Reflecting with St. Edith Stein on the nature of women

Any discussion of the differences between men and women and their roles in society seem to be particularly charged these days. As the role of wife and mother continues to be embraced and celebrated by the church, it is often downplayed in an increasingly secularized culture. At the same time, Catholics today grapple with the role of women in the workforce as well as the role of the woman who is single by choice or circumstance.

In the month of August, as part of my year of reading one spiritual classic a month, I took up “Essays on Woman” by.Edith Stein, also known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. This collection of her writings contained many striking elements and show how little seems to have changed in the debates over women’s place in the church and society between now and when she gave these lectures in the 1920s and ’30s.

Stein held a doctorate in philosophy — no small feat for a woman at the time — and was a student and assistant to the renowned phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. Coming from a Jewish background and upbringing, she converted to Catholicism in 1922 after reading the “Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila.” She became a Discalced Carmelite nun in 1933 after teaching for a period of time at the Dominican nuns’ school in Speyer, Germany.

Prior to her entry into the convent, Stein wrote these essays not simply out of her academic expertise as a noted philosopher, but with the warmth and empathy of a woman who has thought deeply about her relation to God and her fellow man.

Stein challenged both the feminists of her time and those who would relegate a woman only to the role of wife and mother.

“Are we able to speak of vocations which are specifically feminine? In the beginning of the feminist movement, the radical leaders denied this, claiming that all professions were suitable for woman,” she wrote. “Their opponents were unwilling to admit to this concept, recognizing only one feminine vocation, woman’s natural vocation.”

“Only the person blinded by the passion of controversy could deny that woman in soul and body is formed for a particular purpose,” she reflected, writing that according to her natural vocation, “woman is destined to be wife and mother.”

“Woman naturally seeks to embrace that which is living, personal, and whole,” she wrote, “to cherish, guard, protect, nourish, and advance growth is her natural, maternal yearning. Lifeless matter, the fact, can hold primary interest for her only insofar as it serves the living and the personal, not ordinarily for its own sake.”

However, she added that “only subjective delusion could deny that women are capable of practicing vocations other than that of spouse and mother.” Citing the experience of many different times in history, she noted that “in case of need, every normal and healthy woman is able to hold a position. And there is no profession which cannot be practiced by a woman.”

In a wide range of professions, she contended, “basically the same spiritual attitude which the wife and mother need is needed here also, except that it is extended to a wider working circle.”

Pointing toward the example of the Virgin Mary at the wedding feast in Cana, Stein wrote that women in the workplace can imitate her in being “conscious of where there is want and where help is needed, intervening and regulating as far as it is possible in her power in a discreet way. Then will she like a good spirit spread blessing everywhere.”

Ideally, she wrote, a woman’s soul is “fashioned to be a shelter in which other souls may unfold. Both spiritual companionship and motherliness are not limited to the physical spouse and mother relationships, but they extend to all people with whom woman comes into contact.”

With her expansive understanding of the many ways women could bring their femininity to bear on their particular situations in life, she upheld the Virgin Mary as the ideal.

Womanhood, she said, “finds its most perfect image in the purest Virgin who is the bride of God and mother of all mankind. Next to her stand the consecrated virgins who bear the honorary title Sponsa Christi and are called to participate in His redemptive work. But her image is also perpetuated by the woman standing beside a man who is Christ’s image and helping to build up His body the Church through a physical and spiritual maternity.”

Assessing the situation of many women in her time, Stein wrote that “many of the best women are overwhelmed by the double duties of family and professional life” and there are also women who entered into a profession they loved, but found their expectations of happiness in it unfulfilled as they “have neither searched for nor found the means to make their feminine nature fruitful in professional life.” She also noted the situation of the “religious unsure of the full meaning of their vows or unable to maintain the total sacrifice required of their vocation after their first youthful ardor has declined.”

Her remedy for this sad state of affairs? “A woman’s life must be a Eucharistic life,” she argued, if it is to bear fruit. She was certain that “each woman who lives in the light of eternity can fulfill her vocation.”

She emphasized that “only in daily, confidential relationship with the Lord in the tabernacle can one forget self, become free of all one’s own wishes and pretensions, and have a heart open to all the needs and wants of others.”

At the end of her own life, Stein was an example of this total surrender to God and radical openness to self-giving.

In August 1942, despite her convent’s attempts to protect her, she was deported to Auschwitz where she was soon killed.

Pope Benedict XVI said of her that “witnesses who managed to escape the terrible massacre recounted that while Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, dressed in the Carmelite habit, was making her way, consciously, toward death, she distinguished herself by her conduct full of peace, her serene attitude and her calm behaviour, attentive to the needs of all.”

This column was written by Lauretta Brown, culture editor for OSV News.