My husband gave me a birthday card once with the message: “Happy Birthday from the one who rules the roost to the one who rules the rooster.” I loved it.

There has never been “man’s work” and woman’s work” in our home. I have always shoveled as much snow as he in the winter–at least timewise, my shovelfuls were a little smaller. He dries the dishes, and he has done the cooking since I went to work and he was working from the home. I drive the John Deere, mowing all the pastures, even the long, steep front hill; he uses the electric mower to get where the tractor can’t go. I clean house and do laundry. He helps hang clothes on the line if he’s handy. He fixes plumbing and electrical connections. He plasters, I sand, paint, and varnish. He puts up wall paper. I trim sheep’s hooves while he keeps the sheep amused or sometimes holds them still on their backs in his lap on the ground. He saws downed trees and branches. I pack up the brush in the wagon and drive it to the brush pile. We both throw it up and over. I pick up the fork to get the olives out of the jar. He picks up the spoon. He has taught me, by example, to be kind; I have taught him that a huge job can be tackled one step at a time, that he doesn’t need to be overwhelmed by any job, no matter how large. He keeps me grounded; I help him fly a little. We cut each other a lot of slack because both of our physical stamina and our memories are slowing down. It was his impetus to convert to the Catholic Church. I followed along. Am I blessed, or what?

In grade and high school, yes, girls are and always have been “favored” in the sense that teachers tend to like them better and because they are better able to sit through classes and obey the rules than most boys can. Young boys, of course, would rather be up and about doing something other than sitting at a desk, and tend to have shorter attention spans. As a result, they are far more likely to be labeled as being “hyperactive” or having ADD or some variation thereof than girls are. (Yet another manifestation of the feminist notion that all sex differences are purely cultural and can be programmed out of a child if you try hard enough)

Although I never got to experience it myself (I attended a Catholic high school that had been all-boys but had gone co-ed a few years earlier) I personally believe single-sex education at the junior high and high school level would be a great thing — it would enable boys to learn to be men and girls to learn to be women in an environment where they don’t have to worry about how they are going to look in front of the opposite sex, PLUS they would have teachers who don’t have to deal with both sexes at once also. Now before anyone asks “But how are they going to learn how to get along with the opposite sex,” well, they have all their off hours, weekends, and summer vacations to do that, right?

The decline of single-sex education is, I agree, one of the saddest casualties of the feminist movement.

As for the preponderance of women among extraordinary ministers and the like… well, women are and always have tended to be more “churchy” and religiously observant than men in our culture, and in past generations (like my father’s and grandfather’s, and if you are Catholic, I am sure you remember this also) usually husbands were more likely to lapse from the faith and leave their wives and kids to go to Mass by themselves every Sunday, than the other way around. This was the case long before Vatican II.

That, I think, is more a result of men abdicating THEIR responsibility to show spiritual leadership and leaving it to women to fill the void, than of women consciously attempting to take over.

C.S. Lewis wrote that the “crown” of headship than the husband wears as head of the home is a “crown of thorns” that, too often, he shoves off on his wife and forces HER to carry, rather than grasping too eagerly for it himself. But, I digress. That could be a topic for another day.

As an economic policy, consider this. My husband’s first salary as a chemist was $500/month, $6,000/year. Our small family could could live without effort on that salary. (As a Lieutenant, J.G., before discharge, it was just short of that.) I don’t remember the tax structure, but, for our purposes, let’s say, 10%, we paid $600 in federal income tax. Now, if I could have been persuaded to go to work for, say, $400/month or $4800/year, our combined income would be $10,800, and our taxes, now in a higher income bracket of say, 13%, would be $1,404. ($6000 + $4800 x .13) That’s more than double the taxes due on my husband’s single income And then there is the increased revenue from gasoline taxes (two cars needed now), and probably smaller families (fewer child tax deductions and fewer children to educate, with the additional bonus of having children for longer hours to indoctrinate), less volunteerism justifying federal programs to fill the gap in addition to redistribution of wealth. You don’t think that leftist mouthes were salivating over this? Think of all the federal programs that could be maintained, and, after all, we didn’t NEED that much, and others certainly deserved it more. Sounds like a political philosophy to me and a good basis on which to build a political structure. I think that there was a plan.

The fact that children were made to bear the brunt of this revolution by having to become the parent and the emotional support of the now-victimized mother, by being forced, as small children, to live according to an adult schedule–out of bed at 6 am (bad night? no sleep? too bad, mother’s got to go to work. See you at 6-pm–that is is of little concern to anyone, except perhaps the mother with a tender conscience.

Education as “the fall back” insurance? How helpful is a 20-year old degree in anthropology in getting back in the workforce at an advanced level? A late career is more likely to be behind the counter or the cash register. If you want to advance in a career, you’d better stick with it after graduating. BTW, a stack of pay stubs is pretty cold comfort at the end of one’s life, and the mother who abandoned her children to day care, will probably be abandoned to a nursing home in her old age when she can no longer play golf with her friends in the retirement home.

Lower income? As an employer why should I pay a woman as much as I pay a man if, after a year’s training, she is likely to decide that her biological clock is winding down and she wants to quit her job and raise a family, or she falls asleep in a department meeting (I”ve seen it happen) because she was up all night with a feverish child, or she takes maternity leave and leaves her work burden to fall on all of the single women in the department, whose work load is already overburdened because the economy is bad and the company isn’t hiring.

And the boys. (Another big lie: that boys got all the recognition in class and girls were ignored. I don’t know how that got past the giggle test. Girls were the favored sex in every class I was in in grade or high school). The boys really suffered, especially during adolescence, when they are already feeling the ground shift under their feet, they are told to go to the back of the bus and shut up. It was the “girls’ turn.” I had a son who suffered that indignity (born in 1971, BTW. His nearest sibling was born in 1961). These days, every professional program in college enrolls more women than me. When I began a career in publishing after attending college in my 50s, every male acquisitions editor was replaced with a female when he left the company. Every Catholic church that allowed girls at the altar, now have almost no boys. (One parish in our vicinity has 27 extraordinary ministers on a Sunday. About 4 of them are men.)

There is lots more to say, but that’s enough for now, except to say that the worst lie of all is the one that says that this life can be perfect if I can just manipulate and control all the people and circumstances in my life. It’s not perfect. Never was; never will be. Some sacrifices are worth it.

I was born in 1964; you do the math.

“I saw many younger women’s lives torn apart… by buying into the feminist lie”

Could you be more specific about what parts of feminism you consider to be a “lie”? A lot of different things, both good and bad, get lumped under the heading of feminism and a blanket condemnation of feminism tends to come off as a condemnation of those aspects which nearly everyone, including devout, traditional, pro-life and family Catholics, would consider good.

In my opinion, the bad parts of feminism were:

the promotion of abortion and sexual freedom/promiscuity (made possible, of course, by contraception);

a hostile attitude toward men in general and toward male authority figures in particular;

the notion that children do not need both a mother and a father and that those roles are interchangeable at will;

the idea that all differences between men and women are purely cultural and can be changed with enough social conditioning;

the loss of respect for stay at home wives and mothers (who as I pointed out above, often cared for older or disabled relatives as well as children); and

the idea that women could “have it all” in the sense of being able to devote themselves entirely to career advancement without consideration for its effect on their family lives. (Of course men also need to consider this too — “workaholic” men who are never there for their wives or children have a detrimental effect on family life also.)

Now, what were the “good” parts of feminism, if feminism is even the right word to describe it? I would say they were:

the promotion of equal pay for equal work and of women’s right to enter any profession or occupation for which they are qualified;

the belief that education for women should be taken as seriously as that of men;

eliminating the attitude that women did not need education or career training because they could just rely on their future husbands to take care of them (this attitude did still exist even in my parent’s and grandparent’s generation, even though women can always lose even the most devoted husbands and fathers to death or disability, and he could always lose his job, requiring her to step in as breadwinner);

the end of legal principles and employment practices that treated women, especially married women, as if they were perpetual minors; and

getting rid of the presumption that women were at fault when they suffered domestic violence, rape or sexual abuse. Of course, some feminists go overboard in the other direction nowadays and act as if all men are potential rapists, or as if ONLY men are ever violent or abusive. Women can commit these crimes too. However, it was not that long ago when women who were raped or abused by male partners or relatives were routinely treated by the police and courts as if they must be lying or must have “asked for it. ”

So, not all social changes affecting the role of women in the post-World War II era have been bad or destructive of family life. Nor was there necessarily some kind of overarching “plan” or plot to destroy marriage and the family involved. However, many social movements and changes that start out good or have good aspects can end up having unintended and ultimately destructive consequences. The trick is to weed out the good from the bad.

When you reach adulthood living in a war zone, you really can’t appreciate the devastation that was wrought on what it was before.

God bless you Louise and thank you for articulating that.

When you reach adulthood living in a war zone, you really can’t appreciate the devastation that was wrought on what it was before.