Radical Feminists Do Not Understand True Freedom Can Only Be Found In Love
“One of the reasons women’s lives have changed is that they have been able to control their fertility, it is an important issue.“ — Cherie Blair (source: The Press Association)
It’s sad when things come down to this mentality: women, to be free women in society, need contraceptives. However, given the way society has developed, it’s quite understandable why people think in this fashion: because they want a good (freedom) but they do not truly understand what that good actually is. Freedom in the modern world is misunderstood; people think that it means to be able to do whatever one wants without any limits, without any restrictions. Whatever will make it impossible for us to fulfill any of our most outrageous desires must, by definition, be anti-freedom, even if it is our very own bodies. Radical feminism, following such a vision of freedom, ends up with self-hatred, following the errors of gnosticism (hatred of femininity, hatred of the body, hatred of the material universe because of its restrictions to freedom, hatred towards reproduction and children because of the burdens they become on the “free” spirit); true, Christian feminism, as espoused by St Elizabeth Feodorovna, St Edith Stein, Pope John Paul II, and many, many others, realizes the value and worth of both genders. It insists we raise women up without lowering or destroying masculinity. These feminists, not to be confused by the radicals, remind us that our body is not just an accidental appendage to be overcome, but truly represents something about who and what we actually are. If the soul forms the body to represent one’s true self, then the body must not be thrown aside; it should be seen as an important, integral part of what it means for us to be ourselves.
True freedom is not about lack of responsibility, lack of order, or lack of rules; it is about personal integrity and the ability to be in the world the person we are meant to be. And, since we are created in the image and likeness of God, in the image and likeness of the Trinity, that is in the image and likeness of love, true freedom is manifesting that love in and through the world, personally to others, and sharing all of who we are in that act of love. To do this, we must overcome all false concepts of the self, overcome our individualism, and become true to ourselves: we must accept ourselves for who we are, including, and especially, our bodily existence with its gender. We will then realize our personal action and reaction to others will be, must be, engendered. When we live in a society without the full and proper expression of both genders in the world, in both public and private spheres, with the proper appreciation of those expressions, is there any wonder why people are becoming more and more alienated with themselves, and are incapable of forming any true, lasting bonds with one another? When society sees a child as an obstacle against freedom instead of the beautiful fruit of true freedom, of love, is there any way such a society can continue long without splintering apart into individuals warring against one another?
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For a good discussion on radical feminism (not Christian feminism) and its slow but hopeful demise in the public sphere, read Marjorie Campbell’s piece at InsideCatholic here: http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3725&Itemid=48
Well, ‘a’ child isn’t an obstacle to freedom, but 16….
Obviously, Miss Blair is correct. Controlling fertility was a major step, whether by common birth control devices or NFP. You can’t go to college or have a career if you’re pregnant non-stop. Why should women have to be pregnant for 20 years straight ? Another factor is the drastic lowering of infant and child mortality, reducing the need for countless pregnancies. Even most NFPers don’t have a dozen kids. Giving birth is not the be-all and end-all of being a woman.
A couple things.
Gerald, I am sure you know you will get a lot of criticism for what you just wrote (supporting the wife of the former Prime Minister of the UK in her encouragement for contraception). What you said here is not new for you (many of us at VN have pointed out your seemingly natural disdain for children before — making us wonder about a few things, truth be told) but after your support for homosexual marriages and other things, you should expect what comes from this.
Second, I think your response, for the most part, does not follow the discussion at hand. No one has said giving birth is the end all or be all for a woman; Catholicism does point out the natural holiness of virginity which should demonstrate that Catholicism does not follow such a reductionist view of women. Moreover, it doesn’t mean one has to think for those women who are married, once again, that they find their end all or be all of their person as being a mother. However, on the other hand, it is an integral part of who they are and to deny it is also to deny who they are. That’s the thing. It must be a holistic integration, and the motherly qualities of women manifest their ways, not just in bearing children, but in day to day activities, in private (at home) or in public (at work), and there truly is a masculine and a feminine way to engage public life. St Edith Stein in fact points this out as to why woman’s suffrage and woman’s right to work in the workforce was important: they bring in a complementary aspect to the public sphere which is lacking when women are regulated to the private sphere alone. Following this insight, one could say this would create an unnatural, homosexual, public sphere.
Cherie Blair’s statement is factually correct, whether one approves of it or not.
Since you’re wondering – We’re actually hoping to get pregnant later this year. Likely name for a girl: Fiona Regina, Regina being my mother’s name, and Fiona based on my wife’s heritage. Boy: not sure yet. Gerald II. doesn’t fly it seems :P
Motherhood is certainly an important aspect of femininity, as is fatherhood to masculinity. I would say that fatherhood – beyond ‘Just wait when Daddy gets home!” had been a neglected issue for the longest time.
It certainly is wrong to view children per se as an obstacle. Nonetheless, the option to choose when or if to get pregnant is certainly a good thing. That can be achieved with the pill, NFP and other things. NFP is, after all, another means to what Blair talked about – controlling one’s fertility.
While I would agree that there are differences between men and women, and that they complement each other, I also think that the lines are frequently blurred on an individual level. Certainly, nobody should be relegated to a role determined by a predefined concept of what a woman can or should do – nobody is born a woman, so to speak. Not everything a woman does has to be ‘motherly’, and so forth.
Given the horrible sexism and oppression exhibited by about any religion (at least in practice) and civilization until very, very recently, I may be a bit too quick to suspect patriarchal desires.
“Nobody is born a woman” says enough… really it does.
What Simone de Beauvoir meant by “Nobody is born a woman” is that the then-well-alive sexist construct of how and what a woman is supposed to be is something invented rather than essential. It was a bon mot.
It seems as Ms. Blair and Gerald may also share a deficient view of “freedom”. “College and a career” will not lead to some sort of emancipation from our broken estate. Freedom is the ability to choose the good, and neither college nor a career will give any great advantage in this realm.
And this idea that only over the past 50 years or so have woman found some measure of freedom seems to smack of overly simplified modernistic notions. And equating the pill with NFP, NFP seemingly being framed as simply “Catholic birth control” shows at best a woefully anemic view of the Catholic teaching on NFP and the family.
To radically deconstruct the traditional Catholic notion of what a family is, what a mother is, … … as sexist constructs and patriarchy
seems to throw out so much of the good that we can clearly see in other cultures even now and in past civilizations. Are you really about to claim that our culture is more life-giving and protecting, less selfish and individualistic, more communal and famial, … than what has preceded us. The “Dark Ages” are radiant in comparison to our culture of death.
Peter: yes.
It seems that Henry’s point about the nature of ‘true freedom’ has been somewhat swept under the rug here. No body doubts that choice is a “good,” but the question is: is it a good in itself? That is, freedom for freedom’s sake seems to be one of the hereditary diseases that the Enlightenment has passed down to our age. Think about it, it’s not all that great a leap from Kant’s categorical imperative–which has at its heart the autonomy of the will–to Sartre’s existentialist-inspired “man is condemned to be free.” It’s along this vein, I’m sure, that De Beauvoir could say “no body is born a woman.” One could just as easily say “man” or even “human” for that matter.
If one is born neither male or female, it’s because one has simply been born free. And here freedom is simply for freedom’s sake, an end in itself. Talk about a snake consuming its own tail in an autodeconstructing act of existential suicide! If this is to be our view of freedom, then freedom is indeed meaningless and we through ourselves into the abyss of Sartrean absurdity.
Fortunately, freedom hasn’t always been understood in such a limpid fashion, as Henry has pointed out. Freedom is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Recognizing it as such and relative to the full florishing of our human nature (pace Sartre and De Beauvoir) provides it, and human existence as well, with a kind of inner intelligibility that makes life meaningful. But then again, I suppose that’s a rather large pill to have to swallow for those used to nursing the spoiled milk from the Enlightenment’s wizened breasts.
I suppose that’s a rather large pill to have to swallow for those used to nursing the spoiled milk from the Enlightenment’s wizened breasts.
A vivid image. Unfortunately, those who exhibit such disdain for the Enlightenment don’t understand freedom in any meaningful sense. You also said, And this idea that only over the past 50 years or so have woman found some measure of freedom seems to smack of overly simplified modernistic notions.
Only someone without any sense of history could say that and mean it.
I actually thought Henry’s point was well made. I probably worded it poorly above, but authentic freedom is not simply the freedom to choose for its own sake, but to choose “the good”, ultimately Christ.
Or as the Holy Father stated during his recent visit in New York with his meeting with young people and seminarians:
“Have you noticed how often the call for freedom is made without ever referring to the truth of the human person? Some today argue that respect for freedom of the individual makes it wrong to seek truth, including the truth about what is good. In some circles to speak of truth is seen as controversial or divisive, and consequently best kept in the private sphere. And in truth’s place – or better said its absence – an idea has spread which, in giving value to everything indiscriminately, claims to assure freedom and to liberate conscience. This we call relativism. But what purpose has a “freedom” which, in disregarding truth, pursues what is false or wrong? How many young people have been offered a hand which in the name of freedom or experience has led them to addiction, to moral or intellectual confusion, to hurt, to a loss of self-respect, even to despair and so tragically and sadly to the taking of their own life? Dear friends, truth is not an imposition. Nor is it simply a set of rules. It is a discovery of the One who never fails us; the One whom we can always trust. In seeking truth we come to live by belief because ultimately truth is a person: Jesus Christ. That is why authentic freedom is not an opting out. It is an opting in; nothing less than letting go of self and allowing oneself to be drawn into Christ’s very being for others (cf. Spe Salvi, 28).”
Mike,
Then please give me your definition of freedom them, as evidently your definition differs from what I am referring to above.
Or is it just that you have a superior grasp of history perhaps?
Wow, “control of their fertility” used to (in the bad old days before 50%+ divorce rates, STD’s, illegitimacy, dysfunctional familties, etc.) mean being chaste until marriage. Now, it apparently means artificial contraception, abortion, separation of sex from procreation, openness to being used and abused by males for gratituous sex, etc. That is not freedom in my book.
Not sure if Ms. Blair is a radical feminist.
Don’t know if she wrote it but Janis Joplin sang: “Freedom’s just another word for ‘nothin’ left to lose’.”
Ms. Bair’s quote is more emblematic of the cesspool which is contemporary society radical feminism.
“… those who exhibit such disdain for the Enlightenment don’t understand freedom in any meaningful sense.”
But that’s precisely the problem with many Enlightenment notions of freedom–they’re self-referentially incoherent since they posit an absolutized view of freedom to the point of it’s become hypostasized. If the Enlightenment becomes the standard by which one’s notion of freedom is judged, then the dice are loaded from the get go–a crap shoot. Absolute freedom is the absurd (one need not look beyond Sartre), and in what sense is the absurd meaningful?
T. Shaw:
“‘control of their fertility’ used to (in the bad old days before 50%+ divorce rates, STD’s, illegitimacy, dysfunctional familties, etc.) mean being chaste until marriage.”
Whew! I feel so much better knowing this now. The old days were chaste. Good. I was beginning to find Homer and friends a compelling portrait of “old.” Thanks for that.
PS: There are some book you might want to read that make you look kinda silly when you write things like that.
Three cheers for the Enlightenment as brought into concrete existence by the Founders of this great nation. For religious freedom, freedom of speech, women’s right to vote, women being able to go college, women no longer going from being the ward of their father to being the ward of their husbands (asking the father for the daughter’s hand in marriage – but not the son’s). Three cheers to throwing, running and playing like a girl. Three cheers to women being able to tell a no-good husband to shove it. Goodbye to the ‘man of the house’ and ‘wearing the pants’. Goodbye to ‘Mrs. John Smith’. A woman shouldn’t and doesn’t need a man. A woman should want a man and vice versa.There’s nothing ‘radical’ about that.
Three cheers for the Enlightenment as brought into concrete existence by the Founders of this great nation. For religious freedom, freedom of speech, women’s right to vote, women being able to go college, women no longer going from being the ward of their father to being the ward of their husbands (asking the father for the daughter’s hand in marriage – but not the son’s). Three cheers to throwing, running and playing like a girl. Three cheers to women being able to tell a no-good husband to shove it. Goodbye to the ‘man of the house’ and ‘wearing the pants’. Goodbye to ‘Mrs. John Smith’. A woman shouldn’t and doesn’t need a man. A woman should want a man and vice versa.There’s nothing ‘radical’ about that.
Three cheers for this expression of the dignity of women. However, for you to claim that the increasing recognition of the rights of women had anything to do with the founders of “this great nation” is historically false.
Gerald,
And now we’re stuck with a bunch of weak, whiny, women and even weaker and whinier men. Yay!
Oh ze veek vomen and ze veaker men, if only ze men vere still “zaeh wie Leder und hart wie Kruppstahl” *. Ah, ze good old days.
* How Hitler wanted young men to be: “”A German boy must be lean and lithe, quick as a greyhound, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. He must learn self-denial, to endure reproaches and injustice, to be reliable, silent, obedient, and loyal”
Oh and the women ? Back to home and hearth. They got medals for child-bearing – the “Mutterkreuz”, the “Honor Cross of the German Mother”. My great-grandmother got one. A mother could be awarded a bronze, silver, or gold cross depending on the number of children she had produced. Eight would entitle the woman to a gold cross, six for silver, and four for bronze.
Polemical ? Sure. But that’s what came to mind.
The standard and tiresome “Hitler … …” response. It’s amazing how often he gets resurrected, even to bolster the most mundane of arguments. I guess with the Fuher and I in the now in the same camp that clearly ends this little rabbit trail.
interesting that only men seem to be contributing to the discussion. “the blind talking about color” comes to mind. how about this angle: choice is good because it gives you the freedom to act moral or neglect to do so. in this particular question, the question of what is moral seems to be far from a universal truth in the real world. so let’s not get too much into lecturing other people, but rather spend our energies on looking after our kids and allowing all family members the choice they seek. maybe we can fail a bit less every day in this regard.
“interesting that only men seem to be contributing to the discussion. “the blind talking about color” comes to mind. ”
Genetic fallacy
I guess the cafeteria is wide open now.
I wonder if the huge number of orthodox Catholic blogs who remain linked to Gerald understand that?