How Feminism Shattered Our Understanding of Motherhood

The communist vision of a genderless worker has supplanted the Christian creed and its vision of mother and child.

Christian story started very simply: a mother delivered her baby, truly God and truly man, amid the squalor of straw and livestock. Such humble beginnings begat a new vision of motherhood that became the archetype for the Church — Holy Mother Church. Embraced by all Christians for centuries, ecclesial motherhood was cast in art, music, poetry, and culture. Even the word for church is feminine in the romance languages. Architecturally, the wide-reaching and iconic arms of Saint Peter’s Square in Rome remind Christians that the Church is meant to be home, nurturer, comforter, and nourisher to us all. She is our mother.

Since Eve, motherhood has been a gift unique to women. Historically, it was understood as a wide category that included the wise grandmother, the religious sister, the mentoring teacher, and the guiding aunt. Holding the needs of others in focus, motherhood encompassed sheltering, nourishing, caring for, and assisting others to grow and live abundantly.

For decades now, that maternal image, as it relates to both women and the Church, has worn thin. Our modern conception of motherhood has narrowed to include only the biological birthing or adoption of children. This is not due to lax or scandal-ridden pastors and clergy, activist bishops, or even a confusing pope. Motherhood has become threadbare because feminism has successfully supplanted the Christian creed and its connection to motherhood with the communist vision of a genderless worker.

Most Western women consider feminism a gentle, benevolent friend who at times has gone astray. Voting, property rights, employment opportunities, education, and public office all speak to the positive goods that most women think feminism has brought women; few understand the commanding power it now has over Western culture and the way in which it has quietly but resolutely made itself the deadliest ideology in human history.

The slide downward began with the rise of socialism in the 1800s, when activists used consciousness raising, a tool of Mao’s Communist China, to stir up women’s emotions of anger and outrage, making them aware of their own oppression. In 1897, the socialist paper Lucifer encouraged readers to “preach the gospel of discontent to women, to mothers, to the prospective mothers of the human race.” Through these efforts, socialism spread one family at a time.

https://spectator.org/the-gospel-of-discontent-how-feminism-shattered-our-understanding-of-motherhood/