Sunday 10 February 2019

Confessions of a Feminist Heretic

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From a very interesting article entitled

Confessions of a Feminist Heretic

by a feminist who became a Catholic after becoming a mother.
"While this is hard to admit, my feminism was, in good part, self-centric. It was very much concerned with my identity, my power and potential. Of course, this expanded to include an interest in womankind more generally, but my passion for feminism nonetheless sprang from an exaltation of my own experience. I extolled the ideals of autonomy and independence—until those ideals were utterly undone by the realities of pregnancy and motherhood, the reality of Julian.

"Suddenly, I was confronted with the intractability of maleness and femaleness. As it turns out, these are not mere social constructs. My femaleness is not something I chose, not something I control. Motherhood and fatherhood are not interchangeable. I grew my son inside my body. At the appointed time—unknown and undecided by us—my body birthed him, with strength I did not know I possessed. My body bled for weeks while it healed the rupture of our union. My body made sweet milk for him. I spent hours marooned in the rocking chair, sometimes enraptured, sometimes bored out of my mind, feeding him from myself. My husband, was there, too, caring for him in his way, but our experiences were not, cannot, be interchanged. Before parenthood, our domestic division of labor was equitable, fluid—but now we were at the mercy of biological realities beyond our control."

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