What was the Church's role in promoting women's rights in the past? (NOT abortion OR holy orders)

  • Thread starter Thread starter LemonAndLime
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
L

LemonAndLime

Guest
Was the Church ever an advocate for women’s rights in the pre-feminism/sexual revolution period?

Feminism in its purest form (right to vote, learn to read/write etc) only started in the early 1900s/late 1800s started by a movement of women. If we are taught that everyone is born equal and should be treated as such, why hasn’t the Church done more to advocate women’s rights? The Church puts a commendable effort in pro-life issues (IVF, abortion, etc) so I guess the Church isn’t shy in getting involved in political matters as well as moral.

I’m a feminist. Most people say they’re not a feminist - but you are, if you think that I, as a woman, have the right to an education. That makes you a radical feminist in some parts of the world.

I am incredibly naiive in terms of Church history, but was there any effort whatsoever to promote women’s rights outside of the Church? E.g. education, voting, attitudes towards women’s roles, etc. This is a very important issue for me - I often criticised the Catholic Church because I felt they were infringing on women’s rights by not allowing abortion/holy orders. Since starting RCIA I am quite happy to say I was wrong that its a woman’s right to murder an unborn child, as to holy orders - I’m happy to accept the Church knows better, but I don’t know a lot about the reasons why women can’t become Priests so I can’t comment on how my opinion has changed. While my faith won’t be affected, I would find it difficult to understand a Church which did not do much to advocate women’s rights.
 
I think it is nice that a man and a woman had to consent for marriage. That seems like the sort of thing you could mean. If she (or he) was compelled or simply kidnapped, it did not make a valid marriage.

But the Church did not always regulate marriage. You’d have to look into the history of the thing. It is plenty old enough for your criterion, though. Perhaps the middle ages or earlier? I know St. Thomas Aquinas mentions the topic of compulsion in marriage.
 
Did you know, that some Catholic priests (those who change their names at ordination) take a combined female and male name?

I don’t know if it was unique to the culture, but the convents supported the right of a woman to devote her femininity and motherhood to the Church.

We role model a long list of female Catholic saints - back to the Early Church female Gentile converts who were martyred:

mariannedorman.homestead.com/femalemartyrs.html

We have 3 female Doctors of the Church

You might do research on the education of woman at Catholic universities

Present day, the largest worldwide Catholic television network was begun by Mother Angelica (EWTN).

Of course, we honor the contemplative work of Mother Teresa and the Church models her actions.

Lead by the Pope and the Magisterium, the Catholic Church supported women and preborn children against abortion practices (when many Protestant denominations turned a blind eye to the harm)

The Catholic Church honors the special role and position given to Mary as Mother of God
 
LemonAndLime said:
Was the Church ever an advocate for women’s rights in the pre-feminism/sexual revolution period?

Feminism in its purest form (right to vote, learn to read/write etc) only started in the early 1900s/late 1800s started by a movement of women. If we are taught that everyone is born equal and should be treated as such, why hasn’t the Church done more to advocate women’s rights? The Church puts a commendable effort in pro-life issues (IVF, abortion, etc) so I guess the Church isn’t shy in getting involved in political matters as well as moral.

I’m a feminist. Most people say they’re not a feminist - but you are, if you think that I, as a woman, have the right to an education. That makes you a radical feminist in some parts of the world.

I am incredibly naiive in terms of Church history, but was there any effort whatsoever to promote women’s rights outside of the Church? E.g. education, voting, attitudes towards women’s roles, etc. This is a very important issue for me - I often criticised the Catholic Church because I felt they were infringing on women’s rights by not allowing abortion/holy orders. Since starting RCIA I am quite happy to say I was wrong that its a woman’s right to murder an unborn child, as to holy orders - I’m happy to accept the Church knows better, but I don’t know a lot about the reasons why women can’t become Priests so I can’t comment on how my opinion has changed. While my faith won’t be affected, I would find it difficult to understand a Church which did not do much to advocate women’s rights.
Click to expand...
This is a surprise.

Since this is a Catholic board I was expecting more people to post (in this thread) in order to defend/boast of the Catholic Church’s record on human rights.
 
Women’s religious orders with their own internal governance.
Indissolubility of marriage.
There are waaaaay more women saints than men saints.
Universal education (not just nobility).

It started with Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. Misogyny was a tradition of men that had already by Jesus’ time crept into Israel. Did you know that the Law required stoning the man and the woman caught in adultery? So where was the man? If she was caught in the act, so was he!

Watch the movie “The Stoning of Soraya M.” and you will appreciate the depth of the importance of this moment.

BTW adultery wasn’t a fun, sexy, romantic adventure the way 20th-21st century people construe the idea. It was more like prostitution. Why did this dispossessed woman need to engage in prostitution? To feed herself and her family. The Jews never kept the Jubilee restoration of family lands, and she was dispossessed, and desperate. There is an economic justice message there, too.

Contrasting the treatment and standing of women in the cultures Christianity has evangelized, and you will see how the Church has elevated women’s rights. Not in a bra-burning rally kind of way. But that’s so 60s-70s.
 
In my opinion, not good enough.

You can be a Catholic , pro-life feminist. I’m one personally, and I am a male.

I think that woman have been oppressed throughout history, both in the church, and not in it.

However, Christian history isn’t all bad against woman. The bible was (and correct me if I’m wrong) the first book to promote the uniqueness of women. Judaism had Ruth, Esther,Deborah-all these remarkable women. Not alot of Greek or Roman woman really did what they did (or, sadly, if they did, it wasn’t recorded).

Is Christianity perfect? God no (pun intended). There grave sins committed against women. No, these sins shouldn’t be swept under the rug…though sadly, they are too often.

Too many people hear the word “feminist” and think that you are automatically pro-choice or female priests. Um…no.
 
LemonAndLime said:
Was the Church ever an advocate for women’s rights in the pre-feminism/sexual revolution period?

Feminism in its purest form (right to vote, learn to read/write etc) only started in the early 1900s/late 1800s started by a movement of women. If we are taught that everyone is born equal and should be treated as such, why hasn’t the Church done more to advocate women’s rights? The Church puts a commendable effort in pro-life issues (IVF, abortion, etc) so I guess the Church isn’t shy in getting involved in political matters as well as moral.

I’m a feminist. Most people say they’re not a feminist - but you are, if you think that I, as a woman, have the right to an education. That makes you a radical feminist in some parts of the world.

I am incredibly naiive in terms of Church history, but was there any effort whatsoever to promote women’s rights outside of the Church?
Click to expand...
The Church has always had an uneasy relationship with the societies in which it has found itself. Sometimes it would have to accommodate and somtimes civil authorities would have to accommodate to it. But always, it was uneasy. So, just as one cannot judge civil governance by its churches, one cannot judge churches by those things that came from civil governance.

It may, however, be noted, initially, that women did figure prominently among the followers of Jesus. They did in the early history of the Church. Some of the abbesses of the great convents in the Middle Ages were comparable in their power to feudal lords and certainly to bishops. There have always been women saints in the Church, and veneration was given to them no less than to male saints.

In Christendom, while it could be said to be Christendom, there were many female heads of state.

All of that was easily conrasted to the very secondary role of women in Hellenistic society and (to a lesser extent) in Roman or pagan society generally. Who ever heard of a female Emperor of Rome, or even a tribune or senator? And there was what? One female Pharoah in all the millenia of Egyptian history, and even she had to pretend to be male.

It may fairly be said that the artifacts of an institution or society can be more instructive about it than what its critics said about it in print. If one simply looks at the Catholic churches from the very first, one sees the prominent representation of women in statuary, mosaics and paintings; and those portrayals were not in any way demeaning or bespeaking some kind of inferiority. Look to the right and to the left of the main altar in any traditional Catholic Church, and you’ll find it hard to assert that women were considered inferior. And I’m talking about centuries of art and architecture here.

Now, what I am about to say will likely draw fire from someone, but I’ll say it anyway.

Art historian Kenneth Clark opined that Islam, Judaism and classic Protestantism are fundamentally “male” religions in their artifacts. Strict, plain, unadorned, manly in doctrine, and without truly prominent women represented in its venerated persons.

Catholicism, on the other hand, he says, is at least as “feminine” as it is “masculine”. Its classic churches are chock full of not only male figures, but also of women and babies. (the latter, largely, in the form of omnipresent cherubs, but also including the infant Jesus and Mary as a little girl) Its venerable figures resolutely include both males and females; so much so, in fact, as to invite protestant charges of “Mariolatry”. Clark, anyway, says those artifacts bespeak different mindsets of their respective groups toward women.

As a descendant of a long line of very assertive and accomplished women, I would dispute the notion that women have always been “at home, pregnant and barefoot” in western society. Truly, they would have (and those within my memory did) laugh at the notion that modern feminism has done much of anything for women that capable women couldn’t have done for themselves, long since, and largely did.

Yes, there was the right to vote in the U.S. That’s an important civil right, no doubt about it. Equal pay for equal work, yes. But frankly, most of my ancestor women got equal pay anyway, and here we are today wondering why womens’ lifetime earnings are only 70% those of men, despite all the feminist activism. There are those who explain it by lifestyle choices, and there’s merit to that explanation. But it can just as equally explain why perhaps most women didn’t receive “equal pay” earlier, if it’s true that life choices explain the differences. If so, all the “equal pay” laws and the lawsuits and the hoorah are all pointless, or at least a lot of effort for very little.

And, of course, the primary causes of the feminists have been to drive women into the workplace and consumerism, will ye or nill ye, to promote abortion and the idea that both men and women have an inalienable right, almost a duty, to practice promiscuity and inter-gender rootlessness. Have they really done you any favors?

As a man, perhaps I have no right to answer that question. But out of somewhere comes the voice of my late businesswoman/mother/wife grandmother. Her voice is faint, but I’m pretty sure her answer to the question is “No. Not really.”

What is true feminism, after all? I’m no expert, but I have been a Catholic for quite some time, and my answer to that, derived from my Catholicism, would be “absolute equality, just as souls are equal, and worthy of respect, even veneration, just as Mary is worthy of respect and veneration.”

But that doesn’t mean all things are the same for women as for men. As a woman, you would know that even better than I.
 
I think that the veneration that the Catholic Church displays for Mary the Mother of God which is absent in most Protestant denominations is an indication of the respect that the Catholic Church as a whole has for women.

I think that the vast number of female saints that the Church has is another demonstration of that fact. Some of those saints, like Joan of Arc, really do show how the Church can respect someone who violated traditional gender roles.

I also believe that convents promoted woman’s rights by allowing females in earlier centuries an alternative to the marriage that would have been their only future. One of the negative effects of the Protestant Reformation was that women in the Protestant faith no longer had the option of joining a convent.

As far as abortion goes, I have to say that it is not an anti-feminist thing, and I get so annoyed when people believe that you can’t be feminist and pro-life at the same time probably because I see myself as both a feminist and a pro-life person. Actually, abortion can be regarded as being feminist, since in many cultures women have traditionally been perceived as less valuable than men, and so in Asian countries like China female babies are far more likely to be killed than male ones. In a way, saying that all abortions are wrong protects female babies from being killed at a higher rate than male ones.

Anyway, that’s just my two cents, but I have to admit that in all my years as a Catholic, I have never felt like I was perceived as being inferior because I am a female.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top