Woman. L. F. CERVANTES and L. HARRINGTON. New Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 14. 2nd ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. p812-819. 15 vols.
Transcendentally considered, a woman's basic role in any society is to perfect herself. She is to perfect herself physically, emotionally, intellectually, morally, and religiously. A woman is called in union with man to represent humanity and to develop both herself and humanity in as complete a manner as possible. Her role in society ideally includes the actualization of all of her talents to the fullest possible extent.
There are likewise existential considerations. When inquiring into the role of woman in society, one must ask, "Which woman?" and "Which society?" Which woman?—for her role will differ according to whether she is young or old, educated or uneducated, rich or poor, single or married, with no children or with many children, with a husband present or absent, participating in a domestic or commercial career, etc. Which society?—primitive or modern, rural or urban, agricultural or industrial, underpopulated or overpopulated, at peace or at war, in an era of penury or affluence, of social chaos or order, with a family system that is patriarchal or egalitarian, in which women are of low or high status? Each of these variables, and many others, affect a woman's role in society.
In these transcendental and existential considerations of the role of woman in society there are two valid and mutually supplemental emphases: (1) the natural law principles that are incorporated in and elevated by Christian teaching, manifesting the self-identity of every human being as an image of God, and the divergent but complementary natures of male and female social roles;(2) the changing sociocultural circumstances. The first of these emphases represents the unique permanent contribution made by the Christian evaluation of the status and role of woman' the second suggests that a stereotype of social-sexual roles derived from one culture can quickly become antiquarian in interest and applicability, since specific roles must be constantly reanalyzed in relation to existing circumstances.
Reason teaches that the identical human nature appears in the male and female in two different forms. Moreover, Scripture affirms, "God created man in his image. In the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them" (Gn 1.27). It follows that woman is in possession of full human nature and perfectly equal with man in moral value and status before the Creator. It is, therefore, not reasonable to take one sex as the ideal and standard of value for the other. Aristotle's and Freud's designation of woman as an incomplete or mutilated man must be rejected [Gen. animal. 737a 25, 767a 35, b 65, 775a 15; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis tr. W. J. H. Sprott (New York 1933) 153–173]. St. Thomas's acceptance of Aristotle's evaluation results in the same masculocentrism (Summa theologiae 1a, 92.1 ad 1).
As a sovereign human being, a woman has as her prime role that of perfecting herself with the aid of divine grace and thus saving her soul. Every other role in her life is subordinate to this one. In terms of this absolute, woman is no more subordinate to man than man is to woman. A mature and single woman is as free and independent an agent as a mature and single man. Within the context of marriage on the other hand, both man and woman subordinate themselves to the principles of a suprapersonal moral and physical union. Woman's basic role as a sovereign human being may not be violated even in marriage. Her individual moral independence and responsibility may not be replaced or superseded by the interposition or superordination of any other agent, male or female.
Physical Characteristics. The physical differences associated with reproduction are obvious. The sexual life of the female moves sequentially and rhythmically through complex changes that have no close counterpart in the male. Her earlier maturation, her greater vulnerability, her inescapable biological suitability for motherhood cannot be ignored. Menstruation is a factor in woman's life from about age 13 to about age 48 in 21st century America. Pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, and menopause, with their varied and critical glandular and hormonal adjustments, are differences between male and female that are not without psychic and social import.
Less obvious but equally relevant is the fact that every cell of a female's body is distinguishable from every cell of a male's body because of differential chromosomal content. Modern findings show the differential functioning of hormones associated with the male and female body in influencing behavior. Woman's blood has a greater white corpuscle content with consequently greater self-healing capacities. The greater viability of the female is evident at every age of life, from the fetal stage to old age; it is offset by a sex ratio at birth of roughly 105 male to 100 female births. Woman's metabolism is anabolic rather than catabolic, thus differing from the male's. Her total nervous system is of greater sensitivity, excepting the nerve centers in the genitals. The fact that a woman possesses about one-half the oxygen capacity, one-half the muscular capacity, and a less rugged bone structure than a man tends to place a woman at a disadvantage in physical activities. Consideration of skeletal and muscular structure, skin and hair texture, subcutaneous disposition of fat, rate of bodily growth, or any other of the gross secondary characteristics of the sexes makes it apparent that women differ from men physically in more than reproductive mechanisms.
Psychological Attributes. There is no inherent disparity of intellectual capacity between men and women. There are, however, in every culture, male-female dichotomies of psychic, emotional, and temperamental orientations. These cannot be appraised adequately without consideration of the particular cultures in which they originate and take shape. In every culture, women must come to terms psychologically with themselves as women just as men must come to terms psychologically with themselves as men. Prof. Morris Zelditch observes that in every society, the husband role has certain distinctive attributes, and the wife role has other psychic and emotional characteristics. He maintains that most commonly the husband's role can be described as that of "instrumental leader" and the wife's role most commonly is that of "expressive leader." Expressive leadership has to do with nurture—feeding the family members, caring for the children, keeping house—and with the emotional and psychological concomitants of these tasks. Instrumental leadership is expressed in the making of important decisions, being the ultimate disciplinarian, and taking the responsibility for the family's economic security. ["Role Differentiation in the Nuclear Family: A Comparative Study," in T. Parsons and R. F. Bales, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process (Glencoe, Ill. 1955) ch. 6].
Whatever validity there may be in occasional references to prehistoric matriarchies, the dominance of the human male at the beginning of the historic era is clear. The available evidence indicates that the status of woman was all but universally low. A comprehensive study of 500 primitive societies revealed female equality in only eight, and in each of these there was a notable shortage of women [L. T. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (New York 1919)]. Permitted polygyny was found to be standard; the owning of many women, like the owning of many cattle, was but a matter of wealth. The mother right (not to be confused with the mythical matriarchate) and matrilineal descent in no way implied a high position of the female. The common conclusion concerning the status of the sexes among primitives was: "Woman is almost universally considered property"[G. May, Social Control of Sex Expression (New York 1931) 186].
Traditional India. The status of woman in non-Christian traditional civilizations was that of a person who lacks inalienable rights. The family system of India is a prototype of the traditional extended kinship system and is associated with the oldest organized religion in the world (see HINDUISM). The classical Indian family consists of a plurality of married couples and their children, who live together as a joint family in the same household or compound. All the men are related by blood. The senior male, usually the father or grandfather, is the patriarch. The males are by law the owners of the property; the women have only the right to maintenance. The legal framework of this type of joint family was crystallized in about the 11th century in the Mitakshara, one of the many commentaries on the Indian sacred scriptures that stretch back 3,500 years. Although these sources contain not a few passages eulogizing women, they likewise fix the female's status as radically inferior. The bearing of a male child was the only valid initiation rite, so much so that an orthodox Hindu beggar would not accept alms from a barren woman. The widespread incidence of child marriage is due in part to this religious belief that it is necessary to bear a legitimate son at the earliest possible moment.
Polygyny was permitted in India, but it was seldom practiced except when a first wife had not become the mother of a son or sons. Female infanticide has roots in the fact that daughters have often been considered of little value. Until the beginning of the 20th century, 99 percent of the women were illiterate; a generation later it was reported that only one out of every 100 girls received an elementary education and one out of every 1,000 a secondary education. The double standard of morality, the absolute subordination of women to men, the suttee or burning of widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands, the purdah or veiled seclusion of women, limn in clear outline the traditional status of woman in India.
Ancient China. In another Oriental civilization, Confucianism for more than 2,000 years stereotyped a social system revolving about a father-son axis and held in theological equilibrium by family worship of ancestral males (see CONFUCIANISM AND NEO-CONFUCIANISM). Within its sociojuridical system one could find polygyny, unilateral divorce for the male, and the relegation of woman to a secondary role. Women were without the right to immovable property and were not entitled to formal education since their activities were confined to the home. They were subject to their fathers before marriage, to their husbands after marriage, and to their sons should they become widowed. A husband could kill his wife if she were taken in adultery; his adultery was taken as a matter of course. He could strike her; she received 100 blows for striking him. He could sell his wife; she had no legal recourse. Traditional Chinese marriage was solely by agreement of the couple's parents, contracted possibly even before the birth of the prospective life partners. A married woman's duty was above all to her parents-in-law just as a married man's was above all to his parents. A man who suppressed his wife because of his father or mother and a woman who neglected her husband because of his father were equally praiseworthy.
Ancient Greece. It is an irony of history that the ancient Western society that most uniquely idealized beauty and first formalized scientific thought was the one that reduced woman's status to a lower level than in any other major civilization. Moderns find it difficult to comprehend that the Golden Age of Greek classical civilization permitted not only slavery but a male monosexual mania. The faithful and tender love that in Christian tradition is realized fully only by a married couple, the classical Greeks assumed could be fulfilled between two men. If not more common than heterosexuality, homosexuality was at least more idealized. The Oration Against Neaera, ascribed to Demosthenes, sheds light upon the roles of women in classical Greece: "Mistresses we keep for the sake of pleasure, concubines for the daily care of our persons, but wives to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of our households" (59.122).
Ancient Rome. Under the ancient Roman trustee family system, the most conspicuous rule in relations of the sexes was that of the patria potestas that gave the male head in the family the power of life and death not only over his wife but over his children and other members of his patriarchal domain. He had the rights of chief executive, legislator, judge, and priest. The father had the right to accept or reject a child at birth, to give his daughter in marriage irrespective of her wishes, and to name a guardian for his wife and children. Legally, women and children were not citizens. Public justice existed only through the male, and he alone was responsible for the crimes committed by his family. Her adultery was punishable by death, her husband's taken for granted. She was a perpetual minor, a form of property in a patriarchal, patrilineal, patrilocal, male civilization.
Nevertheless, since the civilization was centered in family mores, she had great dignity in her roles as mistress of the home, wife, and mother. She had the security derived from social ideals of family continuity. It was once Rome's boast that for over 500 years, from the mythical founding of the city (753 B.C.) to the Punic Wars (264–202 B.C.), there had not been a divorce, and the security of woman was as certain as the marriage bond. It is misleading to speak of the "emancipation" of woman in the declining centuries of the Roman Empire. It was a period of general decline in the power of the family over all of its members. Woman remained legally subject to the absolute power—the manus—of the male even when the historical circumstance that had given rise to this power had long vanished.
Christian Revolution. The birth of Jesus was the turning point in the history of woman. Previous civilizations had held woman to be essentially inferior to the male. Christianity denied the basis for a sexual caste system and proclaimed a spiritual unity that integrated all human differences in a higher supernatural principle: "There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor freeman; there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal 3.28). No previous civilization had maintained that men, women, and children had inalienable rights. Christ insisted that both male and female were made in the image and likeness of God and that these divine composites could not be violated without offense to their Maker. By accenting the sovereignty of the individual within unity of all human persons, Christ made untenable the slavery that was part of all pre-Christian civilizations and that had inevitably undermined the status of woman.
Every major civilization before the time of Christ had permitted polygyny with its demeaning effects upon the self-image and integrity of women. Christ reestablished the basic divine pattern of monogamy at the same time that He sacramentalized it: "This is a great mystery—I mean in reference to Christ and to the Church" (Eph 5.32). Christ reaffirmed that marriage was of divine, not only human origin: "What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder" (Mk 10.9). [See MATRIMONY (SACRAMENT OF).]
Previous civilizations had made the patriarchal extended family, clan, and tribe the basis of social organization. When Christ stated that "a man shall leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife" (Mk 10.7), He shifted the axis of society toward the nuclear family. The male had had complete authority in regard to the female; the female had no juridical authority in regard to the male. Christianity recognized the need for centralized domestic authority, but it established a binuclear familial pattern adjustable within limits to democratic processes: "Be subject to one another in the fear of Christ" (Eph5.21). "The wife has not authority over her body, but the husband; the husband likewise has not authority over his body, but the wife" (1 Cor 7.4). The marriage of a young woman in traditional societies depended upon the decision of the family irrespective of the will of the bride. In Christianity the agreement of the spouses themselves was recognized as the bond of marriage; consequently without the free assent of the woman there could be no valid marriage.
The double standard of morality had characterized discrimination against woman from time immemorial. Christ held it to be null; what was wrong for woman was wrong for man: "Whoever puts away his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; and if the wife puts away her husband, and marries another, she commits adultery" (Mk 10.11–12). The single standard would weigh more heavily upon the man: "But I say to you that anyone who so much as looks with lust at a woman has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Mt5.28).
Infanticide, especially female infanticide, had been an accepted practice. Christ declared the child—male or female—to be a model, an angelically guarded deputy: "for of such is the kingdom of God" (Mk 10.14), "for I tell you, their angels in heaven always behold the face of My Father in heaven" (Mt 18.10), "And whoever receives one such little child for my sake, receives me" (Mt 18.5).
In previous civilizations, the doors of formal education and religious membership were regularly closed to women. A devoted band of female followers gathered about Christ and His mother during His lifetime. Within the primitive Christian Church the status of female teachers and auxiliary workers was recognized as of ecclesiastical importance [see DEACONESS; WIDOW (IN THE EARLY CHURCH)]. Whereas no previous civilization had held out a dignified alternative to marriage for woman, Christ established life in virginity undertaken for spiritual reasons as meriting "a hundred-fold, and … life everlasting" (Mt 19.29). The portals of learning, teaching, and social service were opened to women as well as to men.
Historical religions had been male-centered and male-oriented, with masculine ideals. Christianity provided for the first time ideal models of both male and female. From a human viewpoint, Jesus presented an ego ideal for fishermen, laborers, artisans, soldiers; Mary, His mother, presented a more immediate model to women, whether virgins or mothers. In making purity, gentleness, humility, care of others, love, and the traditional "feminine" virtues primary Christian ideals, Christ in effect idealized the whole of womankind.
It is sometimes asserted that Christianity introduced a spate of misogynist writings. St. Paul, Tertullian, and St. Jerome are held to be the prime offenders. The misapprehension springs partly from failure to understand that Christ expanded woman's self-concept and social functions by setting up an alternative to the traditional roles of wife and mother, namely, dedication to contemplation and social service undertaken for the kingdom of God's sake. In seeking to establish the ideal of virginity ("spiritual fertility") and the monastic ideal, authors such as Tertullian and St. Jerome made some incautious statements within the historical context of a sex-saturated society. Their statements were tempered, however, by the Christian dominance of love, sacramentality of marriage, personal sovereignty of the individual woman, and the single moral norm for both male and female. Although he did not approve the conduct of his protégé and friend Fabiola, who had abandoned her philandering husband and remarried, St. Jerome repudiated society's double standard that would countenance certain behaviors on the part of a husband that it would not condone on the part of a wife. "With us Christians what is unlawful from women is equally unlawful for men, and as both serve the same God both are bound by the same obligations" (Letter 77).
The irony of accusing the early Church of antifeminism is that there was a curious and powerful force in the world, outside and in opposition to historical Christianity, that was undoubtedly antisexual, antifeminine, and antifamilial. This was Manichaeism; it was an element in practically every one of the major Christian heresies of the first five centuries. Woman's status was not elevated immediately by Christ's coming any more than slavery was abolished immediately or is even abolished completely today. Christ's mission was and is spiritual. He did not establish a women's rights movement. But Christian doctrine and sacramental life contained the dynamic truth that was destined to revolutionize the status of woman.
End of the Roman Empire. From the 4th to the 6th centuries of the Christian Era, peoples from the North overran the empire of the Caesars. The Vandals, Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians, Alemanni, East Goths, Angles, Jutes, and Saxons influenced the family system. Whereas the Romans reckoned kinship from the common ancestor through males only (the system of agnation), the invading tribes reckoned kinship through both male and female lines. This tended to deemphasize the male domination in the traditional Roman family and to accent the binuclear family system. This was a juridical gain for the status of woman.
Middle Ages. It was feudalism that held society together after the fall of the Roman Empire. With the collapse of law and order and the self-protective regrouping of families around the strongest local lords, Western Europe became a vast network of fiefs or landed estates held on condition of service to an overlord in return for his protection of lands and persons. The effects of this social system were profound. Insofar as it was a military system dependent upon a succession of male heirs, the status of woman was depressed. Insofar as it was Christian and monogamic, women were secure under a noble and presumably single standard of morality. Insofar as it was an economic system promoting self-sufficiency, men, women, and children were integrated into a communality of labor that had little reference to stereotypes of "man's work" and "woman's work" except when requirements of muscularity or maternity occasioned their distinctness. Insofar as it was a system of inheritance and interlocking marriages, calculating families continued the ancient practice of promising their young sons and daughters in opportunistic marriages, so that the institutionalization of extramarital romantic alliances became inevitable.
Throughout the Middle Ages the convents and monasteries were the centers of formal education. The available evidence indicates that there were more convents than monasteries and that on occasion an abbess would be the religious superior of men as well as of women. It is likewise quite probable that more women than men received what formal education was given. With the men dedicating themselves to war, chivalry, and husbandry, reading and writing were quite frequently thought of as the work of clerics and women. The Crusades led to the further involvement and predominance of women in domestic economies and industries. The guilds generally did not exclude women. The growth of towns, international trade, universities, and the amazing development of church architecture were all liberalizing influences in male-female relationships. Women were not only students but likewise, in not rare instances, professors at the universities, especially in Italy and Germany. In summarizing the relative position of women in the period, a severe critic has concluded that "women in the Middle Ages probably enjoyed more equality with men than most of the time since" [A. W. Calhoun, A Social History of the American Family, v. 1 (Cleveland 1917) 15].
Reformation. The social forces culminating in the Protestant Reformation brought a sharp change. Granted that innumerable factors were involved in the widespread revolt from the authority of the Catholic Church—such as corruption, avarice, chicanery, ignorance, and perfidy in and out of the Church—the Reformation was a religious revolution. It renewed many evangelical family virtues: godliness, obedience, hard work, frugality, chastity, sobriety, faithfulness, honesty, instruction in the Scriptures, etc.
In denying that marriage was a sacrament, the reformers intentionally placed its control in the hands of the State. The immediate result was not without many direct and indirect benefits. Among the latter were the many needed reforms concerning lay spirituality, marriage legislation, and the regularization of clerical and conventual life achieved by the Counter Reformation. The long-range results of the secularization of marriage and governmental control were, however, dysfunctional to both the state of marriage and the status of woman. The denial of Christ's establishment of dedicated virginity as a superior way of life restricted woman's role to its pre-Christian categories of wife and mother. The closing of convents wherever the Protestant reformers gained control meant the suppression of the only schools that were regularly available to the public and a setback to the education of women that was not remedied for two centuries. The accentuation of the OT in place of the NT revived its patriarchal obediential rigidity rather than evangelical egalitarian love.
Although the Reformation, especially in its Puritan form, was marked by rigidly dogmatic and authoritarian control of society in general and of women in particular, the eventual historical result was a liberalization of controls throughout society. The survivor of the internecine religious warfare of the next few centuries was the spirit of democracy. Women eventually gained suffrage and greater control over their own destinies.
The legal development from the English Protestant tradition was remarkably infelicitous, however. Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) crystallized it and became the standard textbook for the training of lawyers in both England and the United States for more than a century. Its classic statement of the legal position of married women was as follows:
By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband…. Upon this principle, of aunion of person in husband and wife, depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities, that either of them acquire by the marriage…. For this reason, a man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself: and therefore it is also generally true, that all compacts made between husband and wife, when single, are voided by the intermarriage. [21st ed. (London 1862) 1.441]
Even the wife's clothes and objects of personal adornment had become legally the husband's. The children were regarded as having but one guardian: the father. The OT paternal power, strengthened by Pauline texts on the seeming absolute subjection of woman to man, and fortified by Puritan beliefs in the evil of human nature and play as the agent of the devil, made the Puritan father of England and New England no ineffectual figure for women and children.
A pen picture of the traditional "valiant woman" contained in Prv (31.10–31) was reputedly written by King Solomon ten centuries before Christ [see WOMAN (IN THE BIBLE)]. It has been applicable even in its details from the dawn of history to modern times in farm communities, in underdeveloped areas, and wherever an agricultural handicraft economy has not been rendered obsolete by the Industrial Revolution. Central to the biblical concept is the manufacturing role of the woman within the household economy. Charm, beauty, virtue, and the roles of wife and mother receive much less emphasis than this. But her activities are not confined to food preparation, textile processing, care of the extended family, or education of children. "She picks out a field to purchase; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard…. She enjoys the success of her dealings…. She reaches out her hands to the poor…. She makes garments and sellsthem, and stocks the merchants with belts…. Let herworks praise her at the city gates." Thus, the "worthy wife" is above all a worker: industrious, thrifty, enterprising, competent, a good manager, a wise counselor, a competent educator, a capable homemaker, a woman who earns her own way and advances to a remarkable extent the livelihood of her family. She works hand in hand with her husband to keep the farm and domestic industries solvent. Isolation of her role as that of child-rearer and his as that of breadwinner would have been a luxury that the society could not afford. The whole family was a relatively homogeneous economic unit. The biblical picture of woman as breadwinner, wife, and mother within the home was the ideal of woman's role from the beginning of human history until the advent of the Industrial Revolution.
Industrial Revolution. A revolutionary series of inventions took manufacturing out of the home and located it in the factory. Woman's daily partner in production and child-rearing was now claimed by the factory. She was left with the children. She became the domestic "childrearer" and he became the non-domestic "breadwinner." It was this revolutionary separation of male and female roles that women came to resent. As manufacturing has taken over more and more of woman's work by prefabricating clothes, premixing foods, and preparing in advance all types of domestic services from housecleaning to social entertaining, women's feelings of noninvolvement and nonfulfillment have been deepened. Both economic and psychological needs have forced women to follow men into industry.
As the industrial revolution has spread beyond the West, it has stimulated a "revolution of rising expectations" within the non-industrialized countries and thus aggravated international tensions by dividing the world into the affluent "have" and the indigent "have not" nations. In all these developments, woman's role in modern society is a central issue.
Domestic Revolution. The Industrial Revolution precipitated a domestic revolution. It was not just a matter of removing industry from the home. Other traditional functions were removed at least in part to other social agencies: the functions of status-giving, protection, health, religion, recreation, and education. However, although the roles of women within the home were minimized in these areas, there were several in which they were maximized. Whereas formerly male and female kinfolk to the third and fourth generations assisted in child-rearing functions, the mother in the relatively isolated family now became the prime socializing agent. Whereas the many jobs in the home had formerly made social control of children and stabilization of adult personalities relatively easy, the abandonment of domestic manufacturing made the mother the predominant agent in accomplishing such control and stabilization. Woman's role was thus maximized in personal relations and minimized in economic relations. The wedge driven by the industrial revolution into the home divided woman's reproductive role from her productive role and her domestic career from her commercial career. Modern society has not yet been able to solve the problems introduced by this revolution in the female role.
Medical Revolution. A more recent historical development may be termed a "medical revolution." For eons early marriage and continued childbearing were the complements of high mortality. No people could survive unless religion, tradition, and custom reinforced the economic and biologically necessary role of woman as the bearer and rearer of numerous children. The tradition was more accurately one of abundant rather than of completed child-rearing, for few children survived. The medical advances of contemporary civilization have changed this. Widespread improvements in sanitation have so reduced mortality and prolonged the life span that woman's unrestricted fertility is no longer the ideal that it was in traditional society. This social fact challenges the view—never the Christian one—that woman's role must be confined to childbearing and the home. As the Industrial Revolution minimized woman's productive role, so the medical revolution minimized her reproductive role. The reunion of these careers is the task of the present era.
International Dimensions. The extent of the revolution of women's rights that occurred in the 20th century is evident from a consideration that whereas at the turn of the century women could take part in the government of their countries in but a few instances, by 1945, when the United Nations Charter was signed, about 50 percent of the sovereign states of the world had recognized the right of women to vote and to stand for public office. At the end of the 20th century, women had the right to vote in nearly every country; however, they are still underrepresented in political institutions. In 1994 women held only ten percent of seats in parliamentary bodies and only slightly more than five percent of ministerial posts (United Nations 1997 Report on the World Social Situation, Part II: Core Issues, ch. VII, 38).
Little protective occupational legislation for women was provided until well into the 20th century. There had been sporadic attempts earlier to minimize some of the outrageous effects of laissez-faire policy. England in 1847 limited the working hours of women in textile factories by its Ten Hour Act. France in the following year passed legislation that presumably limited the working day to 12 hours for both men and women, but it was another quarter of a century before inspectors were provided to see that the 12-hour limit was operative. In the United States, protective state legislation affecting women workers dates from the 1870s, but it was not until the New Deal legislation of the 1930s and the wartime conditions of the 1940s that a general federal standard of minimum wages, hours, and conditions was accepted. On the international scene, advancement has been achieved by the UN Commission on the Status of Women and the International Labor Organization. Catholic effort is represented by the World Union of Catholic Women's Organizations and voluntary groups like the St. Joan's International Alliance.
Several UN documents uphold "equal rights of men and women." In various countries the promotion of equal rights legislation has had a mixed reception. Advocates insist that women are still so extensively deprived of personal property, family, and other rights by law that their status is distinctly inferior to that of men, and that this situation can be effectively remedied only by equal rights legislation. Opponents maintain that such measures might destroy hard-won legislation designed to protect women and would upset the existing body of law governing family relationships and property; they claim that there are fundamental differences between the sexes that require differential treatment in law. In spite of generally improving conditions internationally, the lack of appreciation of the importance of women's work in and out of the home, the continued concentration of women upon early marriage with its resulting lack of education, prejudice, and apathy—primarily of women themselves—prevent women from accepting their full responsibility in civic, political, and social life.
Catholic Interpretations. The Catholic Church is a participant in and not a mere observer of the revolutionary changes in the status of woman. A distinction may be made between the teachings of the Church that are unchanging and those that change in accord with historical evolution. Among the unchanging teachings are those concerning the sovereignty of the individual, the equality of dignity and goals of the male and the female, the single standard of morality, the indissolubility and sacramentality of Christian marriage, the denial that woman's role in society is exhausted by her role of wife and mother, the selective exaltation of virginity dedicated to contemplation and social service, the recognition of the characteristic qualities and virtues of man and woman, the invalidity of any marriage not characterized by the free choice of both partners, the promotion of education for women, and the provision of institutionalized care for the disadvantaged and derelicts of all types.
The new emphases in the teaching of the Church are chiefly those precipitated by the Industrial Revolution. Instances of these new orientations are especially evident in the remarkable series of encyclicals and papal addresses beginning with Leo XIII (see SOCIAL THOUGHT, PAPAL). Insistence upon social justice for both men and women, equal payment for equal work, special precautions for women workers, women's obligation to vote and participate in public life, encouragement of women to utilize their leisure in social service and professional careers, counsel to the growing number of women forced by circumstances to remain unmarried, the inclusion of physical education in the training of young women, the encouragement of capable women who show "great ability in every sphere of public life," the advice to women not to slight their mission as wives and mothers for unnecessary commercial careers, and allusions to the mother's authority as well as to the father's are examples of these new or changing emphases. The prevalence of democracy and the reallocation of functions to agencies outside the home have brought about a reorientation concerning authority within the home. The sentence in St.Page Paul's Epistle that states: "Let wives be subject to their husbands as to the Lord" (Eph 5.22) is less frequently separated from the injunction immediately preceding: "Be subject to one another in the fear of Christ" (Eph5.21). As modern social science emphasizes the man's instrumental leadership and the woman's expressive leadership, so modern Catholic theology stresses the husband's primacy in matters of ultimate administration and the wife's primacy—not mere equality—in matters pertaining to love. In the words of Pius XI, "For as the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love" [Casti connubi in Acta Apostolicae Sedis 22 (1930) 549].
In the mid-twentieth century, Pius XII attempted to unify and apply Catholic teaching on the status of woman: "This is your hour, Catholic women and Catholic girls. Public life needs you…. The fortunes of the family, the fortunes of human society, are at stake; and they are in your hands. Therefore every woman without exception is under an obligation—a strict obligation of conscience, mind you!—not to remain aloof; every woman must go into action, each in her own way, and join in stemming the tides which threaten to engulf the home, in fighting the doctrines which undermine its foundations, in preparing, organizing, and completing its restoration…. A wide field is opened to woman's activity, an activity primarily intellectual or primarily practical, according to the capabilities and qualities of each individual." [Questa grande vostra adunata, in Acta Apostolicae Sedis 37 (1945) 288–291.]
At the end of the century, John Paul II, following the trajectory set by John XXIII, the Second Vatican Council, and Paul VI, also recognized the "sign of the times" of women's greater participation in every sphere of human endeavor. His homilies, letters, and encyclicals emphasize the equal human dignity of men and women, calling for an end to the obstacles to their full development as human persons. In Mulieris Dignitatem he wrote, "The biblical text Gen 2:23 provides sufficient bases for recognizing the essential equality of man and woman from the point of view of their humanity. From the very beginning, both are persons, unlike the other living beings in the world about them. The woman is another 'I' in a common humanity" (Mulieris Dignitatem 6). He wrote further: "The moral and spiritual strength of a woman is joined to her awareness that God entrusts the human being to her in a special way…. This awareness and this fundamental vocation speak to women of the dignity which they receive from God himself…. In our own time, the successes of science and technology make it possible to attain material well being to a degree hitherto unknown. While this favors some, it pushes others to the margins of society. In this way, unilateral progress can also lead to a gradual loss of sensitivity for … what is essentially human. In this sense, our time in particular awaits the manifestation of that 'genius' which belongs to women, and which can ensure sensitivity for human beings in every circumstance: because they are human!" (Mulieris Dignitatem 30).
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Source Citation: CERVANTES, L. F., and L. HARRINGTON "Woman." New Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 14. 2nd ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. 812-819. 15 vols. Gale Virtual Reference Library.