Ask the average Catholic what they think of "feminism", and the majority, it is hoped, would quickly repudiate this -ISM as it brings thoughts to their mind of radical, liberal women fighting for the "right" to kill the unborn, contraception and even lesbianism. But most people don't realize how much some of the underlying principles guiding the movement have become a part of the modern mentality, so much so that it invariably has its effects, however subtle, on people who have to live in society....who live in the world. Before presenting an excerpt of an article on feminism, it would be well to understand a little about what the Church teaches concerning one of our "spiritual enemies", summarized from the classic text book, "A Spiritual Life" by A. Tanquerey (1930). If we don't understand our enemies, how can we expect to win our battle?
The Church teaches that our spiritual enemies can be placed into three general categories:
- concupiscence
"Concupiscence is the foe we carry within us. The world and the devil are the foes from without that feed the fires of concupiscence and fan its flames."
"The world we speak of here is...the sum-total of those who oppose Jesus Christ and are the slaves of the threefold concupiscence. These are : 1) unbelievers...2) the indifferent....3) hardened sinners.....4) worldlings, who believe and even practice their religion, yet, combine with it the love of pleasure, of luxury and of ease, and who not infrequently scandalize their neighbor by giving them occasion to say that religion has but little influence on morals."
"The dangers of the world. The world which through visits, letters, [television, radio, public schools] and worldly literature worms its way into the heart of Christian families, even into religious communities, constitutes a great obstacle to the attainment of salvation and perfection. It stirs up and feeds the fire of concupiscence; it seduces and terrorizes us."
"It seduces us with its maxims, with the show of its vanities and with its perverse examples."
"It holds up maxims directly opposed to those of the Gospel. It actually extols the happiness of the wealthy, of the powerful, of the ruthless, of the upstart, of the ambition, of all those who know how to enjoy life. On the lips of worldlings is ever the cry: "Let us crown ourselves with roses before they wither." (Wisdom 2:8) Must not youth have its day, must not each live his life to the full? Many others do this and Almighty God can not damn all mankind. One has to make a living, and were one to be scrupulous in business one could never become wealthy.
"When the world fails to seduce us it attempts to terrorize us."
"At times this takes the form of an actual, organized persecution against the faithful. Those that make public profession of their faith or send their children to the Catholic school are denied promotion in certain departments of business or of civic life.
"The remedy. To resist successfully this dangerous trend one must have the courage to look upon life from the point of view of eternity, and regard the world in the light of faith. Then the world will appear to us in its true colors, as the enemy of Jesus Christ, to be fought against with all our might in order that we may save our souls; it will appear to us as the scene of action for our zeal whither we must carry the maxims of the Gospel."
"...The exercise of this apostolate is not limited to priests. Men of conviction among the laity can practice it with real success, as persons are less on their guard against their influence.
The venomous bite of feminism
Beginnings
Psychological and psychosocial effects of feminism
Inappropriate Guilt
If the girl refuses to be swept along by feminism, she is made to feel guilty. This is not too difficult, because girls are generally more adaptable and can, therefore, be manipulated by those with an agenda. It is a funny thing, this guilt. It can be rather mild, a certain sense of not being quite sure one has done all she should, without actually articulating it. This does not pose too many problems to the young woman or to her family.
Discontent
This is a major problem. Rather than finding joy in doing the will of God and fulfilling His purposes for her life, the young woman living in a feminist tainted environment often experiences a pervasive feeling of disquiet and discontent. She feels "out of sorts." The reason for this is found in the woman's strong sense of family and community. She conforms herself to her surroundings. When society is good, this enables her to preserve the culture, to keep the family intact, to leave the social ties which bind men's hearts into the fabric of a cohesive society. But when the society is not good, the quandary begins. What to do? She cannot conform. Over 70% of married women with children have re-entered the workforce. The young Catholic woman cannot allow herself to adapt. Probably not since the time of the Roman empire, when the courageous Christian soon-to-be martyrs drew themselves apart from the prevailing cultural life, have Catholic women been in such a position. "Go out from them and be ye separate," we are exhorted, but no one ever said that this would be without pain.
Loneliness
Women's Lib, waving the banner of The Sisterhood, has plundered the neighborhood. The result for the woman at home with her children is loneliness, a profound sense of isolation. The other mothers are all at work. Her own mother probably holds a job. No one can come for coffee while the children play on the kitchen floor.
Anger
The most pernicious effect of the "women's movement" on wives and mothers is anger. Feminists fan the flames of rage. The loneliness and isolation, the discontent and the guilt, are easily transformed into anger. Everyone tells the woman that she is entitled to such feelings. She is encouraged to nurse resentments and seek retribution for all sorts of imagined grievances. When she takes the advice that is offered her on all sides, she destroys the warmth and forgiveness and kindness so necessary to family happiness and the heart of the home turns to stone.
- the world
- the devil
The world seduces us with the show of its vanities and pleasures. Most worldly gatherings cater to curiosity, to sensuality, even to lust. Vice is made attractive by being concealed beneath the guise of what are called "innocent fashions and amusements," but which are none the less fraught with danger. Such are, for instance, immodest dress and immodest dances, especially such as seem to have no other purpose than to occasion wanton looks and gestures. What must be said of most theatrical performances, of public entertainments, of the lewd literature that one encounters at every turn?
The world seduces us with its evil examples. At the sight of so many youths living solely for pleasure, of so many men and women who make light of their marriage vows, of so many businessmen who do not scruple to enrich themselves by questionable means, the temptation to follow suit is, indeed, very strong. Moreover, the world is so tolerant of human weaknesses that it actually seems to encourage them. A home-breaker is considered a sportsman;; the financier, the businessman who amasses his wealth dishonestly is called a clever fellow; the free-thinker is considered a broadminded man who follows the light of his conscience. How many men are thus encouraged to lead a life of sin!"
At other times, the world turns timid souls from the discharge of their religious duties by mockery and jest. It refers to them as hypocrites and dupes believing still in antiquated dogmas. It holds up to ridicule parents whose daughters are modestly dressed, asking them if it is thus that they hope to make a match for them. Many souls are in this manner, in spite of the protests of conscience, driven to conform through human respect to fashions and customs that offend against Christian modesty.
Sometimes the world resorts to threats. Individuals are served notice that their religious affiliations disqualify them for certain positions, or they are made to understand that their prudishness will make them unwelcome guests at entertainments; or again, they are told that if their conscience stands in the way of business they must either so as every one else does - deceive the public and make more money - or be ready to lose their positions.
It is but too easy to let ourselves be won over or terrorized, for the world has its accomplice within our own hearts, in our natural desire for high places, for dignity and for wealth."
It is for such select souls and for priests to infuse into the more timid Christians the courage to fight the tyranny of human respect, of fashion and of the legalized persecution. The best means of effecting this is to band together into societies those influential laymen who have the courage of their convictions, and who fear neither to speak nor to act accordingly. It is in this manner that the Saints brought about in their times the reformation of morals. It is also in this manner that in our great centers of learning, the universities, solid groups have been formed that know how to make their religious practices respected and how to steady the weaker brethren. On the day when such groups shall have been considerably multiplied not in cities alone but in the country-districts as well, the death knell of human respect shall not be long in sounding, and true piety, if not universally practiced, shall at least be held in real esteem."
Mrs. Susan Claire Potts, M.A., C.M.C.
[From "Catholic Restoration", Vol. II. No. 5 1992]
It's an insidious thing, this feminism. It's like a voracious insect deep in the soil attacking the roots of culture. Everything that grows from those roots is somehow twisted and deformed, unhealthy and impure. It's necessary to kill the insect so the flowers can bloom.
The young girls are the flowers who must be saved from the devastating blight that claimed so many older women. Because if their beauty is destroyed, their purpose thwarted, there is no hope for the restoration of Catholic society. It is a great joy now to see the young mothers in their flowing dresses with their lace mantillas over their shining hair and their little girls putting their pink crystal rosaries in their white patent leather purses. Sorrow sweeps over me as I remember the time of my own generation, of the years of our young womanhood, when "enlightened" young ladies who had their "consciousness raised" strode blue-jean clad to the marching beat of feminism.
The French call it "bouleversement", and that's what happened in the sixties, when everything turned upside down in the Church, in the society, in the home.
...As a psychologist, it seems to me that there are, even among the young, attitudinal and characterological changes that are directly attributable to the death-embracing ideology of feminism.
It's really no surprise that the first stirrings of modern feminism began in Europe just after the French Revolution. Mary Wollstonecraft published "The Rights of Women" in 1792, and not much has changed since then. It has simply ballooned, just as liberalism reaches its logical denouement in the chaos around us now, so two hundred years of academic and philosophical feminism strangle the popular culture with an icy loveless grip.
The feminists state that their purpose is "to redress the inferior status of woman" and to achieve "the elimination of formal and informal social and business restraints on women" to effect political and economic equality with men. Revolutionary to the core, they seek a comprehensive restructuring of society, its customs and its mores. But the destructive impulse goes even further when moving from the sociological to the psychological. For what the feminists seek, and have always sought, is the eradication of the feminine nature. They loathe womanliness, in themselves and in their "sisters." Not one of these "sisters" is to be excluded from their efforts - no discrimination in their camp! As Lynne Hierholzer, president of the Michigan chapter of the National Organization for Women, declares, "We are working for all women whether they know it or not."
Feminists seek to impose the belief that the differences between the sexes are culturally determined. They utterly reject physiological factors, and the idea that God has created man and woman in an exquisite complementary is anathema to them. In their pride, they seek to recreate human nature. They give their little girls trucks and soothe their little boys with anatomically correct baby dolls. They ignore scientific studies of children's play which demonstrate the innate differences between boys and girls. For example, if you give building blocks to boys, they will usually build an edifice of some kind, normally a tower. When it is all finished, they will smash it down gleefully and start all over again. Girls, on the other hand, will make rooms or circles and carefully put things into them like paper dolls or little blocks or bits and pieces of anything handy.
Another sample is that when obstacles are placed in a play area between a boy and something he desires, such as a toy or a piece of candy, he will typically either climb over the obstacle or attempt to crash it so he can reach the object of his desires. The girl, on the other hand, will try to go around the obstacle; and failing that, she will generally not make further attempts to reach the reward but will busy herself with something else.
To the feminists, this means nothing. They decry this behavior, saying that it is imposed by a male dominated society. They are blind to the necessary distinctions between male and female behavior and blind to the natural virtue implicit in the girl's docility and willingness to adapt. They seem unable to draw conclusions from their observations of human nature. Their "overarching" ideology precludes rational thought. And so now in these last dim years of the twentieth century, textbooks have been rewritten, the work place revolutionized, and families destroyed. And woman - the joy of her husband, the mother, the tender, civilized caretaker of culture - has been savagely uprooted and left to fend for herself in the crass commercialism of modern life.
Feminism has emotional repercussions in both the man and the woman. For the woman, though, it is more internalized and, therefore, more intense. She is vulnerable as her station in life is attacked. She is subjected to brutal psychological warfare which can have serious ramifications for her and for her family.
But for others, it's not so simple or so easy to manage. All the heavy artillery is brought out against the talented or highly educated young woman who decides that the world is full of empty promises and abandons it. She is made to feel like a fool. Even her own mother will frequently say, "But you're WASTING your education." Friends and colleagues who have a distorted understanding of the Sacred Scriptures will ponderously remind her of the Parable of the Talents. She will be told that she is "selfish". And she will feel guilty.
All these forms of inappropriate guilt are difficult to resolve, but the most "vicious attacks in this regard are those leveled at the woman for having "too many" children. It sometimes seems as though everyone has been tutored by Zero Population Growth zealot, Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University. They have been brain-washed into believing that the planet cannot support so many people and that disaster looms in the near future if stringent global population control is not maintained. Writers for the women's magazines, columnists in the daily papers, public school health education teachers all sing the same discordant song. "Replacement level" population growth is the maximum allotted. Children are rationed like sugar and coffee in wartime: two to a customer. (Or better yet, 1.7, but the logistics don't work out very well.)
The United Nations Population Fund recently issued its annual report, and it's clear that Ehrlich has not changed his tune. He said, "If you're counting on science and technology to pull your chestnuts out of the fire and just let the population grow, you're out of luck." Joining forces with the UN in its assault upon the birth of people were the National Academy of Science in Washington and the Royal Society of London who warned that "...(F)or the first time, population growth and environmental abuse might be outrunning the ability of science and technology to respond as they have in the past." It's remarkable how unscientific the warnings are: "...You're out of luck," and "...might be outrunning..." They are scare tactics pure and simple. If any College sophomore wrote like that in a term paper, he'd flunk. But once such ideas dominate the popular media, people accept them unquestioningly as true. In the oddest twist imaginable, people become afraid of large families. The most terrifying enemy of mankind is, then, not the devil, but babies! On a practical level, how do young mothers and fathers fight that?
Thus, when a Catholic woman heads for K-Mart with her four or five children in tow, she faces the possibility of a real ordeal. Total strangers will come up to her and say things like, "Are these all yours? What's the matter, didn't you ever hear of the pill?" Or, an expectant mother of several children will be met with shrill cries of "another one???" I've heard a Catholic grandmother say to her granddaughter who had just delivered her second baby, "Now, that's enough." This is the sort of thing the young mother faces; and largely, she faces it alone. There usually isn't anyone nearby to speak a word of encouragement or share an understanding smile. And while she knows she is following God's will, entrusting the size of her family to Divine Providence, and while she loves her children, pities the slaves of birth control, and recoils from the contraceptive mentality present in so-called "Natural family Planning," she is still made to feel guilty.
The thing with guilt is that it gnaws at the person. This makes perfect sense, because when the guilt is appropriate, meaning that the person has in fact done something wrong which needs to be confessed, penance done, and reparation made, she should not feel comfortable until she does. But with inappropriate guilt, it's something else entirely. The person has not done something wrong but SOMEONE ELSE seeks to convince her that she has by projecting on her the force of her own hostility. When the recipient experiences the full weight of the "projected affect," there are three typical responses: (1) cast it off and throw it back, (2) evaluate whether it applies and apply what does and reject what doesn't, or (3) swallow it. Girls frequently choose the latter, introjecting and internalizing the flaming arrow.
And it doesn't stop there. The false guilt will make the girl so uncomfortable that she will seek to alleviate her pain. If she has no one to help her identify the reasons she is feeling so wretched, she will be plagued by nagging doubts about whether what she is doing is worthwhile. It is at this point that many enroll their children in the local day care center, send their husbands to the market to stock-up on Stouffer's frozen dinners and head back to graduate school or to the office.
Women have always lived "closer to life." They have been involved with the fundamental things: soap and water, food and garbage, birth and death. They wipe up the blood, bind the wounds, fry the potatoes and do the dishes. And all through the ages until now, they have backed each other up. They weren't alone. Even in our polyglot pan-"Christian" country, there were pockets reminiscent of Christendom. Catholics clustered together around the Church in geographical parishes; and the closer the houses were to the parochial school, the more the neighborhood had a Catholic character. There the true Christian mothers raised their families and did their work. They hung their wash on the clothesline in the yard (where Our Lady of Grace reigned in the garden) and called to their next door neighbor to come sit for a while and talk. They talked through the fence as they planted their tomatoes and pulled their weeds. And they walked with their children to the comer store and talked to the butcher about the nice cut of beef and to the grocer about his aunt's arthritis.
That's gone now. All the sweet interludes in a busy day, the human contact, the feeling of belonging are gone. Because the woman is more gregarious, more social, the loneliness is piercing. She begins to envy "the girls at work," who at least have someone to talk to. She begins to resent her husband who "gets to get out in the real world." She's irritable and overeats (or starves herself). Desperate for human contact, she fills her house with raucous electronic reproductions of the human voice - the blaring television, the blathering radio.
The social groups are gone: the Mothers' Clubs and Altar Societies and Ladies' Sodalities. The weekday activities have largely disappeared. Why? Because the women are at work. Even wedding and baby showers are held on Sunday now. This is interesting from the point of view of changing social patterns. In the past, these things were held on weekday afternoons or evenings or, in some neighborhoods, there would be a great big Saturday night extravaganza in a rented hall. But never on Sunday. For Sunday was the day for Mass and special family activities - with Mom and Dad and the kids together for a drive in the country or a picnic or dinner at Grandma's house. It's all different now.
The young woman knows that there's really very little hope for the daily loneliness to be assuaged; and so the emotional demands that she places on her husband when he arrives worn out at the end of a grueling day seem impossible for him to meet. She feels let down: he feels put upon. Understanding breaks down and her isolation increases.
Thus it is important to understand that feminism is an incendiary bomb dropped on society and that even when the devastatingly hateful philosophical system is consciously rejected, the raging flames can still burn a family.
