Can John Paul II and Catholic Women Save Authentic Feminism?
Has feminism offered society a positive contribution? Or has it, as Carrie Gress says in her new book, The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us, been so corrupt from its inception that it must be “slayed” as an “ideological dragon?”
Is there such a thing as “authentic feminism,” or is the tree of “feminism,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes,” so rotten at its core that it must be cut down completely?
Before I address those questions, let me begin by saying that the history and impact of feminism that Gress presents in her book, particularly the “second wave” of feminism that came forth in the 1960s as a push for women’s equality in the workplace and for reproductive rights, rang extremely true to my own experience.
Her account of that part of feminist history was, almost eerily, the telling of my family history. Gress accurately conveyed the story of my own mother morphing from a stay-at-home mama of 10 — a PTA president, Brownie leader, Boy Scout den mother, practicing Catholic and often daily communicant — into a political activist and feminist who worked long and hard to try to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed in Congress.
By the age of 31, Mama had borne 10 children in 11 years. I was the sixth, born in 1960, five years before my youngest brother arrived and eight years before Pope St. Paul VI released the encyclical Humanae Vitae. Suffice it to say that, by 1970, my mother had left the Catholic Church, become agnostic and gone to work full time, ultimately becoming a high-powered lobbyist in Washington, D.C. She told me just before she voted for her personal friend Hillary Clinton in 2016, “I’ll always vote for a woman’s right to choose.”
While I realize this is probably an extreme example of getting swept into the feminist movement, I believe my mother’s story represents the experience of many women who felt disappointed and abused by their own encounters with masculine authority in the home, the culture and the Church — and who felt called to do something about it.
I can understand how Mama’s experience of an alcoholic father, a dominating husband and a priest she claimed “yelled at her” in the confessional for wanting to take birth-control pills, which she believed the Church was in the process of approving, fomented the ground of her feverish fight for women’s rights.
I believe that she and other women in history were honestly seeking equity when they pushed back against what they experienced as injustice — and that we would be remiss not to affirm both the pain they felt and the many gains they fought for and won: the right to vote and the right to education, health care, property ownership and fairer treatment in the workplace, to name but a few.
Having said that, and to the point of Gress’ book, it also seems that much of the “cure” that women concocted to address systemic inequality has become more deadly than the sickness they were trying to remedy.
