By Katherine Bennett, Catholic Herald, March 8, 2024
Today is International Women’s Day (IWD), a day which proclaims to act as a focal point in the women’s rights movement, “celebrating” the achievements of women, gender equality and reproductive rights.
Hashtagged #EmbraceEquity, it is a day for all women: short women, tall women, fat women, thin women, rich women, poor women, women with penises and 18” shirt collars. You name them and IWD will celebrate them – unless of course they are potential women in utero. Those nuisance “clumps of cells” getting in the way of the important things, like their potential mother’s becoming CEOs.
So, who are the women that we are invited to celebrate? In order to answer to this, I thought it would be interesting to look through the list of women given to children to learn about at a local secondary school. They include:
Janice Bryant Howroyd, the first African-American woman to build her own billion-dollar company.
Morag Myerscough, a London-based artist who in 2014 created an installation celebrating the year in which same-sex marriage became legal.
Jill Scott, a female footballer and member of the England squad that won the women’s Euro championship 2022.
And of course, no list of women of modern times would be complete without a man, in this case Danica Roam, the first transgender person to ever run and be elected for the Virginia General Assembly in the US State of Virginia in 2017. This was followed in 2023 by Roam being elected to the Virginia Senate, reportedly becoming the first openly transgender person to be elected to a state senate seat in the Southern United States.
One can’t help noticing among all this that the W in IWD seems a bit incidental. Too many of the well-intentioned attempts to celebrate women focus on the things that they can do as well as any man.
There is no denying that it is a great human achievement to invent a new medicine, win the world cup, oversee a $1 billion company and to run for and gain legislative office in the grand old state of Virginia, but none of these things are unique to women.
It shouldn’t be so much about what women can “do” that should preoccupy those interested in celebrating them, but about who they are.
There has never been a more important time to recapture a sense of what a woman is outside of what a woman does. It is this heavy emphasis on achieving that is leading young women to believe that their worth lies in an ability to compete in the same arena as men (and which incidentally seems to be making many of them miserable at the same time).
In order to achieve, she will be told that claiming her reproductive rights is an essential way to level the playing field. The problem is that this doesn’t level the playing field at all. It simply unbalances everything.
Whilst women will be encouraged today to view the Sexual Revolution as an unalloyed good that has empowered them to take a place at the table, the reality is quite different. This revolt against who we are has, despite what the feminists say, done more for men than for women. Hence it seems an odd thing to be celebrating.
Calls for unfettered access to contraception and abortion only sets up the conditions for men to have easier access to sex with none of the consequences.
As Dave Chapelle piercingly observed: “Well if you should be allowed to kill them, then we should at least be allowed to abandon the little f***ers.”
This attitude should not be shocking to a culture that has encouraged women to forget their vocation as physical and spiritual mothers and to treat their own bodies as objects of use, be it in the boardroom or the bedroom.
In 1968, Pope Paul VI prophesied the fallout from the Sexual Revolution. He foresaw a general lowering of morality, less respect for women, coercive control by governments, and bodies being treated like machines.
It would take a very confident woman to deny that he was right given the abundant evidence around us. The explosion of the porn industry has helped to solidify the image of women as sex objects. Huge numbers of young women are forced into prostitution and sexually abused. Awkward pregnancies are either avoided or ended, with 10 million lives lost to the abortion-industrial complex since 1967. That’s one baby every 2.5 minutes for 55 years.
Millions and millions of baby girls lost, whose mothers will be busy celebrating International Women’s Day, while those baby girl of course never will.
Undisciplined in self-control, too many men who get women pregnant abandon them at unprecedented rates. From 1960 to 2000, the proportion of children raised by single mothers more than tripled in Europe and North America.
As if that weren’t enough, desperate women find a market for their eggs or become “wombs for hire” in order to satisfy the desires of gay men.
As with all things, the Church has an explanation about why it is that we might have expected one thing but got another. She alone truly understands human nature. She understands God’s plan for our sexuality. She knows that if we mess with God’s plan (which we are free to do) it won’t go well, but she also picks up the pieces and acts as a field hospital on the spiritual battleground.
Like our Holy Mother Church, woman gives life. Not that IWD seems interested. International Women’s Day is a bit like Valentine’s Day that the culture sells to us every 14 February. If love was honoured every day we wouldn’t need that shtick. The shallow gender equality proposed by advocates of IWD is really just a call for uniformity between the sexes, for a deadening of female grace.
A true honouring of women would recognise her unique vocation, uphold her dignity, give thanks for the ways in which she receives love in order to return love.
“In God’s eternal plan, woman is the one in whom love first takes root,” John Paul II wrote in Mulieris Dignitatem (1988). And it really is love – not money or power – that keeps the world turning. That’s something worth celebrating every single day, regardless what IWD thinks.
This article was originally published on International Women’s Day in 2023. It has only had a few minor edits made as the original article appears to remain relevant to the current moment.