make that what’s important to them. And I’ll give you an example. There are young women who come to work and their measure of success is how quickly they can climb the corporate ladder and how quickly they can get into supervisor and managerial positions because that to them is success. And that is not success as measured by the Lord. The Lord might have you in a position, for example, as a writer or an artist or some other thing that is exactly perfect for your skill set, exactly where He wants you to be. And if you were to change positions and follow that dictate that you need to be climbing and you always need to be doing something different and aggressively pursuing the next step, you might be negating His plan for your life altogether. Right. So just remember, it’s not important. What you’ve been told is important, that to succeed, get more money, climb up the ladder, have a title. That is not important.
SPEAKER 10 :
And Diane, you of all people say that with the understanding that you began at probably the lowest position here or one of them. And did climb the corporate ladder and did rise in salary and did rise in supervisorial responsibility and did get a title. But I have the feeling that that never was primary to you. I’ve never sensed that you were hammering for that.
SPEAKER 04 :
Never mattered to me. Every time a job change was brought to my attention, I fought it, as a matter of fact. I didn’t want to change because it was not a comfort zone.
SPEAKER 10 :
I want to say something to the women who are here that I think is really important to understand. The longer you live, the faster life goes. And looking back on it, you realize how very, very brief life is. a particular period of your life was. When you’re your age and you’re looking forward, it looks like 10, 15, 20 years is a long, long time. It is the blink of an eye. And you can devote yourselves To children, to raising those kids and giving them the best that you have, it’s a short window of your life. And you’ve still got, by normal actuarials, how long you’re expected to live. You’ve got a longer period of time to use the skills that you have and to develop those professional responsibilities. There’s a lot left. You don’t have to choose between children and a career. But you usually have to take the children first because the window closes on that one very, very quickly. You understand what I’m saying? And maybe that’s what you’re trying to say in this book, Diane.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, there are – many older feminists who are now looking back at their lives and questioning what they indoctrinated this generation with. And they’re questioning it, and they’re going, maybe I didn’t have all the answers. And unfortunately, so many of them will never look to Christianity for the answers.
SPEAKER 10 :
And their children are even more confused because they’ve gotten mixed messages. And the passion with which the early feminists started is now kind of… diminished with time in the present generation maybe that’s why you call your book feminism mystique or mistake the great title the subtitle says rediscovering god’s liberating plan for women i know it was difficult for you to do this it was difficult but i um
SPEAKER 04 :
I don’t think people realize how well-read you are on the issue of feminism. They think that feminists, women, know women’s issues. But Dr. Dobson has accumulated maybe more files than I have on this subject.
SPEAKER 10 :
You can talk about it just as well. Well, I wrote my third book on that subject, What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women, which was really coming right out of the feminist movement. It was 1974 when I wrote it, and we were right in the thick of that philosophy. And I saw that it was flawed then, and that’s what I was writing about way back then. You’ve come along and updated it then. Thanks, Diane, for being with us. Thank you, ladies and man, for being with us today and for participating in the broadcast. And we’ll get together again. God’s blessings to you, Diane.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, it is such a privilege to listen in on that conversation and the honest questions from these college students. Boy, you could really hear the tension they were feeling, wanting to follow God’s plan for their lives while facing pressure from a culture that often dismisses traditional values. You’ve been listening to a special edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk and the conclusion of Dr. Dobson’s memorable conversation with the late Diane Pasno about her book called Feminism, Mystique or Mistake. Now, if you missed any portion of today’s broadcast or you want to go back and listen to part one, go to drjamesdobson.org forward slash family talk. You know, the questions we heard from the college students in the audience get to the heart of the real world struggles this generation is facing. They’re longing for truth and craving clarity about their identity and purpose. And that is precisely why the work of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute remains so essential. Right now, your generosity will go twice as far thanks to the historic Dr. James Dobson Memorial Matching Grant. Every dollar you donate will be matched through December 31, 2025, up to $6 million. Now, this remarkable gift is an incredible memorial and a statement of confidence for the only organization entrusted by Dr. Dobson to carry out his legacy and expand his work to new generations and geographies. Together, we can honor Dr. Dobson’s vision and ensure that future generations have access to biblical wisdom when they need it most. To make a secure donation online, go to drjamesdobson.org. That’s drjamesdobson.org. If you prefer, you can call a member of our constituent care team at 877-732-6825. That’s 877-732-6825. Or if you prefer, you can send your tax-deductible donation through the U.S. Postal Service. Our ministry mailing address is Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk. P.O. Box 39000, Colorado Springs, Colorado, the zip code 80949. Once again, our ministry mailing address is Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, or you could just use the initials JDFI for short. P.O. Box 39000, Colorado Springs, Colorado, the zip code 80949. Well, I’m Roger Marsh, and on behalf of all of us here at the James Dobson Family Institute and the broadcast division, which is Family Talk, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, the voice you can still trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
