Welcoming the Wholeness of Woman

The Catholic Vision of Feminine Dignity

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“I don’t belong.”

In my early 20s, that thought was the constant refrain in my head.

I didn’t belong on Capitol Hill, where I worked as a legislative aid. There, surrounded by women focused on climbing the political ladder, I felt old-fashioned in my longing for a family.

But I also didn’t belong with many of the Protestant women with whom I worshipped. I wanted to read C.S. Lewis. They were obsessed with Francine Rivers. I wanted to talk about politics, literature, and theology. They wanted to talk about boys.

On Capitol Hill, I was expected to not care about babies. With the women at Bible study, I was expected to care about nothing but babies.

One group of women championed birth control and abortion. The other group championed silence and obedience.  

And I didn’t belong. I didn’t belong anywhere. I was neither feminist nor fundamentalist. But I didn’t know I had any other options.

Eventually, at age 25, I came home to the Catholic Church. That’s when I found where I belonged. That’s where I discovered John Paul II and Alice von Hildebrand, Edith Stein and Gianna Beretta Molla, Francis Martin and Prudence Allen, Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, Paula of Rome, Macrina the Younger, Scholastica, twin to Benedict, and two thousand years of teaching on the dignity of women. Those teachings embraced the wholeness of who I was—body and soul, heart and head, woman and human being. They also helped me appreciate every part of me, especially the parts that didn’t fit into boxes or meet others’ expectations.

Through the teachings of the Church on women, I learned to see myself how God sees me. But so many women still haven’t learned that. They’ve bought into the half-truths about women peddled by secular feminists and religious fundamentalists, half-truths that bind the two ideologies together, each feeding the other, each making the other stronger, and each pulling the women who adhere to them further and further away from both themselves and the Church.

And it really is the half-truths which make both feminism and fundamentalism so attractive. In this particular cultural moment, both proclaim something that is true, something which needs to be said and affirmed. But bound up with those truths are deadly lies that undermine women’s dignity—differently, but in equal measure.

Unpacking those lies, separating them from the truths with which they’re tangled, is important. Understanding what the Church actually teaches about women is even more important.

So, pour yourself a cup of coffee and settle in. Because that’s what we’re doing today…at length.

First, though, for clarity’s sake, let’s define our terms.

Both “feminist” and “fundamentalist” are imperfect metaphors, which evoke different meanings for different people. Here, however, whenever the word “feminist” is used, it refers to Second and Third Wave secular feminism (which emerged over the last 70 years in the West) and not what some people call “Christian feminism” or “new feminism.”

“Fundamentalist” refers to those Protestants and Catholics who selectively adhere to literalist interpretations of certain portions of Sacred Scripture and Magisterial documents, ignoring context and what the whole of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium have to say on the issue.

Okay, now onto the half-truths and lies.

Denying the Feminine Genius

In some Christian circles, secular feminism is dismissed out of hand. But what feminism has always gotten right is its recognition that women are subjects, not objects, and that we are capable of rational thought and competent action in spheres outside the household. Feminism has long insisted that women have more to offer the world than simply our fertility and cooking skills. We also possess the ability to argue, persuade, heal, teach, calculate, manage, build, write, make beautiful things, and make things beautiful. We are strong of heart and strong of mind. We are tenacious, intuitive, and creative. We are men’s equals.

All that is true. But mixed in with that truth is a profound lie: that if women want to exercise those gifts, if women want to be happy, fulfilled, and “successful,” then we have to deny what sets us apart from men—our fertile feminine bodies and our orientation to motherhood, both spiritual and physical.

Decades ago, secular feminists made women’s advancement in the workforce the measure of their movement’s success. Dollar signs, corner offices, and titles became the primary benchmarks for woman’s liberation. But when those are the benchmarks, womanly bodies and motherly hearts become problems to control, not gifts to celebrate.

As feminists came to see it, fertility is the great womanly weakness. We bleed. We breed. We lactate. We gravitate towards our young, instinctively putting them before all else. And sooner or later, instead of choosing to lean in, many of us opt to lean out. Babies have the persistent tendency to not just trump dreams, but to become them.

Because of that tendency, feminists have made easy access to birth control and abortion a cornerstone of their movement. They’ve encouraged women to prevent or delay pregnancy with the pill and end pregnancy with abortion. They blithely talk about freezing eggs, IVF, and surrogacy as easy options for conceiving later in life, once we’ve established ourselves in our careers, ignoring not only those procedure’s low success rates, but also the massive medical, psychological, and ethical complications that accompany them.

Then, when a child does come along, they tell us how insignificant the day-to-day acts of mothering and homemaking are—that anyone can clean a house or care for children, but only we can do the much more important work in the world that we’ve been educated to do. The cultural message shaped by feminists is clear: to stay home with our children, to sacrifice for them, to make them or our marriage a greater priority than career advancement, is a waste of talent and intelligence.  It’s all work to be hired out, not embraced as our own.  

Denying the Image of God

Like feminists, fundamentalists also get some important things right—namely, the things feminists get wrong. They remind us that fertility is a gift, not a problem. That motherhood is holy, healing work. That homemaking is a sacred art. That women are different from men, in beautiful, transformative, powerful ways. That husbands are uniquely charged with leading their families to God. That beauty is good and babies are a joy and marriage is foundational to a healthy, functioning society.

With that message, fundamentalism has found an increasingly captive audience. Not only because it’s proclaiming truths few others acknowledge, but also because it promises clarity and form to a generation overwhelmed by confusion and chaos. It offers black and white roles, black and white solutions, to people living in an increasingly complex world.

But what fundamentalism has to say about women doesn’t stop there. It goes further, teaching things which are contrary to both reason and revelation.  

First, fundamentalists see one of the consequences of Original Sin—man’s domination of woman—not as an aspect of fallen humanity which Christian men and women are called to struggle against, but rather as a good which Christians should embrace.

They ignore Genesis 1, where guardianship and stewardship of creation are roles entrusted to both man and woman, and instead introduce a false inequality into the relation between the two, where man alone is steward and woman alone is helpmate, existing for the man’s sake, not her own.

Fundamentalists also contend that women’s minds and hearts are suited only for work within the home; that, contrary to 2,000 years of Church history, woman is always to be led, never to lead; always to be taught, never to teach; always to defer, never to assert. And that it is gravely sinful for her to do otherwise.

And they confuse the vocation to homemaking with the work of housekeeping and reduce a woman’s role in the marriage to that of servant and prostitute, there to serve and service her husband, not partner with him in the education and formation of children, not help him on the journey to holiness, and not (like every baptized Christian) participate in the three-fold office of Christ as priest, prophet, and king.  

In short, while secular feminists deny the core of woman’s femininity—our body and soul’s orientation to motherhood—fundamentalists deny the core of woman’s humanity—our subjectivity, our reason and free will, our unique giftedness and calling as individuals before God.

Embracing Wholeness

In all that, when it comes to women, feminism and fundamentalism are two sides of the same coin. Both are guilty of the same error. Both are reductive. Feminists reduce women to our minds. Fundamentalists reduce women to our bodies. Both only see part of who God made us to be. Each denies a core part of woman’s humanity—one our femininity, the other our subjectivity.

The Church, however, makes neither mistake. She proclaims no partial truths. She doesn’t attempt to reduce women to only half of ourselves. In her, the wholeness of who woman is and what we bring to the world is recognized.

And what is that? Who is woman? Who does the Church recognize us to be?

First, she recognizes us as men’s equals. Not merely equal to men in dignity, but “equal as persons” and “human beings to an equal degree,” (CCC 372; MD 6).

In other words, the Church teaches that everything which makes up human nature—the ability to reason, know right from wrong, exercise free will, and give ourselves to another in love—all these things men and women hold in common, as creatures made in the image of God. Women are not, the Church says, less human than men. We are not less intelligent, less reasonable, less capable of discerning right from wrong and exercising good judgement. We are, as much as men, capable of standing before God and “receiving the outpouring of divine truth and love in the Holy Spirit,” (MD 16).

Equal, however, does not mean the same. While recognizing the “essential equality” of men and women, the Church also recognizes essential differences between men and women, differences which she calls “complementary.” (MD 6; LTW 7). Those difference do not imply that either man or woman is incomplete without a spouse.

Rather it means that how we possess our human nature, how we see the world and interact with it, the orientation of our minds and hearts in particular situations—all that differs in subtle but important ways, ways which reflect something of God’s divine nature, ways which are meant to enrich the world, ways which draw us to one another and call us to give ourselves to each other in love. These differences are what allow man and woman each to be “helpmate to the other,” both in the practical work of life and in the journey to holiness (CCC 372).

A Humanizing Force

What else about women does the Church recognize?

She recognizes women’s minds. She recognizes our competence. She recognizes that women have important contributions to make in the world, not just in the home. She also recognizes that the world needs those contributions. The world needs women participating in “every area of life—social, economic, cultural, artistic and political,” (LTW 2).

The Church also laments the inequalities between men and women in centuries past and believes there is “an urgent need to achieve real equality in every area: equal pay for equal work, protection for working mothers, fairness in career advancements, equality of spouses with regard to family rights and the recognition of everything that is part of the rights and duties of citizens in a democratic State,” (LTW 4).

Unlike feminists, the Church doesn’t ask us to deny our femininity as we use our gifts in the world. She doesn’t ask us to renounce our fertility or reject our orientation to motherhood. She doesn’t see either as weaknesses, but rather as great gifts, meant to enrich the whole world. The Church’s desire to see women participating in society is rooted in that recognition. She believes that women have something unique to bring to every area of life—something that men cannot bring: a motherly concern for the individual; a motherly orientation towards the little, the least, and the most vulnerable; and a motherly interest in establishing a more human, less mechanized world. Pope Saint John Paul II explains:

“[A] greater presence of women in society will prove most valuable, for it will help to manifest the contradictions present when society is organized solely according to the criteria of efficiency and productivity, and it will force systems to be redesigned in a way which favors the processes of humanization which mark the ‘civilization of love,” (LTW 4).

For as much as the Church values the contributions women have to make to the professional world, however, she doesn’t assign more value to the work women do in the world than to the work we do in the home. She recognizes that mothers are of “irreplaceable value” in the work of making a home and rearing children and that no true advancement of women can exist without “clear recognition” of “the value of their maternal and family role.”  To that end, she adds, “the mentality which honors women more for their work outside the home than for their work within the family must be overcome,” (FC 23).

For this same reason, the Church condemns economic conditions which oblige women to leave their children for the workforce, and believes  that “society must be structured in such a way that wives and mothers are not in practice compelled to work outside the home, and that their families can live and prosper in a dignified way even when they themselves devote their full time to their own family,” (FC 23).

She also urges employers to find creative solutions that allow women to “harmoniously combine” both the work of motherhood and their professional work and that such creativity is necessary “if we wish the evolution of society and culture to be truly and fully human,” (MD 3).

Above all, the Church reminds both women and men that the measure of our success in this life is not our bank account or our resume, but rather how well we have responded to God’s call in our life. And that call, above all else, is a call to communion and love.

“God is love and in Himself He lives a mystery of personal loving communion. Creating the human race in His own image and continually keeping it in being, God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion. Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being,” (FC 11).

Accordingly, as husbands and wives engage in “evangelical discernment” about work, leisure, finances, education, and every other question of family life, the duties of that vocation—love—and the way they in particular have been called to live that vocation—as a family—are to guide those decisions and take precedence (FC 5).

Christian Headship

Last, but not least, the Church recognizes that in the family, while husbands and wives are to “be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ,” husbands have the biblically appointed role as head of the family (Eph 5:21-33). That headship, however, isn’t to be exercised as the world thinks of headship.

Christian headship is not a dictatorship—where the husband rules and the wife conforms to his every command. Rather, married couples are called to “make decisions by common counsel and effort” for, “if [the family] is to achieve the full flowering of its life and mission, it needs the kindly communion of minds and the joint deliberation of spouses,” (GS 50, 52).

Similarly, Christian headship is not a headship of force—where obedience to the husband’s will is compelled. “You are not [your wife’s] master,” writes Saint Ambrose, “but her husband; she was not given to you to be your slave, but your wife,” (see FC 25).

It also is not a headship of domination—for man’s tendency to dominate woman is an effect of the Fall, not part of God’s plan for the family or for Christian marriage. “The matrimonial union requires respect for and a perfecting of the true personal subjectivity of both of them. The woman cannot become the ‘object’ of ‘domination’ and male ‘possession,’” (MD 10).

Nor is Christian headship a headship of superiority—for husband and wife possesses an essential equality. “Man and woman have been created, which is to say, willed by God…in perfect equality as human persons,” (CCC 369).

Lastly, Christian headship is not a headship of management—where the husband is boss and the wife is employee. Those are contractual terms, used nowhere in Church teaching, which signify a temporary and unequal relationship formed for the exchange of goods or services. Christian marriage, however, isn’t contractual. It’s covenantal. It’s a lifelong relationship in which two people give themselves to each other. Persons are exchanged, not goods and services. And “only the equality resulting from their dignity as persons can give to their mutual relationship the character of an authentic ‘communio personarum,’” (MD 10).

In contrast to all those worldly models of headship, Christian headship is modeled on the example of Christ, who laid down His life for love of His bride; who always invites our obedience, never demands it; who seeks unity of heart and minds, not conformity of behavior; who came to serve not be served; and who humbled Himself in order to lift us up.

This, the Church tells us, is how husbands are to love their wives and lead their families—as humble servants, who invite their wives to reason with them and work with them in the tasks assigned to man and woman in the Garden: stewarding creation together, rearing children together, and pursuing union with God together.

“‘To reign’ is to serve!” John Paul II reminds us. “This is the way in which authority needs to be understood, both in the family and in society and the Church,” (LTW 10).

Clarifying and Deepening

This is the teaching of the Church on women. It is a teaching that embraces the fullness of woman’s dignity and gifts. It is a teaching that rejoices in her femininity. It is a teaching that honors her motherhood, whether physical or spiritual. And, not unimportantly, it is a teaching that has deepened and developed with the passing of centuries, just like every other teaching of the Church.

Over the course of two millennia, through prayer, reflection, study, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the Church has come to understand many unchanging truths more deeply, learn to explain unchanging realities more fully, and witness to unchanging dogmas more perfectly. This is true of her teachings on Sacred Scripture, the Trinity, Christ’s Divinity, Transubstantiation, the priesthood, the papacy, Mary’s role in our salvation, and five hundred things more, including her teachings on women and married life.

With women in particular, cultural changes over the last two centuries in work, education, family life, and the status of women in society, have compelled the Church to affirm woman’s dignity more clearly, recognize our abilities more fully, and articulate our subjectivity more deeply. Those same changes have led the Church to lament the wrongs done to women throughout the course of humanity’s long history, including the wrongs done to women by members of the Church.

 As John Paul II notes:

“Unfortunately, we are heirs to a history which has conditioned us to a remarkable extent. In every time and place, this conditioning has been an obstacle to the progress of women. Women's dignity has often been unacknowledged and their prerogatives misrepresented; they have often been relegated to the margins of society and even reduced to servitude. This has prevented women from truly being themselves and it has resulted in a spiritual impoverishment of humanity. Certainly it is no easy task to assign the blame for this, considering the many kinds of cultural conditioning which down the centuries have shaped ways of thinking and acting. And if objective blame, especially in particular historical contexts, has belonged to not just a few members of the Church, for this I am truly sorry,” (LTW 3) 

The Church is Christ’s bride, breathtaking in her beauty and holiness. On earth, however, she is made of up sinful men and women, with minds and wills weakened by concupiscence. This tendency to sin has meant the tendency to dominate women, to possess them and repress them, has been present in every generation, and bishops and priests have been as guilty of denying women’s subjectivity as anyone else. Their culture’s understanding of women played a greater role than the Gospel did in how they saw women.

Just the same, the Church herself has never denied woman’s dignity. The Church has never denied woman’s subjectivity. The Church has never denied woman’s ability to follow Christ and lead others to Christ. She has, in fact, done the exact opposite, calling “holy” women who have led nations and armies, counseled bishops, advised kings, chastised popes, healed bodies, run businesses, taught in universities, written books, preached in cathedrals, translated Scripture, received mystical visions, cared for the poor, nursed the sick, traveled across to oceans to proclaim the Gospel, and performed with extraordinary love the ordinary work of caring for their families in the home.

More than that, the Church has recognized one woman as Queen and Mother of all—a woman who just happened to make the most important decision any member of humanity has ever made—the decision to carry God Himself in her womb—without asking her husband.  

Room for All

Looking back, it’s easy to see why, as soon as I learned about the Church’s teachings on women, I knew where I belonged. It’s because there is so much room in the Church.

Feminists and fundamentalists want to put woman in tiny boxes, where we must choose to be one way or another, cutting off part of ourselves in order to fit the other. Anything different from the orthodoxy of each—any different desire, dream, vocation—is anathema. And, like I once did, countless women believe those boxes are their only option. They think they need to choose, one or the other.

But in the Church, there is room for woman to be her whole self. We don’t have to choose between our gifts—personal and feminine. We can embrace both motherhood and subjectivity. We can be wholly ourselves, doing what God made us to do and loving as God made us to love, knowing that our thoughts, opinions, and gifts matter. God never wants us to be less ourselves—in work or a relationship. He wants us to be the woman He made us to be.

With all this room, however, comes more work. A lot more work, actually.

Navigating the dynamics and circumstances of our own particular family, with each person’s unique gifts, temperament, and calling requires ongoing discernment, prayer, creativity, and spiritual maturity. It also requires a different orientation of mind and heart than the culture encourages.

It requires recognizing that affluence and influence are not the benchmark of success, but rather how well we have loved God and others.

It requires finding our value not in what the world thinks of us, but in our identity as children of God.

It requires thinking about the good of the family, not just our own good.

It requires sacrifice and dying to ourselves.

It requires giving up illusions of control, learning flexibility, and leaning in and leaning out in different ways in different seasons, as babies come and babies grow, as our family’s needs change, and as we change.

It may require healing, learning to recognize our value and the value of our desires, opinions, and thoughts.

And it definitely requires humility. It requires a willingness to recognize that we don’t have all the answers, that we’ve made mistakes, that much of life is a mystery, and very little about it is simple or easy.

But there’s the room for that too. There’s room to correct course as we imperfectly do all this work. There’s also the assurance that God is there with us, the whole while, not waiting to love us once we get it all right, but loving us completely through it all, walking with us and helping us as we pray, struggle, stumble, and discern.

God has made a big, beautiful home for me, for you, for all of us in His Church. Rejoice in that. And never trade it for a lesser home, ruled by lesser gods or lesser men.

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Church Document Abbreviations

GS       Gaudium et Spes

FC       Familiaris Consortio

MD      Mulieris Dignitatem

LTW   Letter to Women

CCC    Catechism of the Catholic Church

Further Reading

Since this month’s newsletter was something of a barnstormer, I’m going to skip my usual essay and kids’ books recommendations, as well as recipes, and give you a list of intellectually serious and deeply faithful books that will help you learn more about the fullness of the Church’s teachings on women. These books have been profoundly formative for me, and I hope you pick at least one to read this year.

Essays on Woman, by Edith Stein: This is the fourth volume in the Carmelite saint’s collected works and brilliantly explores the feminine genius and what woman uniquely can contribute to the world today.

The Concept of Woman I, II, and III by Sister Prudence Allen: If you want to understand how the Church’s understanding of woman’s dignity has deepened over time and how that understanding has interacted with ever-changing cultural conceptions of women, there is nothing better than Sister Prudence’s three volume masterpiece. Yes, three volumes. They’re big volumes, too. Maybe give youself three years for these.

The Privilege of Being a Woman by Alice von Hildebrand is a short and gorgeous little reflection on the beauty of womanhood as seen through the eyes of the Church.

Women in the Days of the Cathedrals by Regine Pernoud is a lovely historical look at the myriad of ways women participated in public life during the Middle Ages, and which challenges ahistorical notions about what women have and have not done throughout history.

Are Women Human? by Dorothy Sayers is a brief, witty reflection on the roles and rights of women.  

The Feminist Question by Father Francis Martin is a penetrating look at the theology undergirding feminism in light of Church teaching.

The Church and Women: A Compendium, released by Ignatius Press is an old but fantastic collection of essays on what continues to be some of the most pressing questions about women in the Church today.

The Eternal Woman by Gertrude von LeFort is a short, but deep meditation on the nature of woman and her place in the sweep of salvation history.

The Theology of the Body by John Paul II is a rich study of what it means to be a human person, made in the image of God, that draws on Thomism, Catholic mysticism, and a personalist phenomenology (among other things), and presents probably the Church’s fullest magisterial teaching on woman’s personal dignity and vocation to holiness.