The “Feminine
Mystique”
“The family
is the place where different generations come together and help one another to
grow wiser and harmonise the rights of individuals with the other demands of
social life; as such it constitutes the basis of society” (art. 52).
“At present
women are involved in nearly all spheres of life; they ought to be permitted to
play their part fully according to their own particular nature. It is up to
everyone to see to it that women’s specific and necessary participation in
cultural life is acknowledged and fostered” (art. 60).
The
combination of these two texts from “Gaudium et Spes” of the Vatican Council II
underlines a beneficial result of the “I-Thou” relationship. Every member of
the family is granted his/her rights within and without the family circle,
including the wife (and mother) who has her contribution to make outside the
home. The Council’s text is so well worded as to make out that the
inter-subjective relationship of the family is related in unstaggered
continuity to the desired intersubjectivity in society. Social relations and
cultural encounters are measured by the success of the interpersonal
communication in the family of which they are the societal expression and
development.
The church’s
magisterium took some time to develop its attitude towards the wife and her
role in the family and society. This attitude was not helped by St. Augustine,
for one, who drew the mother of the family in very dark colours: “A mother will
have a lower place in heaven, since she is married, than her daughter, because
she is a virgin” (Sermo 364 “ad continentes”). The Council of Trent (1545)
accepted the internal hierarchy of the family of the period which demanded the
wife’s total obedience to the husband, though she had her fair share of
responsibility and authority. This, coupled with the total economic dependence
on the man, left the woman with meagre rights and a lesser member of society.
And according to the physio-biology of Aristotle, the male was the “active”
principle, the female the “passive.”
The social
and political changes of the 19th century till the beginning of the
20th (1918) affected family life in the new commercial and
industrial centres. In the democratic and social setup that was strongly marked
by anti-clericalism and anti-religion the new ideas of person and society
dictated the loss of internal consistency. This spelled out the freedom and
autonomy of the wife and of the individual members of the household. Civil
marriages and divorce were legalized in the face of the objections of the Holy
See. This new era dropped the presuppositions of the sacral Catholic society
into which marriage had been automatically inserted. It ignored the social
submission of the wife and her obedience to her husband and rather spoke of her
as a “helpmate” who had also acquired a new importance as a teacher of her
children in the home to compensate for the spiritual alienation of her worker
husband. Conjugal relations were described in more personalistic terms and with
greater flexibility. The oppressive mentality that left housewives feeling
vacuous, purposeless and “desperate” is abolished. Feminist Betty Friedan
called for drastic steps to re-educate the women who were cheated or deluded by
the erstwhile “feminine mystique.” This is especially the need in many areas
locked in the fundamentalist mindset of the Old Testament/Koran, where women
are from time immemorial considered second class citizens or worse, a function,
and an object of male instrumentalisation. Whether in a developed or poor
country, the common debilitating factor is an unenlightened womanhood.
Traditions
must be critiqued in order to serve the cause of collective and personal
freedom. Where they hinder progress they must be confronted with unsentimental
realism. Article 52 of “Gaudium et Spes” mentions the art of “carefully
distinguishing the everlasting from the changeable”, a necessary dialectic for
all those wishing to be an effective presence in the world.