COMMUNISM & WOMAN
by MSGR. FULTON J.
SHEEN
of the Catholic University of America
March 2, 1947, by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen of the Catholic
University of America, produced by the National Council of Catholic Men
in cooperation with the National Broadcasting Company.
COMMUNISM AND WOMAN
The proudest boast of Communism is that it has finally emancipated
the woman. Marx writes: "Differences of age and sex have no longer
any distinctive social validity. All are instruments of labor." The
key word here is instrument which reduces a human being to the dignity
of a monkey wrench. The assumption was that woman was free as soon as she
became available for production. One of the paradoxes of our irrational
world is that woman today is glorified when she produces an Atomic Bomb,
but not when she can produce life. It is like praising violinists for producing
sewer pipes instead of melodies.
At the very beginning of the Communist Revolution in Russia a decree
was passed declaring that all women between the ages of seventeen and thirty-two
became the property of the State, and that the rights of husbands were
abolished. (Novaia Zhizn, No. 54, 1918 p. 2.) In keeping with the idea
that liberation means working in a factory rather than in a home, we read
in a Soviet book published in 1935: "Women's labor has become one
of the main sources from which industry could draw fresh supplies of workers.
During the earlier years of the first Five Year Plan, there were about
six million housewives in the towns. All the local Communist organizations
received orders to call up these reserves and attach them to production."
(Shaburova, Woman is a Great Power, 1935 edition, p. 32) The women refused
to accept what the Communists called "the emancipation for women from
depressing domestic atmosphere" but they were ultimately forced into
"emancipation" and began working in mines, sewers, and in the
manipulation of pneumatic drills. A few years ago twenty-three percent
of the miners were women. The Soviet poets composed ballads for the women
to sing as they were "released from socially unprofitable and exhausting
domestic toil." (Shaburova, Ibid, p. 36)
"Formerly women only knew how to cook soup and porridge,
Now they go to the foundry At the foundry it is nicer." (Ibid,
p. 38)
This idea of the emancipation of women through industrialization is
not altogether a Communist idea, but like many others has been derived
from Western bourgeois capitalistic civilization which thought of the liberation
of woman in terms of equality with men. The only difference is that the
Communist merely carried the idea to its logical extreme, and if it scandalizes
us now it is because our bourgeois world never understood the full implication
of its error.
The two basic errors of both Communism and a capitalistic liberal civilization
on this subject were: 1) Women were never emancipated until modern times.
Religion particularly kept them in servitude; 2) Equality means the right
of a woman to do a man's work.
First, it is not true that women began to be emancipated in modern
times and in direct proportion to the decline of religion. The fact is
that woman's subjection began in the seventeenth century with the break-up
of Christendom and took on a positive form at the time of the Industrial
Revolution. Under the Christian civilization women enjoyed rights, privileges,
honors and dignities which have since been swallowed up by the machine
age.
In eighty-five Guilds in England during the Middle Ages, seventy-two
had women members on an equal basis with men in such professions as barbers
and sailors. They were probably just as outspoken as men because one of
the rules of the Guilds was that "the sistern as well as the brethren"
may not engage in disorderly or contumacious debates. In Paris there were
fifteen guilds reserved exclusively for women, while eighty of the Parisian
guilds were mixed. Nothing is more erroneous historically than the belief
that it was our modern age which recognized women in the professions. The
records of these Christian times reveal the names of thousands upon thousands
of women who influenced society and whose names are now enrolled in the
catalogue of saints, Catherine of Sienna alone leaving eleven large volumes
of her writings. Up until the seventeenth century in England, women functioned
in business perhaps even more than today. In fact, so many were in business
that it was provided by law that the husband should not be responsible
for her debts. Between 1553 and 1640 ten percent of the publishing in England
was done by women. Because the homes did their own weaving, cooking and
laundry it has been estimated that women in pre-industrial days were producing
half the goods required by society. In the Middle Ages women were as well
educated as men and it was not until the seventeenth century that women
were barred from education. Then at the time of the Industrial Revolution
all the activities and freedom of women were curtailed as the machine took
over the business of production and men moved into the factory. Then came
a loss of legal rights by women which reached its fulness in Blackstone
who pronounced woman's "civil death" in law.
As these disabilities continued woman felt the loss of her freedom,
and rightly so, because she felt she had been hurt by man who robbed her
of her legal rights, and she fell into the error of believing that she
ought to proclaim herself the equal of man, forgetful that a certain superiority
was already hers because of her functional difference from man. Equality
then came to mean negatively, the destruction of all privileges enjoyed
by specific persons or classes, and positively, as absolute and unconditioned
sex equality with all men. These ideas were incorporated into the first
resolution for sex equality passed in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848: "Resolved
that woman is man's equal, was intended to be so by the Creator,1
and the highest good of the race demands that she be recognized as such."
This brings us to the second error in the bourgeois-capitalistic theory
of women, namely, the failure to make distinction between mathematical
and proportional equality. Mathematical equality implies exactness of remuneration;
for example, two men who work at the same job at the same factory should
receive equal pay. Proportional equality means that each should receive
his pay according to his function. In a family, for example, all children
should be cared for by the parents, but it does not mean that because sixteen
year old Mary gets an evening gown with an organdy trim the parents should
give seventeen year old Johnnie the same thing. Women in seeking to regain
some of the rights and privileges they had in Christian civilization thought
of equality in mathematical terms or in terms of sex. Feeling themselves
overcome by a monster called "man" they identified freedom and
equality with the right to do a man's job. All the psychological, social
and other advantages which were peculiar to women were ignored until the
inanities of the bourgeois world reached their climax in Communism where
a woman was emancipated the moment she went to work in a mine. The result
has been that woman's imitation of man and her flight from motherhood has
developed neuroses and psychoses which have reached alarming proportions.
The Christian civilization never stressed equality in a mathematical
sense, but only in the proportional sense, for equality is wrong when it
makes the woman a poor imitation of man. Once she became man's mathematical
equal, he no longer stood when she came into a room, no longer gave her
a seat in a bus, and no longer took off his hat in an elevator. The other
day in a New York subway a man gave a woman his seat and she fainted. When
she was revived she thanked him, and he fainted.
Modern woman has been made equal with man, but she has not been made
happy. She has been emancipated from a clock and thereby no longer free
to swing, or as a flower has been emancipated from its roots, only to wither
and die. She has been cheapened in her search for mathematical equality
in two ways: by becoming a victim to man by becoming only the instrument
of his pleasure, ministering to his needs in a sterile exchange of egotism.
A victim to the machine by subordinating the creative principle of life
to the production of non-living things, which is the essence of Communism.
This is not a condemnation of a professional woman, because the important
question is not whether a woman finds favor in the eyes of a man, but whether
she can satisfy the basic instincts of womanhood. If it were the man that
made a difference to a woman and all that wifehood and motherhood entail,
then the least womanly of all women would be found in convents. The fact
is, however, that nowhere else are more normal, and certainly more happy
women to be found on this earth. One might add also, that nowhere else
are there so many young women,2 for a peculiar quality about
the spiritual life is that it keeps a woman young. Cosmetics, mud baths,
sneezeless soaps are lacking, but they manage to keep young and unwrinkled
because they are at peace.
What makes the difference in woman is not therefore a man, but whether
a certain God-given qualities which are specifically hers are given adequate
and full expression. These qualities are principally, devotion, sacrifice
and love. They need not necessarily be expressed in a family, nor even
in a convent. They can find an outlet in the social world, in the care
of the sick, the poor, the ignorant in a word in the seven corporal works
of mercy. It is sometimes said that the professional woman is hard. This
may in a few instances be true, but it is not because she is in a profession,
but because she has alienated her profession from contact with human beings
in a way to satisfy the deeper cravings of her heart. It may very well
be that the revolt against morality, and the exaltation of sensuous pleasure
as the purpose of life, are due to the loss of the spiritual fulfillment
of existence. Having been frustrated and disillusioned, such souls first
become bored, then cynical, and finally, suicidal. Wherein lies the solution?
In a return to the Christian concept wherein stress is placed not on equality
but equity.
Equality is law. It is mathematical, abstract, universal, indifferent
to conditions, circumstances and differences. Equity is love, mercy, understanding,
sympathy consideration of details, appeals, and departures from the fixed
rules of courts which law has not yet embraced. In particular, it is the
a application of law to an individual person. It places its reliance on
moral principles and is guided by an understanding of the motives of individual
families which fall outside the scope of the rigors of law. In the old
English law of Christian days the subjects in petitioning the court for
extraordinary privileges, asked for them "for the love of God and
in the way of charity." For that reason the heads of courts of equity
were the clergy who drew their decisions from Canon Law. In vain did the
civil lawyers with their exact prescriptions argue against their opinions.
The iron ring outside a Cathedral door, which a pursued criminal might
grasp, gave him what is known as the "right of sanctuary" and
while giving him immunity from the prescriptions of civil law, made him
subject to the more merciful law of the Church.
Applying this distinction to women, we are saying that equity rather
than equality should be the basis of all the claims of women. It goes beyond
equality by claiming superiority in certain aspects of life. Equity is
the perfection of equality, not a substitute. It has the advantages of
recognizing the specific difference between man and woman, which equality
does not have. As a matter of fact, they are not equal in sex; they are
quite unequal, and it is only because they are unequal that they complement
one another. The violin and the bow are not equal. Each has a superiority
of function. Man and woman are equal inasmuch as they have the same rights
and liberties,3 the same final goal of life and both have been
redeemed by the Blood of Our Divine Saviour but they are different in
function. It is that truth which solves the problem. One of the greatest
of the Old Testament stories reveals this difference. While the Jews were
under Persian captivity, Aman, the prime minister of King Assuerus, asked
his master to slay the Jews because they obeyed the law of God rather than
the Persian law. When the order went out that the Jews were to be massacred,
Esther was asked to approach the wicked King and plead for her people.
There was a law that no one should enter the King's presence under the
penalty of death, unless the King extended his scepter as a permission
to approach the throne. That was the law. But Esther said: "I will
go in to the King, against the law, not being called, and expose myself
to death and to danger." (Esther 4: 6) Esther fasted an prayed and
then approached the throne. Would the scepter be lowered? The King held
tout the golden scepter, and Esther drew near and kissed the top of it,
and the King said to her: "What wilt thou, Queen Esther? What is thy
request? (Esther 5:3)
This story has been interpreted through the Christian ages as meaning
that God will reserve to Himself the reign of justice and law, but to Mary,
His Mother will be given the reign of mercy. During the Christian ages,
Our Blessed Mother bore a title which has been forgotten, but it is revived
in two modern non-Catholic writers, Henry Adams and Mary R. Beard. Adams
described the Lady of Equity in the Cathedral of Chartres. Stretching through
the nave of the Church are two sets of priceless stained glass windows,
the one given by Blanche of Castile, the other by Pierre de Dreux which
seems to "carry across the very heart of the cathedral" a kind
of civil war. Over the main altar however sits the Virgin Mary, the Lady
of Equity, with the Holy Child on her knees, presiding over the courts,
listening serenely to pleas for mercy in behalf of their sins. As Mary
Beard beautifully put it: "The Virgin signified to the people moral,
human or humane power, as against the stern mandates of God's law."
And we might add, this is the woman's special glory mercy, pity, understanding,
intuition of human needs, call it anything you please. When women step
down from the role of the Lady of Equity and her prototype Esther, and
insist only on equality, they lose their greatest opportunity to change
the world. Law has broken down today. Jurists no longer believe in a Divine
Judge behind Law. Obligations are no longer sacred. Even peace is based
upon the power of Three Nations rather than on the Justice of God. Shall
women, in this day of the collapse of justice equate themselves with men
in rigid exactness, or shall they rally to Equity, to mercy and love and
give to a cruel and lawless world some something that equality cannot give?
Whence shall come a devotion to causes, if women who are capable of greater
devotion then men, insist on a cold equality? How shall wars be stopped
and the taking of young life, if women, like men, trust only in law?
But if women, in the full consciousness of their creativeness say to
the world: "It takes us twenty years to make a man, and we rebel against
wars every generation snuffing out that manhood in war." Such an attitude
would do more for the peace of the world than all the covenants and pacts
that have no other basis than expediency and deceit. Did women but recognize
the truth hidden in the Lady of Equity, love might be restored to homes
and families. The reason there is little love now is because in the human
order there is never any love between equals. There may be justice, but
no affection. If man is the equal of woman, then she has rights, but what
heart ever lived on rights. All love demands inequality or superiority.
The lover is always on his knees, the beloved must always be on a pedestal.
Whether it be man or woman, the one must always consider himself or herself
as undeserving of the other. Even God humbled Himself in His Love to win
man, saying He came not to be ministered unto, but to minister. And man,
in his turn approaches that loving Saviour in Communion with the words:
"Lord, I am not worthy."
Not then because women enter professions do some harden and become
frustrated. Professional careers do not of themselves defeminize women,
otherwise the Church would not have raised political women to sainthood,
as was the case with St. Elizabeth and St. Clotilde. The cause of tragedy
in woman today is that by stressing equality, they have lost those specifically
feminine qualities which have given her superiority of function. These
qualities are devotedness and creativeness. No woman is happy unless she
has someone for whom she can sacrifice herself, not in a servile way but
in the way of love. Added to the devotedness is her love of creativeness.
A man is afraid of dying, but a woman is afraid of not living. Life to
a man is personal; life to a woman is otherness. She thinks less in terms
of perpetuation of self and more in terms of perpetuation of others so
much so that in devotedness she is willing to sacrifice herself for others.
To the extent that a career gives no opportunity for either she becomes
de-feminized. If these qualities cannot be given an outlet in a home and
a family, they can nevertheless find other substitutions in works of charity,
in the defense of virtuous living, in the defense of right as other Claudias
when their political husbands as Pilates rely only on expediency, Then
her work as a money earner becomes a prelude and a condition for the display
of equity which is her greatest gory.
The level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood. This is
because there is a basic difference between knowing and loving. In knowing
something you bring it down to the level of your understanding. An abstract
principle of physics can be understood by an ordinary mind only by examples.
But in loving we always go up to meet the demand of the one loved. If you
love music you have to submit to its laws and disciplines. When man loves
woman, it follows the nobler the woman the nobler the love, the higher
the demands by the woman, the more worthy a man must be. That is why a
woman is the measure of the level of our civilization. It is for our age
to decide whether woman shall claim equality in sex and the right to work
at the same lathe, or whether she will claim equity and give to the world
that which no man can give. In these pagan days when women want to be only
equal with men, they have lost respect. In Christian days when men were
strongest, woman was respected. As the author of Mont. St. Michel puts
it: "The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a period when men were
at their strongest; never before or since have they shown equal energy
in such varied directions, or such intelligence in the direction of their
energy; yet these marvels of history these Plantagenets; these Scholastic
philosophers; these architects of Rheims and Amiens; these Innocents, and
Robin Hoods, and Marco Polos; these crusaders who planted their enormous
fortresses all over the Levant; these monks who made the wastes and barrens
yield harvests all, without apparent exception, bowed down before the
woman. Explain it how you will! Men rushed like sheep to escape the butcher,
and were driven to Mary; only too happy in finding protection and hope
in a being who could understand the language they talked, and the excuses
they had to offer . . . Society has invested in her care nearly its whole
capital, spiritual, artistic, intellectual and economical, even to the
bulk of its real and personal estate." As Abelard said of her: "After
the Trinity you are our only hope . . . you are placed there as our advocate;
all of us who fear the wrath of the Judge, fly to the Judge's mother who
is logically compelled to intercede for us and stands in the place of a
mother to the guilty." To the Lady of Equity once again modern women
must look, as even those who have the Faith must see fulfilled in her those
spiritual functions which no priest can perform; queen, mother and woman.
Christianity does not ask the modern woman to be exclusively a Martha or
a Mary; the choice is not between a professional career and contemplation,
for the Church on the Feast of the Assumption of the Lady of Equity read
the Gospel of Martha and Mary to symbolize that she combines both the speculative
and the practical, the serving the Lord and the sitting at His Feet. If
woman wants to be ever a revolutionist , then the Lady is her guide for
she sang the most revolutionary song ever written The Magnificat, the
burden of which was the abolition of principalities and powers, and the
exaltation of the humble. She breaks the shell of woman's isolation from
the world and puts woman back into the wide ocean of humanity as she who
is the Cosmopolitan Woman gives the Cosmopolitan Man, for which giving
all generations shall call her blessed.
But she was the inspiration to womanhood, not because she claimed there
was equality in sex, for peculiarly enough this was the one equality she
ignored, but because of a transcendence in function which made her superior
to a man inasmuch as she could encompass a man, as Isaias foretold. Great
men we need like Paul with a two-edged sword to cut away the bonds that
tie down the energies of the world, and men like Peter who will let the
broad stroke of their challenge ring out on the shield of the world's hypocrisy,
and great men like John who with a loud voice will arouse men from the
sleek dream of unheroic repose. But we need woman still more; women like
Mary of Cleophas who will raise sons to lift up white hosts to a Heavenly
Father; women like Magdalen who will take hold of the tangled skeins of
a seemingly wrecked and ruined life and weave out of them the beautiful
tapestry of saintliness and holiness; and women, above all, like Mary,
the Lady of Equity, who will leave the lights and glamours of the world
for the shades and shadows of the Cross where saints are made. When women
of this kind return to save a world with equity, then we shall toast them,
we shall salute them not as the modern woman, once our superior now our
equal, but as the Christian woman closest to the Cross on Good Friday,
and first at the tomb on Easter Morn.
God love you!
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