ROME, March 18, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – On March 11th, a few days before the papal election, one of the Catholic world’s most eminent philosophers, Alice Von Hildebrand, celebrated her 90th birthday. Von Hildebrand taught philosophy at a private, secular college in the US for 37 years, but is today perhaps best known as one of the leading proponents of the “New Feminism” that was brought to the fore under the papacy of John Paul II.
New Feminism, promotes the concept of the natural biological and complementarity of men and women, and opposes the “gender” ideology – along with abortion, contraception and sterilisation – of Second and Third Wave academic feminism. It is this type of feminism that von Hildebrand identified in an extensive 2003 interview as “the worst attack on femininity that has ever taken place in the history of the world”.
The anniversary of von Hildebrand’s birth is contrasted with the 50th anniversary, on March 14th, of the publication of the book The Feminine Mystique, by the late Betty Friedan, a work that became the manifesto for “second-wave feminism” that has become the leading force in political life around the western world. The struggle between these two faces of feminism is going to be of critical importance to Pope Francis.
Secularist feminism, still very much in ascendancy in politics and academia, advocates competition between the sexes for jobs and social advancement, looks upon motherhood as an obstacle to self-fulfillment and insists as a central tenet, on legalised abortion and artificial contraception to allow women to compete in the marketplace with men. And crucially for the new pope, it identifies the Catholic Church and the papacy as among its greatest enemies. Before the crowds had left the Piazza on Wednesday night, the world’s media were already carrying demands from the proponents of the feminist-inspired Sexual Revolution that the new pope overturn the Catholic prohibitions against abortion, birth control and homosexual activity.
Critics say that the contemporary feminist movement, that took over the realm of politics, media and academia after the 1960s, has brought in not only the abortion and contraceptive cultures, identified by Pope John Paul II as the “Culture of Death,” but created a vast gulf between men and women. Collette Caprara of the Heritage Foundation, wrote last week that Friedan’s feminist revolution has led to the disintegration of family life and its traditional economic and social protections for women and children.
Moreover, feminism is losing adherents among younger women and its promoters are busy on the internet working to rejuvenate its image. Germaine Greer, another icon of the 60s feminist movement, recently wrote that a new European group, Femen, famous for its topless demonstrations, would do well to counter some of the worse aspects of the Sexual Revolution’s brave new world.
Greer wished that Femen would face down the anti-woman trends in Islam and to “drive out sex tourism and the mail-order bride business, and protect women at risk of honour killing and infanticide”. She lamented, however, that the group’s “attack is aimed as much at religion of any kind,” as against such evils.
“It belongs to the old order of radical feminism that sought to abolish marriage and patriarchy. Its leaders tell us classical feminism is dead, but what’s happened is deeply conservative equality feminism has usurped its position,” Greer wrote.
In the last 40 years, there has been much talk among Catholics of creating a new “Christian feminism” that would assert the equal dignity of man and woman while maintaining the existence of differences between the sexes and upholding the sanctity of life and marriage. Perhaps among the greatest contributors to this discussion has been Alice von Hildebrand, whose books include, The Privilege of Being a Woman (2002), Man and Woman: A Divine Invention (2010).
In the 2003 interview with Zenit, von Hildebrand described academic, Marxist-based feminism as a kind of “trap” producing little more than misery. She said that the unintended consequence of feminist thought was to convince women that it was bad to be women.
The “amazing thing” about feminism, she said, was that “instead of making women more profoundly aware of the beauty and dignity of their role as wives as mothers, and of the spiritual power that they can exercise over their husbands, convinced them that they, too, had to adopt a secularist mentality”. This mentality, that she describes as “utilitarian” holds that human value is derived only from work and external accomplishment.
Women “let themselves become convinced that femininity meant weakness. They started to look down upon virtues – such as patience, selflessness, self-giving, tenderness – and aimed at becoming like men in all things,” von Hildebrand said. This, she said, sparked the “war” between the sexes that we are all still suffering from today.
“Those who fell into the traps of feminism,” she continued, “became blind to the fact that men and women, though equal in ontological dignity, were made different by God's choice: Male and female he made them. Different and complementary.”
While the adversarial model of feminism insists that the non-biological differences between men and women are mere “social constructs,” New Feminism proposes that the two are designed to work through life together, each offsetting the other’s weaknesses. In contrast, secular feminism, a development of the anti-Christian secularist thought of the 18th and 19th centuries, has created a world in which women are at war with men and all human beings are at war with their natures.
“The whole is topsy-turvy: Marriages break down; many do not even consider getting married; partnership lasts only as long as it satisfies one. Unnatural relationships so severely condemned by Plato are fashionable and claim their rights to be put on the same level as those that God has ordered,” she said.
Asked how women can claim the benefits of their natural inclinations, von Hildebrand said that while from a “naturalistic point of view,” men are “more creative, more inventive and more productive” as engineers, architects, philosophers and theologians, from God’s point of view all these works are “dust and ashes compared to every act of virtue”.
Women, she said, are not called to be “productive” in this material way, but every woman, whether married or unmarried, is “called upon to be a biological, psychological or spiritual mother.”
“She knows intuitively that to give, to nurture, to care for others, to suffer with and for them – for maternity implies suffering – is infinitely more valuable in God's sight than to conquer nations and fly to the moon.”
It is to the lives and examples of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the woman saints that modern women can turn for guidance. These, she said, “teach us that an awareness and acceptance of one's weakness, coupled with a boundless confidence in God's love and power, grant these privileged souls a strength that is so great because it is supernatural.”
“The mission of women today is of crucial importance. In some way, they have the key to sanity — the first step toward a conversion,” she added.