Women are still oppressed and they are doing it to themselves.
By Catherine Parish
I’m writing on the Feast of the Assumption, and delighted to see that the great difficulties within marriage are being acknowledged by the Church, and that concerned people within the Church are seeking to redress them. Married people helping other married people, the way it should be. These are wonderful, positive initiatives that make uplifting and hopeful reading.
The type of stress that is contributing deeply to marriage troubles for all, not just for Catholics, was eloquently illustrated recently for me, particularly in the light of the celebration of a Feast of Mary, the most sublime woman, wife and Mother.
Driving home from school with my teenage daughter yesterday, an ad came on the radio, a medical researcher looking for women who suffer debilitating side effects from the contraceptive pill who were willing to be part of a study testing a new contraceptive pill that she hoped would lessen these effects.
My daughter remarked “Why do women do that to themselves?”
Now, she attends a co-ed government high school. She has been confronted by the full-on secular assault on teenagers that is the prescribed health education course. She has been told off for bursting into uncontrollable giggles at some of the more ludicrous practical aspects of it. She is an intelligent, highly analytical young lady with a generally normal, good humoured and positive outlook on life.
The question hung in the air. Why do women do that to themselves? Why feel the pressing need, the absolute necessity, of persisting in the use of a drug that makes you feel unwell a lot of the time?
The exhausting reality of many women’s chronic work-life imbalance, the early over-sexualisation and sexual objectification of girls, higher rates of suicide, substance abuse and psychological problems in women who have had abortions, ever stronger causal links between the contraceptive pill and breast cancer, rising maternal deaths in countries with liberal abortion laws.
Most of these have been in the news in the last twelve months. Why am I getting a message that in the modern world where freedom is the catchcry, women are suffering unreasonably the burdens of that so-called freedom? And that it has become other women with ideological barrows to push who are strenuously denying that any of this is happening.
Women against women, what hope have we got?
Men and women are inherently different, and that used to be recognised in the structure of society. Now, that was sometimes terribly stifling for women.
But these days, with universal education available to all, and virtually no career doors closed, women are still allowing themselves to be oppressed with the unrealistic expectation that we can be just as involved as a man with our paid career and still be the world’s most fantastic mother, sexual performer and glamour queen. Phew. No man could do it, and no-one has ever expected him to. That’s why women used to stay at home.
But women have this expectation lumped on them from the cradle, even though they must at times look around them and say why on earth am I expected to lumber myself with two full-time, full-on careers? Who am I actually doing this for?
Until we take back our lives, women will still be exploited and oppressed by these ridiculous, irrational expectations.
It isn’t the men who are feeling bloated and nauseous every month from the Pill, being sexualised too early and groomed for exploitation by the advertising industry, suffering the stresses of unresolved abortion grief, suffering chronically or even dying of abortion related complications and breast cancer.
Now, I know I have written of these problems before, but a wise woman once said to me: the main challenge is trying to say the same old thing in a different way. We must all pray for those who are running the various marriage support courses, that they will be inspired by Our Blessed Lady to present the timeless truths of Catholic teaching on marriage in all their beauty and fullness in a new way that truly embeds itself in the hearts and minds of their listeners.