Is feminism good or bad? What is feminism? What is the role of women in culture? Or even more fundamentally: what is a woman?
Arguments over these questions have become so contentious that it’s dangerous to even raise the topic. Perhaps the wisdom of a twentieth-century German woman can help us find talking points to use with those who are willing to have a serious discussion about these issues.
Edith Stein was born in 1891 into a large Jewish family in the city of Breslau. Although her native city is now known as Wrocław, Poland, it was a German city during her lifetime.
In the early twentieth century, Germany was a prosperous, powerful, and respected nation. Although Edith and her family certainly experienced discrimination because of their Jewish faith, the real hardship of her childhood was the death of her father. As the youngest of eleven children, Edith grew up in a large household with sisters, sisters-in-law, and many other male and female relatives. But it was her widowed mother who became the anchor for their home, a leader in the family business, and a strong but thoroughly feminine role model for her.
Like many young people today, Edith turned her back on God and her Jewish faith when she was a teenager. When she arrived at college at the age of twenty, she soon became active in a controversial political cause: voting rights for women. She was a hard worker and brilliant student at the university, and she found a job as a teaching assistant under the famous philosopher Edmund Husserl. Although her studies were interrupted by her service as a nurse during World War I, she eventually earned a doctorate under his direction.
Although Husserl was not a practicing Christian, his philosophical ideas caused his students to ask deep questions about how we think about reality, questions which eventually led many of his students into the Christian faith. Edith’s encounters with Christians and an accidental discovery of Saint Teresa of Avila’s autobiography helped to open her heart to God. Her decision to become a Catholic caused her mother so much pain that Edith put aside her initial plan of becoming a Discalced Carmelite nun. Instead, she pursued a career as a teacher.
Despite her brilliant doctoral dissertation and a personal recommendation from Husserl himself, Edith was flatly rejected in her efforts to be given a job as a full professor. The reason? She was a woman. Edith therefore wrote articles, taught at a college for teachers, and gave public lectures about many topics, including the role of women. Her second attempt to receive a position as a professor failed as well, despite her growing popularity as a lecturer.
Soon after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, his government passed laws which penalized racial minorities, particularly Jews. Not only did this legislation destroy her hopes for teaching at a university, she was forced to resign from her teaching job. She and many other German Jews quickly found themselves unemployed and unemployable in Nazi Germany.
But divine providence had a hand in the timing of this apparent setback. The career options she had been working toward were now closed to her, and her mother had had a decade to come to terms with her daughter’s Catholic faith. Edith Stein was finally free to do what she had been thinking about since her initial conversion and enter the Discalced Carmelite order. Several months after she entered a convent in Cologne, she became known as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
When Nazi persecution of the Jews increased several years later, the Carmelite order smuggled her and her sister Rosa (who had also become a Catholic and entered the convent) to the Netherlands. On August 2, 1942, Nazis arrived at that convent and arrested both her and Rosa during a roundup of all Catholics of Jewish birth in the area. The two sisters were placed on an overcrowded train and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
Survivors from the train later recalled that Sister Teresa Benedicta spent much of her time caring for children whose mothers were in shock and immobilized by fear. When the train arrived at the camp, Sister Teresa Benedicta was one of the many Jews who were immediately taken to be gassed to death, probably on August 9, 1942. In 1998, Pope Saint John Paul II declared her to be a saint.
What does Saint Teresa Benedicta’s life teach us about the role of women, and how we can use her story to explain that role to others?
Saint Teresa Benedicta was only a child when she began learning about what it meant to be a woman. School curricula and movies did not educate her about this: her mother did. Through her mother’s personal devotion, the way she handled the different personalities of her children, her willingness to work hard and make sacrifices to provide for her family, all described in her autobiography, Teresa Benedicta grew up knowing how a true woman behaved. Frau Stein was a real-life version of the strong woman of faith described in Proverbs, chapter 31.
Every culture has its weaknesses, and young people are quick to notice them. When Teresa Benedicta recognized the injustice of the prohibition against women being allowed to vote, she became active in that movement. Despite the stigma associated with women who worked outside the home, she pursued the career to which she believed God was calling her. When she was unjustly prevented from being considered for a position simply because she was a woman, she recognized that injustice too. But she chose to play by the same rules as her male counterparts, racking up an impressive number of publications about philosophical issues.
Teresa Benedicta was, by nature and training, a philosopher. The discrimination she experienced led her to analyze the differences between men and women as a philosopher and a Catholic in her many published essays. She made distinctions between the separate vocations of man and woman and described the unique spirituality of women, as women. She dared to suggest that better education should be made available for women and proposed the startling argument that a woman having a professional life outside the home did not violate the order of nature and grace. In her essay, “Ethos of Woman’s Professions”, she raised the question about whether there is a natural feminine vocation for each woman and then made this controversial statement:
The clear and irrevocable word of Scripture declares what daily experience teaches from the beginning of the world: woman is destined to be both wife and mother.1
One of her final works, The Science of the Cross, was a reflection on the spirituality of Saint John of the Cross, a fitting meditation for someone about to face a gas chamber. But her final action—serving as a substitute mother for frightened children, even though she was a consecrated virgin—was also a fitting end for such an intelligent, thoroughly feminine woman.
We should not settle for allowing ourselves or anyone else to be educated about the role of women by popular entertainment, mindless slogans, and acts of violence. Instead, we can reflect on those women whom we have known and who best exemplify the role of women. We can address real acts of injustice against women with hard work and charity. We can study the issues of womanhood, feminism, and work so that we are ready to explain our beliefs to others. And it wouldn’t hurt if we started reading the works of Edith Stein.
(Editor’s note: This essay was published originally on August 9, 2023.)
Endnotes:
1 Edith Stein, Freda Mary Oben, trans., The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. II (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996), 45.
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Feminism began with the revolt again the Patriarchy of God with the successful temptation of Eve who then successfully tempted Adam resulting in the Fall of Man. To be certain man has not been the most successful steward (read sinful) of the family though modern feminism has continues to undermine the stewardship of man and the Created Order of God. Fatherlessness and feminized men are the results of feminism’s promotion of “toxic masculinity” and their dismissal of our Patriarchal God from the public square.
Another wonderful article on a saint by Dawn Beutner.
Reinforcing Beutner’s message, Hans Urs von Balthasar left the Jesuit Order to serve instead and for decades as the spiritual advisor to Adrienne von Speyr–widow, physician, thinker and mystic. Looking back, he writes:
“The richness contained there [anthologies of von Spyer’s works] will only be recognized in more mature times. Then it will be seen how strongly the intuition of this woman has influenced my books–“Heart of the World, The God Question, Mysterium Paschale”–and various other works, which essentially are only a theological transcription of so much learned directly from her [….]
“…The more the Church has to keep herself Catholic, open to all, dialogical, dramatic, in the modern world, the more profoundly she must comprehend and live her intimate essence as Body and Bride of Christ [….]
“…The works of Adrienne von Speyr, almost all of which were dictated to me, represent about a third of the books written with my own hand, a second, weak third is made up of the books published under my own name; a more full-bodied third, finally, is made up of books translated by me for my publishing house” (von Balthasar, “My Work in Retrospect,” Ignatius/Communio, 1993).
Thanks be to Our Father Most High, for his gift of faithful women, down through the ages, who say “Yes” to Truth and Love and Life and Family, as did the courageous Edith Stein.
And thanks be to him for my mother, and my two grandmothers, so faithful to him, and to their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Keep writing!
Fr. Gerald Murray wrote eloquently today in the Catholic Thing of our growing crisis in the Church with the upcoming Synods (8-9-2023). Tempted to heteropraxy, what we are primarily missing is the willingness to embrace the Cross of Christ. Where is the Cross of Christ in the Synod IL?
Who better to point the way back to spiritual health than our tremendous Carmelite Saints:
“One of her final works, The Science of the Cross, was a reflection on the spirituality of Saint John of the Cross, a fitting meditation for someone about to face a gas chamber. But her final action—serving as a substitute mother for frightened children, even though she was a consecrated virgin—was also a fitting end for such an intelligent, thoroughly feminine woman.”
Thanks for this.
Women entering the workforce and receiving the vote is one of the worst disasters that has ever befallen mankind. Women used to be revered as creatures of the home who were above the grubby world of hard labor, politics, and ideological controversy. Now, however, they have been degraded to common objects in this grubby world who must shove their children into daycare and deprive them of a mother’s love in order to have a “fulfilling” career.
Well, as for vooting and working, Stein would disagree, and I’ll side with her (and almost every other mdoern Catholic thinker of note).
Indeed.
So women should not vote? Really? How quaint.
100 years ago both my grandmothers would have been regularly rising at six to clean out yesterdays fires, polish the grates, carry the coal in, relay the fires, light the kitchen fire to heat some water for the menfolk and children to wash, wake them up, cook them some breakfast … Depending on the day they would have spent it washing, drying, ironing, pressing, airing, mending … clothes. The whole day from dawn to dusk would be full of hard labor.
And had they been in the leisured classes they would have had those of my aunts as yet unmarried doing it for them.
in today’s world people do not accept what their status in life probably should be; e.g., if another person has a certain job then I should as well, even if I’m not qualified. this is a problem in a world that runs on money
this notion that “you can be anything you want to be” is nonsense (in the US you can do whatever you want but you should have the aptitude to do it)
What you wrote sounded a lot like my own daily routine raising children on a farm, Mr. Hawkins. We had wood stoves, not coal but same idea.
Unless one was in a very remote setting though, women as you described had a great deal more opportunity for fellowship with other women & with their communities. Mothers at home today can be quite isolated & their counterparts are isolated in their own ways in little office cubicles. Physical exhaustion’s not as much a worry today as mental health troubles are.
There’s nothing wrong with manual labor. My friends who do all their own gardening & housework are in great physical shape. I try my best at that, too. I’m still feeling the effects of trying to pick okra that grew 10 ft. high though. It was a struggle & I think the okra stalks won.
🙂
And let’s not forget women in sports where they get the chance to be pummeled by a biological male. So much for feminism and the advances made on behalf of women.
Deacon, in the USSR women and men had equal civil rights. We were first in the world to have a female foreign minister, a female cosmonaut, we had female jet fighters, female scientists etc. And yet we did not have men boxing women or going into female toilets or prisons. My point is that it is not “equal rights for women” that created the perversions but an ideology, in this case “a transgender ideology” which has nothing to do with a sane feminism or (as I prefer to say) equal rights.
Perhaps the difference is that the USSR did not deny a biology which puts natural limits to the activities of both males and females.
Bishop Sheen once preached that men ran the world and women ran society until the movements started
family had gone downhill ever since and now we’re also going broke
Actually, your argument is probably the best pro-transgender ideology I have ever read.
Women who do not wish to be “creatures of home” should do “a reassigning surgery” so as men who wish to be “creatures of home”.
It is a very good outline of the life of Sr Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She is a great inspiration for women, especially intellectuals. Actually, for men as well.
In my opinion, to call her a feminist is to reduce her. She simply was a woman who had a great mind far superior to most (including men who censored her). Her very BEING makes an argument pro- women’s rights unnecessary, for the rational people. God created men and women with equal capacity to think, to realized talents given by Him, with free will and so on. This is exactly what the life of Edith Stein demonstrates.
Thank you. You make a superb point eloquently and elegantly.