The following is an edited excerpt from Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity, set for publication on Jan. 20.
The idea that marriage is simply a kind of equal partnership between a man and woman is a model that Western culture purchased a long time ago and at a high price. Poet and author Wendell Berry lays out the contemporary vision, written in the 1980s:
Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.
Such a pattern, as Berry suggests, isn’t a model for integrating a family together into an organic unit but is a road map for divorce with divisions from the start. Separate responsibilities, career goals, and bank accounts make it a challenge to truly weave a couple together, which requires placing the common goal of the family over the individual.
This elimination of difference between male and female is exacerbated by the many ways in which a woman limits her own female nature to mimic that of the male. Catholic psychiatrist Karl Stern noticed in the 1950s that what “is frequently encountered today is the woman who finds it difficult to accept her womanly role.”
This difficulty, Stern notes, isn’t because there are “injustices imposed on woman in many societies” but has to do with the model of womanhood that looks more and more like manhood.
Stern continues, “It is rather an over-evaluation of masculine achievement and a debasement of values which one commonly associates with the womanly; a rejection often unconscious, even of motherhood; an aping of man, associated with an unceasing undertone of envy and resentment.” This has only worsened over time, with the respective roles of men and women being further blended into one common type of genderless “worker,” based on the Marxist model.
Theologian Servais Pinckaers explains the deficiencies of the Marxist, feminist vision: “In this view the distinction between the sexes engenders rivalry, as well as the hopeless pursuit of the suppression of all differences, which is equally damaging to both. Only the frank, positive acceptance of these differences as complementary aptitudes will allow the reestablishment of collaboration between man and woman.”
Karl Stern agrees: “Only complementariness can make us self-less. The self can be lost only in an other, in something which is not-self. It is complementariness which mobilizes our generosity.”
The new woman created by feminism, who puts herself at the center, Stern explains, “cannot love. All she can do is compete, and even this often only in an illusionary way. If the male partner is weaker, things don’t work out because he is weaker. If he is stronger, they don’t work out because he is stronger. He cannot win, neither can she. In the first case it is disdain which prevents her from loving, in the second case it is envy.”
How often do we see or experience this? Feminism hasn’t taught us to love, but to compete, to use, to blame and condemn, and to find the advantage, no matter what the cost. And what is lost? So many things that are so much more profound, beautiful, and satisfying.
Our culture is so dominated by the common models of the devouring mother or the overbearing wife that we have little to help us capture what authentic love between men and women looks like. What is missing is the understanding of how women can spark creativity in men.
Stern warns, “For just as woman for her greatest creative act needs to conceive from the male, man, for his creative activity, is in need of a mysterious ‘conception’ from the female. ‘Mysterious’ because the process is not cellular. Otherwise the parallel is correct.”
He continues: “The function is similarly catalytic. One is surprised to learn how fleeting the encounter of Dante with Beatrice was, but it seems that for that ‘fathering’ of the man’s child by woman the mere presence is enough, a catalytic presence with no quantitative specification. She has to be around somehow for something to happen: the ancients were right with their idea of the Muse.”
It has long been acknowledged that women have the capacity to elevate or denigrate men. Archbishop Fulton Sheen wrote that to a great extent, the level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood:
“When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.”
RESTORING AMERICA: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN MARRIAGE BECOMES DISPOSABLE
Models of denigration of woman abound, leading us to believe that maybe elevation is suspect, much like Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, believing the muse to be false myth, while in reality, woman is paltry and illiterate. It is curious to consider how the physical sterility of women has led to the intellectual sterilization of men, each dragging the other lower to a world of dirty denigration and meaningless sex.
In contrast to the regnant model, Berry describes couples still holding on to a Christian vision. “There are,” he writes, “still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, ‘mine’ is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as ‘ours.’”
Carrie Gress is a scholar at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, where she got her doctorate in philosophy. She is the author of numerous books, including Something Wicked.