Is it possible to make marble look like marshmallow? Bernini somehow managed it. His statues housed at the Villa Borghese in Rome are some of the best sculptures in the world and, like so many pieces of art, photographs cannot do them justice. The wonderful thing about the way they are displayed is that you can walk all the way around them, right up close. This yields a fundamentally different experience than just seeing a 2D photo of these pieces.
Capturing a 3D reality by 2D means is never satisfactory. And yet, this is sometimes what happens in conversations around sexed personhood. We want to offer girls a robust vision of womanhood and in order to do so must help them understand what a woman is. But because we are limited by time and space and vocabulary, and occasionally, our own imaginations and experiences, we can tend toward offering a 2D view of womanhood.
Defining Our Conversation
Traditional definitions, moreover, are designed to be minimal. What distinguishes this type of thing from that type of thing? What makes it different? This sort of defining is extremely useful in philosophical discussions, but it can flatten conversation in real life. For those who do not have a background in logic, it can feel positively dismissive.
In discussions of sexed personhood, if we start and end with difference, it can leave us wanting. What distinguishes women from men is not their humanity, since both women and men are fully human persons, with all that humanity entails. Each is made in the image and likeness of God: a body-soul unity, rational, and free. Thus, in discussions of difference, humanity is left out because it is a commonality rather than a distinguishing feature. In discussions of difference, women and men are distinguished from one another first and foremost by their sexuality or—to use a historical synonym—their gender: the capacity in them (actualized or not, injured or not) to engender another human person. Women do this in one way; men do it in another. Neither can do it alone.
Is this difference important? Of course. Is it the most important thing? Well, that depends on what angle you’re coming from. If two people want to get married and have children together, this difference is indeed essential to the possibility; without this difference, marriage and children are not possible. If two people want to start a restaurant together, this difference is probably significantly less relevant.
Motherhood is, first and foremost, a spiritual reality, even if we usually first encounter it as a biological one.
Many of the discussions around what it means to be a woman, or conversations around the significance of maleness and femaleness, fail to take into account the angle of the questions asked or misunderstand the position that another is coming from. The 3D vision gets flattened to 2D.
Young women deserve a vision of womanhood that avoids flattening the incredible mystery of the human person into a simple jigsaw puzzle to be solved. This 3D vision must, of course, rely on clear distinctions, but it cannot remain there.
Each human person is fully human. But each human person does not possess the fullness of humanity. When we think of humanity, broadly speaking and in comparison to animals, many achievements come to mind. Humanity has invented a multiplicity of written, spoken, and signed languages. Humanity has designed cathedrals, written novels, composed symphonies, sung arias, rocketed into space, discovered cures for disease, and found ways to feed the masses. Humanity has made homes, hospitals, schools, orphanages, hospices, and other places where people care for one another in both normal and vulnerable situations. None of the other animalia has done any of this. But very few of us have done even one or two of these things—does that make us inhuman? Of course not. Each of us is fully human without possessing the fullness of humanity.
The same is true for women and men. Each woman is fully a woman without possessing the fullness of womanhood, just as each man is fully a man without possessing the fullness of manhood. (When I spoke about this at a retreat, one man said that it came as a relief to hear: It took the pressure off feeling like he had to be “all things man.”)
The challenge comes when we try to distinguish what it is to be a woman apart from humanity. To be a virtuous human is the goal of every person, man or woman. Both women and men are called to be just and loyal and courageous and kind and patient and gentle. But how these virtues manifest themselves in men and women is different; and even more, how these virtues manifest themselves in individual men and individual women is different. This is why general statements like “men are strong” and “women are gentle” are often unhelpful, even if generally true at some level. No one would suggest that Catherine of Siena or Teresa of Avila was weak; no one would suggest that John the beloved disciple or John of the Cross was rough. Good parents do not wish to raise weak daughters or rough sons, even if the gentleness and strength they try to cultivate in their children might look different in each child.
How can we begin, then, to give girls a robust vision of womanhood, if it all just depends on the person? I suggest a two-pronged approach. The first is to discuss differences honestly and clearly—which are universal, which are particular—which I try to do in this article. The second is to offer girls a wide variety of role models: women who have different charisms, gifts, talents, and personalities, but who are all striving for virtue, so that girls can begin to form a 3D vision in their own imaginations of what it means to be a woman. (I will offer some suggestions for this in a future article.)
What Makes Women Unique?
That men and women are different is so obvious a proposition that it was rarely questioned culturally until the twentieth century, when Judith Butler proposed the idea that gender is merely a social construct. Even the legendary Amazonian women, renowned for their military prowess, recognized that their bodies were different from men’s: They cut off their right breast in order to improve their archery skills.
At the most basic, cellular level, men’s bodies and women’s bodies have strong differences among the myriad similarities. The most obvious difference regards what scientists call reproduction and what theologians call procreation: The adult human person’s ability to cooperate with God in bringing about new life. Men and women are both necessary in this process, but it is the woman’s body that welcomes, nourishes, and protects that new little person in his or her beginnings. In the order of creation, human life begins in the body of a woman.
Reflecting on this physical reality, John Paul II offered a metaphysical insight: Women are uniquely oriented toward other people. “In God’s eternal plan, woman is the one in whom the order of love in the created world of persons takes first root” (Mulieris Dignitatem 29).
He continues, “The moral and spiritual strength of a woman is joined to her awareness that God entrusts the human being to her in a special way. Of course, God entrusts every human being to each and every other human being. But this entrusting concerns women in a special way—precisely by reason of their femininity—and this in a particular way determines their vocation” (Mulieris Dignitatem 30).
There may be a strong temptation to interpret his words in one of two ways: that this “special way” is merely biological, and therefore becoming pregnant is the vocation of every woman; or that the “special way” is so vague as to be fairly meaningless. Neither is true.
Metaphysically, a woman is a place of welcome for others, whether or not she physically does or even can do so.
Shared Vocation: Spiritual Motherhood
John Paul II is quick to emphasize that the biological is secondary to the spiritual. Conceiving a child is not only a physical act of reproduction; it is a powerful act of procreation, in which every human person is called into relationship with the living God.
The motherhood of every woman, understood in the light of the Gospel, is similarly not only “of flesh and blood”: it expresses a profound “listening to the word of the living God” and a readiness to “safeguard” this Word, which is “the word of eternal life” (cf. Jn 6:68). For it is precisely those born of earthly mothers, the sons and daughters of the human race, who receive from the Son of God the power to become ‘children of God’ (Jn 1:12). A dimension of the New Covenant in Christ’s blood enters into human parenthood, making it a reality and a task for “new creatures” (cf. 2 Cor 5:17). The history of every human being passes through the threshold of a woman’s motherhood; crossing it conditions “the revelation of the children of God” (cf. Rom 8:19) (Mulieris Dignitatem 19).
Motherhood is, first and foremost, a spiritual reality, even if we usually first encounter it as a biological one. “And does not physical motherhood also have to be a spiritual motherhood, in order to respond to the whole truth about the human being who is a unity of body and spirit?” (Mulieris Dignitatem 20).
This spiritual reality of motherhood is the call, or vocation, of every woman, whether or not she bears children in her own body. Each woman, by virtue of being the type of human who is the place of welcome for others (whether or not she does or can actualize this potentiality in the context of a fallen world), is called to spiritual motherhood. It is not limited to those who are nuns or offered as a “consolation prize” for those who cannot have children: It is the primary way that a woman lives her womanhood. Metaphysically, a woman is a place of welcome for others, whether or not she physically does or even can do so.
Personal Vocation
Is this idea of spiritual motherhood too vague to be meaningful? I would argue that John Paul II’s articulation of what is a general principle purposefully leaves room for the practice of personal discernment. “Vocation is meant here in its fundamental, and one may say universal significance, a significance which is then actualized and expressed in women’s many different ‘vocations’ in the Church and the world” (Mulieris Dignitatem 30). His theoretical answers to the question “What makes woman unique?” are helpful when they are linked to concrete, particular models of women who, through their practice of personal discernment, lived their call to spiritual maternity.
Not every woman is called to get married and have biological children; there is not a one-size-fits-all ideal life path for every woman. The history of celibate religious women in the Church is a clear and living witness to this fact. Not only do some women feel called to live out poverty, chastity, and obedience in a particular imitation of Christ, but some are called to that very publicly and actively, while others do so from the silence of the monastic cloister. Some women in the Church choose a life of consecrated singlehood in the world; others long to be biological mothers but choose to embrace the cross of unwanted singleness or infertility as a path heavenward.
Whether they live in a married, single, or consecrated state of life, women exercise their spiritual motherhood in a vast variety of ways, and always have: defending popes; overseeing local Church councils; educating anyone who needs it; becoming a ragpicker to serve poor children; living as a Catholic in countries where it is illegal; fighting slavery; running businesses; adopting children; serving in politics; smuggling priests through anti-Catholic territory; writing theological treatises; praying for a suffering world, and inestimable other ways.
The specific tasks that women engage in are less important than the fact that these works are a response to the personal call of God to serve others with their spiritual maternity.
While the narrowest definitional distinction between men and women involves a different biological disposition toward procreation, to curb the discussion about the uniqueness of women to this single point can be unnecessarily limiting, flattening a vision of womanhood into a 2D paper doll. Instead, it should serve as a starting point for a wide-ranging conversation about the call to a personal discernment of spiritual motherhood and the holistic, 3D approach to life and vocation that is needed.