The life of the modern woman is one of a multiplicity of competing choices. The culture and laws provide the freedom for her to be a full time professional career woman, a full time at home mom, or some creative merging of the two extremes. 

The modern woman has the freedom to enter matrimony or remain single. She can carefully plan out when and if she wants to have children. She is legally free to walk away from a marriage or to move out on her own as a perpetual single woman. 

The modern woman can send her children to daycare or sometimes even have a stay at home dad for her children. All things seem permissible and available to the modern woman. 

However, the modern woman is still a mixture of confusion. With all the available choices, many women still want the comfort of traditional values and life at home raising children. Women are often opting to work from home or to work jobs that allow the optimum time with the family.  

The Women’s Rights Movement may have paved the way for the freedom of the modern woman, but not without costs to her place of honor and respect in our culture.

Today, many men are confused as to how to properly treat a woman. The days where it was normal and expected to open her door, carry her books, and pay for her dinner have faded away. The honorable men raised to be chivalrous still fight the cultural stigmas and act like a gentleman towards the modern woman. 

Others, still honorable, resist the desire to care for her in this way so as not to offend her feminist views. They are uncertain as to how to conduct themselves and often overstep the boundaries of honor and respect and cause violation.   

A woman thus disrespected, is then confused, for it is this kind of freedom culture tells her she ought to demand, and yet when she is treated like one of the guys she feels somewhat dismayed.  

This disrespectful treatment solidifies her resolve to be more independent which just causes a repeat of the original offense. The modern man does not know how to respond, he has no longer been raised to be the knight in shining armor.  

The modern culture desperately needs to find our bearings. We need to keep the freedom of women, with the respect and honor of tradition. It is not necessary to go back to the days where women were confined to matrimony and child bearing without any ability to also use their talents productively in society. 

However, we can go back to the values of that society where women were honored and treated with respect when a man responded with gentlemanly chivalry.  

Respect has lost its meaning in today’s culture. The woman that demands respect is asking to be treated no different than a man and left to lift her own heavy luggage and open her own doors. Such actions by men were not designed to show a woman who weak she was, but how honored she was by the gentry. 

People need to raise their children in a manner that protects the integrity and honor of both male and female persons. Boys need to be raised to treat women with utmost honor and chivalry. Girls need to be raised to accept such chivalrous actions while being taught that this is an honorable treatment. 

Fathers who treat their girls like a man ought to will show their daughters how to identify the good men who will treat them well. Freedom does not have to come at the costs of a loss of honor. Both values can coexist amiably. 

Modern woman ought not to have to struggle so much to find herself in this world. She ought to be raised with a good sense of who she is as a woman and the myriad of possibilities afforded to her in life.

At the same time she ought to be raised to know good men treat women with great honor and to prefer such men. Culture is always adapting, let it adapt to the values of freedom and honor for all people.