WASHINGTON, D.C., February 1, 2013, (LifeSiteNews.com) – With all the talk of women’s rights in the world today, you’d think feminism has triumphed and made today’s woman happier than ever before. However, the truth is just the reverse as studies show – or as leading feminist Maureen Dowd put it in the New York Times, “the more women have achieved, the more they seem aggrieved.”
Bestselling author and syndicated talk show host Teresa Tomeo has much to say on the subject and she does so in her new book, Wrapped up: God’s ten gifts for women. LifeSiteNews.com caught up with Tomeo at the March for Life in Washington, D.C., last week.
“What I come across so much is a lack of self-esteem, women are so hard on themselves,” said Tomeo, host of EWTN’s The Catholic View for Women.
And traditional feminism, or as Tomeo likes to call it “radical feminism,” harms rather than helps women on that score.
“False messages are coming at us from so many perspectives,” Tomeo explains in a video promoting the new book. “From the mass media, from Hollywood, from television, from the internet, from advertising you have this message that women are nothing more than sex objects. We’re over sexualized; we’re over-objectified.
The other set of messaging is that we’re not good enough. We’re not pretty enough. We’re not skinny enough.”
“And on top of that is a message that our beauty and identity as women, especially our ability to give forth life, is a disease and not a gift,” she added.
Taking up Pope John Paul II’s call for a “new feminism,” Tomeo told LifeSiteNews.com that “real feminism is not rejecting who we are. We are physical mothers, yes – we are also spiritual mothers – but embracing our femininity, embracing our natural design not trying to fight it or go against it.”
With traditional or “radical feminism,” she said, “it is as if they don’t want to be women. They fight it in every way.”
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“The feminism that the church offers goes with the natural order of things, and really makes us happier because we are who we are supposed to be,” Tomeo said.
But what of the popular objection to any kind of pro-woman stance from the Catholic Church – women can’t be priests, or bishops or popes? Tomeo is unfazed by the question.
Answering without a moment’s pause, she said, “I think when people look at the priesthood in America, we think of everything as a democracy and of the need to break through the glass ceiling. God doesn’t run a democracy; He runs a Kingdom, and He’s in charge.”
“In the Church, men can’t marry men, women can’t marry women, and the priesthood is a vocation. The priest represents the bridegroom and the church is the bride,” she explained. “The priest is the bridegroom, as representing Christ, and the Church is the bride. So, we have to tell people that it’s not about a simplistic notion of fairness. It’s about embracing who we are, who we’re designed to be.”
And what exactly are those ‘unique gifts of women’? Tomeo, responds as she’s being called back to tape the next section of EWTN’s coverage of the D.C. March for Life, “they are themselves, priority, sisterhood, forgiveness, and the gift of being you.”
The new feminism she hopes to pioneer is “about embracing who we are, our physical motherhood, our spiritual motherhood, our natural design, being open to life,” she said.
And to find out more, you can get her book “Wrapped up: God’s ten gifts for women” here:
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