It’s not just women.
I start small. Sometimes it’s just a matter of educating people. I cite studies showing how much we’d actually be making if we were paid for our work. Husbands themselves are easy to educate.
I think even non-Catholics would benefit from learning about the Little Way.
That’s an excellent question. Veering off-topic, I don’t like this trend of them imposing very competitive admissions standards. A handful of schools like that is fine, but all Catholic children should have access to Catholic education.
Haven’t read the whole thread yet, but yes, I agree completely. Her book was a bestseller because she described so well what many women were feeling and experiencing. Where she went wrong was assuming that going to work was going to cure that feeling. I think there are relatively few people who truly experience fulfillment in their job. For some, their job is a career that they love, but for the rest of humanity, it’s just work so that they can eat and have a roof over their heads. Plenty of people, not just Friedan’s housewives, ask themselves, “Is this all there is?”
Most of the work that needs to be done in this world is work that few people would do if nobody paid them to do it. The “I love my job so much I would do it if nobody paid me” level of job satisfaction is not only a low percentage of jobs but also requires gratitude in the worker that not even everybody in the “most gratifying” fields feel on a consistent basis. More to the point, nobody could do those jobs if not for all the people doing the work that mainly takes showing up every day and doing what needs to be done.
A relative of mine never married but spends a lot of her time healing the sick as a doctor. She volunteers with Doctor without borders healing the poor across the world.
Exactly. After all, how many of the saintly women were either virgins or widows? St. Paul was right that while marriage is a model of Christ and his Church and a holy state of life, it can also be a distraction. The evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience aren’t just for professed religious. Any unmarried Catholic has the radical freedom to choose those, too, as a way of seeking perfection.
Hmm. It’s definitely not uniquely American. Not even close. There are places that are more career focused than the USA. South Korea is hyper-career focused, hyper perfectionist. Their economy has risen and their birth rate has collapsed at an unbelievably fast rate (faster than Japan, but they haven’t hit a huge wave of retirements quite yet, but it’s coming in the near future and there will be many social problems to accompany it). I teach Chinese students and those kids work and work and work. They work harder than I do and I’m a grown man.
Or to be a soldier of Martha Stewart.
I have this feeling that depression is like a trick knee. You can be born more likely to get it and you can get it by stressing a joint in traumatic ways that don’t always heal up, giving you something you can get past but that you do have to take care of and not ignore. Like ligaments, the psyche is hard to see and doesn’t heal as quickly as some other aspects of our make up do. It’s only an analogy, of course, and all analogies break down eventually, but I think it is like that.