God is not a feminist and neither am I!

Few lessons from my days at primary school stand out, but I do remember one class very clearly. A grammar lesson that was really about inclusive language and equality. Our teacher told us that the word “chairman” was wrong. It should be chairperson, and “his” should be “his or hers”. This appealed to my sense of fairness. I lapped it up – grew to be an ‘enlightened feminist’. But, as International Women’s Day approaches on March 8, I know I’m done with feminism, an increasingly toxic ideology, bound to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

I used to get wound up when younger women rejected feminism. Could they not grasp ‘the subjugation of women’? Perhaps they were just quicker to recognise the falsity at the heart of feminism: that women can have it all, and live like men, and that a woman’s right to do as she pleases trumps even the right of her own child, girl or boy, to life.

Sisterhood

Former President Mary McAleese and her ilk can keep their sisterhood. We’ve had four waves of feminism – and I fear one more wave and we will all be overboard. Last week former US Senator Hillary Clinton shared a women’s rights platform at a security conference in Munich with Sarah McBride, the first transgender member of Congress. ‘Sarah’ was born Tim McBride – and now we are supposed to pretend that ‘transwomen’ are the same as biological women – and entitled to access our spaces.

I was born into the sexual revolution, and the second wave of feminism –  and by the time I went to university, both were dominating the culture. I was career-oriented and joined in the jokes about female undergrads who were just there to get their “M-R-S”. One of my pals wore a button with the discomfiting slogan: “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” The message to men was clear: “You are not needed.”

Feminism was reacting – perhaps over-compensating – for a time when women were economically dependent on men with few rights or choices.

Obviously we must not return to an unjust past. Of course, the conflict between men and women is nothing new. It is biblical and summed up in Genesis 3:16 when God told Eve, after the fall, that her desire would be for her husband and he would “rule over her”. These days though the ‘battle of the sexes’ has morphed into a strange ‘battle on the sexes’. Alongside Trans ideology has come the ‘trad wife’, an American movement, popular in some Christian circles, which advocates a rigid retro role for women with men at the head of the household.

We lived in an exciting world of rising choices – when women were no longer confined to housewife, teacher, nun or nurse”

There is something off balance about that too.

I came of age in the eighties when my peer group was divided between those who wanted a career and marriage, those who just wanted marriage and those who claimed to just want a career.

We lived in an exciting world of rising choices – when women were no longer confined to housewife, teacher, nun or nurse.

Religious life was hardly mentioned – even in my convent school.

I was attracted to career, marriage and children. I do not regret not being married or having children – but I am sorry that my call to consecrated life was not nurtured when I was young. I was too busy engaging in misguided arguments that women should be priests.

Many in my generation did not get married –  not always by choice. A good friend, attractive with a high-powered executive job, said she is still figuring out how she ended up alone – with a career that she never really wanted.

Catholicism was competing with an increasingly feminised culture. My 1970s childhood television shows moved from The Brady Bunch, with its large blended family, and traditional housewife, to shows about single and divorced women making it in a “man’s world”.

Influence

An early influence was an extremely intelligent friend whose mother was a left-wing academic divorced feminist.

My friend was ambitious, wisely breaking off a serious relationship when her less gifted would-be fiance demanded his career must come first.

She became a highly successful workaholic corporate executive – then surprised us all as she turned forty. She fell in love and got married. I had never seen her feminist mother so animated as she gushed after the wedding: “She did it! She did it!” Then my friend had a baby and turned into supermom, quitting her job and focussing almost entirely on her role as a mother and wife, joyfully baking cookies and rushing to her child’s sports lessons.

What happened? I wondered until I noticed her resentment that she was mostly raised by her grandmother while her mother pursued an academic career.

Feminism forgot that marriage was designed to protect women and children. Too often it has picked the wrong battles”

Another feminist friend spent most of her twenties behaving like the men around her, occasionally panicking over pregnancy and reaching for the morning after pill. By her thirties, she had settled down but was demented over her failure to become a mother. “Oh the irony!” she would wail. She was eventually blessed with two daughters and is now a Catholic revert. Her daughters are smart, well educated women and both, still in their early twenties, are engaged to be married.

It seems countercultural in a world where so many women and men are opting for childless co-habitation, a risky business for females who can be left to raise children alone – or abandoned with an expiring biological clock when they insist on children.

Feminism forgot that marriage was designed to protect women and children. Too often it has picked the wrong battles: obsessing over petty issues or waging war on marriage, family and even babies – while failing to address the real issues around equal wages and better working conditions for mothers and indeed fathers.

Privilege

I had the privilege of having a stay-at-home mom. When she did go out to work, I noticed the difference, not just the absence of home cooking and the scent of baking. I missed her comforting presence. Only now do I appreciate how much my mother sacrificed.There’s no vocation more self-sacrificing than motherhood; it demands our bodies, even our blood, a clue that God is not a feminist.

I watched women in my peer group exhausting themselves, trying to have it all. They did not have it all – they were just doing it all. One had a career to match her husband’s but boy did she resent how much he still expected her to do at home, even with help from a nanny and a cleaner. By contrast, an acquaintance and her well-educated husband had decided he should stay home and look after their children while she climbed the corporate ladder. It all looked so perfect until the divorce. The top Executive post which she had aimed for went to a man.

I’m grateful I had the choice to pursue my ambitions. But every choice comes at a price and there is a balance to be struck.

I used to think we could feminise Catholicism too, but no more”

Too many aging feminists encourage young girls to pursue the top jobs without telling them the downside. And they push abortion while enjoying their own children – ignoring early feminist Alice Paul who wisely condemned abortion as the ultimate exploitation of women and children.

Feminism has even moved beyond “my body, my choice” to a place where many simply reject the concept of reproduction altogether.

I used to think we could feminise Catholicism too, but no more. Catholics are supposed to celebrate marriage and family, encourage self-sacrifice, oppose abortion and respect the complementarity of gifts.

Women are of course entitled to lead the boardroom but should be prepared for the reality: pressures on family and personal relationships, less time with their children, or no children at all.