‘Feminine Genius’ Revisited

July/August 2008 Issue | Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith&Culture

The summer I graduated from high school I took an internship in journalism before going to college. It was the late 1980s and the hot domestic topics all concerned “women’s issues.” Not just the social issues we associate with radical feminism, but questions about equality generally.

“Glass ceiling” entered the journalistic lexicon; economists noted the inequality of women’s wages in comparison with men’s; academicians pondered how to attract girls to traditionally male fields such as medicine. A bumper sticker became popular: “A woman’s place is in the House … and Senate.”

In just the same time frame — 20 years ago this August — Pope John Paul the Great issued his apostolic letter On the Dignity and Vocation of Women, in which he foresaw the rise of woman to her rightful place of equal dignity in law and culture, but taught this advance could not bring fulfillment if it came at the expense of her identity as woman, her “feminine genius.”

What is the feminine genius exactly? Not eyes in the back of the head or multi-tasking. It’s recognition of the dignity of the human person.

Written right into woman’s physiology — even if she never physically carries a child — there is “room for another” and innate sensitivity to the goodness of the human person.

Man, the Pope taught, always stands in some sense outside the life process, learning his role as son, husband, and father from woman. Woman, then, has a great service to render humanity as custodian of the person and of the family: some women physically, as literal mothers, and all women spiritually, by bringing the truth about the human person to the fore wherever they work and serve.

John Paul thought that in an increasingly technical and impersonal age, women would have a great role to play in defending the goodness of the person against the onslaught of philosophical materialism.

Twenty years later, a woman is Speaker of the House, and we have seen a credible female candidate campaign for president. More women now enter and graduate American universities than men; more women than men become doctors; and in our country’s biggest cities, women working full-time earn 117% of what men in the same fields do.

Materially, at least in the West, the aspirations of the early feminists seem almost over-achieved. Yet this personal advancement has unfortunately not been accompanied by a subsequent respect for life and the human person.

In the 1980s, few of us in the West were thinking about an ensuing conflict with Islam, but John Paul’s teaching about the authentic fulfillment of woman seems all the more apt in light of the rise of Islamist extremism.

The sexual license of what used to be Christendom and the inhumane repression of women in the predominantly Muslim nations can be seen as flip sides of the same coin. Each is a misguided response to the question of “woman.” The West makes a god of womansexuality; the East makes a demon of it. Take either route, and it’s a short road to disrespect and death via abortion and euthanasia or sharia and jihad; enslavement to sex or literal slavery; the culture of death or the culture of killing.

Recognizing the prophetic nature of John Paul’s letter on women, the Vatican kicked off a year of study of the document with a February conference in which some 250 scholars from 49 countries participated.

Addressing them, Pope Benedict XVI voiced the Church’s concern about the increasing isolation of individuals in the West, enduring “machismo” in the global South, violence against women in the East, and the exploitation of women by the entertainment industry.

“Faced with such grave and persistent phenomena,” he said, “the Christian commitment appears all the more urgent so that everywhere it may promote a culture that recognizes the dignity that belongs to women, in law and in concrete reality.” Sexuality is neither a god nor a demon, but a gift. Respecting it as such and learning its full meaning may be the key to building the culture of justice and love.E

Rebecca Ryskind Teti is Faith &

Family’s contributing editor.

What We’re Watching

A duo of films about interesting women:

Sophie Scholl, The Final Days: The Ratzinger family in Bavaria was an anti-Nazi German family. This film shows the heroic goodness in the anti-Nazi underground.

St. Rita: Passion, conversion, betrayal, faith. What’s not to love?

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