FEMININE MYSTIQUE

 

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 19^th century till the beginning of the 20^th (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.