English
EspañolI want a society where women do not suffer for being women—a society where women enjoy every aspect of their womanhood, fulfillment, and freedom.
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“There are those who believe that many of today’s problems have arisen because of feminine emancipation. This argument, however, is not valid, “it is false, untrue, a form of male chauvinism.”43 The equal dignity of men and women makes us rejoice to see old forms of discrimination disappear, and within families there is a growing reciprocity. If certain forms of feminism have arisen which we must consider inadequate, we must nonetheless see in the women’s movement the working of the Spirit for a clearer recognition of the dignity and rights of women”. (The Joy of Love, n.54)
Commentary
One day, many years ago, a woman in her sixties came to my office, accompanied by two daughters and a son in their forties. The children were pressuring their mother to separate from their husband and father. They claimed that they had all suffered physical and psychological abuse and violence. The abuse was chronic and very serious. The details – for example, photographs and medical reports – were shocking. “Now – they argued – when our mother is so old and lives alone with our father, his constant abuse – he beats her frequently – is an unbearable family scandal for us as children. You have to free her from this!” I was asked for urgent measures of separation.
I requested to be alone with the woman. Then I asked her: “Why have you endured so much violence for so many years? She answered: “I am a woman…I came to this world to suffer.” I froze for a couple of seconds. The resignation of this poor woman, so sincere, so pained, and so wrong, thinking her fate was that of a battered woman. It was shocking and tragic. How many women – I thought – have lived this brutal alienation of themselves?! Suddenly, a powerful light, a mixture of understanding and tenderness, flooded me completely. It transformed my perception of women forever. I have often told those I work with that “I have a feminine soul.” I was infused with it that day.
Let me explain myself. I already understood, in my rationale intellect, the intolerable injustice of the shameful violence that is frequently exercised against women, the mistreatment, cruelties, mutilations – such as the removal of organs – and the servitudes, actual slavery – such as marrying off girls – that they suffer within many families. Such violence is not a sign of love and strength of men, but tyranny, abuse, and human degradation. I understood that physical, psychological, and sexual violence against women within marriage is contrary and in direct opposition to love and conjugal union. I also understood that the “difference” between man and woman – those two unique but diverse forms of being equal human beings – could not be interpreted as a hierarchy with one being superior and another inferior, a master and a servant, a landlord and his property. My rational understanding already comprehended that all these discriminations, and more, were an injustice, and women needed to be free of them.
The new light that I received that day came through as I heard, “I am a woman…I came to suffer”, and as I looked at her aged, feminine body. I did not have a new idea, but an intimate feeling, an embodied experience. I felt what a woman feels.
No man, I said to myself, is the womb of life! No man has a mother´s womb! It is the woman, precisely because of her nature, the only human being in which life can be conceived, in whose intimate company a child is humanized. She is the first to love us and teach us how to love. Because she is a woman, she knows that sexual difference allows for complementarity among the various types of human love, not a stage for power struggles between masters and subjects. She does not need to actually conceive and give birth to children to be the intimate womb of humanity. Due to her nature, a woman is always a womb of love and life. She is closer to human intimacy than any other being and reveals it to men. She is the great beloved who turns man into a lover and loves him. It became clear to me why, while man is the gift to woman and the embrace of her feminine being, “the great enemies” of love and human beings torture and crucify women. Why, in a thousand ways and throughout history, they deceive and corrupt her so that she hates being a woman and her femininity.
I promised myself that day never to be an accomplice to such a conspiracy against women regardless of the environment; friendship, professional companionship, as a fellow citizen, neighbor, in a cultural, economic, and social environment, or simply within our family ties, with our mother, daughters, sisters, and wife. The complimentary between man and woman and the humanization of others that she is capable of occurs according to different modalities in all fields of human life. Not only in sexuality and conjugal love.
