The New Feminism, Then and Now
The New Feminism is so much a part of my professional and personal and spiritual life—for over thirty years—that I have struggled to separate it out and hold it up for inspection. I even thought of naming this paper “Reflections and Confessions of a New Feminist Lab Rat.” But inspect it I did, and what I concluded is that like so many other really good things Christianity brought to humanity, it got its start as a genuinely radical idea that challenged prevailing norms from the moment of its appearance. But then it got somewhat tamed and reduced through a combination of human laziness, sinfulness, and limited imagination and will, and needs to be reappropriated in a more true-to-original form.
The radical idea, of course, is that females image God in a way that men do not exactly, and that Jesus’ Great Commission incorporates this. From this we can take that the task of any advocacy for women’s freedom should centrally be concerned to ensure that women can operate wherever God wants what we have, and however we have been asked to bear Christ to the world. In other words, a Christian feminism is not primarily about us, it is about him.
This is the opposite of bad “autonomy,” yet it requires a woman to be strong and courageous in order to take responsibility for the tasks that come with her gifts. It is the opposite of man-hating, but requires men and women alike not to hinder God’s will for women—whether through men’s dominating or women’s conniving in our own subjection. And it is the opposite of a culture of death, because one of women’s indisputable gifts-to-share is her particular openness to other human life.
New Feminism 1.0 never really lost sight of this, but spent what I would say is a disproportionate amount of time—for understandable reasons I will later mention—thinking about what in this world justice for women looks like. So I think that if we breathe new life into the Great Commission to women begun in Genesis, then a New Feminism 2.0 will not only be truer to God’s will for us, but will assist some of the dilemmas that the New Feminism 1.0 left standing.
I will explore this by brief discussion, first, of the way Christian innovations often unfold over time and then apply this to its call to women. This will include criminally brief discussions of Scripture and early Christianity, and then a more full consideration of later-twentieth-century New Feminism. Finally I will offer a few thoughts about how a recovery of the original radical idea might assist some of the dilemmas lingering after New Feminism 1.0.
Christianity often proceeds by way of mind-blowing, divine revelations—clearly flying in the teeth of custom and culture from their first utterance—that are only over time more deeply understood and lived out. Think about how long it is taking us to unpack the revelation that God accomplishes our salvation by dying in the most ghastly, shameful manner imaginable and rising three days later. Think about the Christian insight about slavery, begun really in the Genesis creation accounts, and then followed by St. Paul’s admonition that there is “neither slave nor free person.” Why? Because as he says in his instruction to Philemon to receive his runaway slave Onesimus, now a convert, because Onesimus is “no-longer . . . a slave but more than a slave, a brother, beloved especially to me,” because he is a “brother in the Lord” (Philemon 16).
Now the radical implications of the equal humanity and dignity of the enslaved were not fully realized in Christian milieux for centuries, but the flame did grow over centuries, in the appearance of some anti-slavery Christian theology soon after the decline of Rome, to the work of Christian abolitionists in Europe and the United States and eventually to John Paul II’s public apologies for Christians’ role in perpetuating slavery.
I reference these examples of the unfolding of Christian innovations over time, because I think that the Church’s treatment of women’s dignity and equality has proceeded likewise. With the recovery of its radical form still to be realized in a New Feminism 2.0.
Regarding women, of course the radical, foundational Christian conclusion about women’s dignity and equality comes from Genesis’ teaching that women, like men, are created in God’s image and likeness. This is—as John Paul II never tired of reminding us—both a gift and a task. Accordingly, when women’s God-given gifts are not acknowledged, when we are even hindered from our part in bearing God into the world with our particular gifts, this is injustice. So the highest task of a Christian or New Feminism—of a movement concerning difficulties and injustices women disproportionately experience—is to overcome what constrains women from this vocation.
This Christian feminism is of course on full display in the New Testament in the words and action of Jesus and his Apostles. In God’s choosing a woman with whom to initiate his new covenant, literally to bear God into the world, and in Jesus’ interactions with women, which easily transcended cultural norms and highlighted women’s capacity to receive and reveal divine wisdom.
Then beginning in early Christianity and persisting to today, the implications of God’s call to women have unfolded. Beginning with the Christian community’s upending social norms holding that a woman’s status at its best was derivative of a human man’s—as his daughter, mother, or wife. But Christianity called women to valor in relationship to Christ—as martyrs, saints, celibates for the sake of the kingdom, early philanthropists to the Christian movement, and over time, as theological scholars, founders of religious orders, mystics, and women in the world consecrating the world to Christ by way of work in the fields for which God had capacitated them.
Now, let us fast forward to the last three-quarters of a century, during which time we have seen a cascade of attention by the Vatican, and by women leaders in the Church, to the question of women’s vocations. Before I talk about the contents of this attention, let me say generally that while these materials always strenuously affirm the radical idea that started it all, they also spend a lot of time dealing with worldly oppression of women, including in church arenas, and the need to respond to this.
With an eye to the time frame of these materials, I have theories as to why this occupied so much of the New Feminism 1.0. I think there was a growing perception in these times that the society of the Church and the society of the world were increasingly foreign to one another. That the Church was this ancient, hidebound, celibate male institution, while secular society was increasingly conscious of new ideas, new technologies, of previously less visible and oppressed members of society, and—especially following WWII—of fundamental human rights.
So it seems to me that the Church was responding as if to say: we affirm all that is true and good regarding recognition of human rights, and we are not afraid of the world or enemies of science and reason, but rather their best friends. Also the Church had not previously spoken much in her universal documents about women except regarding motherhood, so it had more that needed saying. And more Catholic women, myself included, who were writing about the New Feminism, wanted to assure observers, echoing St. Paul, that “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is . . . worthy of praise” in movements for women’s freedom, could find a friend in Christ and in his Church. And then to show how these true, just, honorable, praiseworthy elements of the woman’s movement pointed at the same time, to the necessity of respecting unborn life, and to the work of wrenching society and the economy and the law to the highest respect for motherhood and family life.
So what do the documents of many popes during this time do, in addition to affirming women’s beautiful calls to all forms of maternity? They recount women’s oppression, and affirm the movement agitating for women’s dignity and equality. John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris affirms women’s “demanding both in domestic and in public life the rights and duties which belong to them as human persons.” Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes blessed women’s working in “all spheres” saying that it is “fitting that they are able to assume their proper role in accordance with their own nature.” John Paul II’s Mulieris Dignitatem condemns millennia of discrimination against women, expresses compassion for single mothers and post-aborted women, and insists on greater access to education for girls. His Letter to Women—after affirming that the movement for women was substantially positive—lauds women’s often unheralded roles in political, economic and social spheres, calls for equal pay, protections for working mothers’ career advancements, and equality between spouses, commits Catholic educational institutions to a priority strategy for women, calls for women’s access to more forms of leadership in the Church and in the world, and apologizes for any role that the Church played in the historical oppression of women. All of these themes were continued in the work of Joseph Ratzinger at the CDF, and later as Benedict XVI. And Pope Francis was particularly vocal about supporting more leadership roles for women within the Church—whether in his synodal processes, curial offices, the Vatican museums, his office of Communications, or the council on the economy.
All the while, of course—in all of these documents and actions—the Church has recognized the wrong turns and bad anthropology and ignorance of God that had led some strands of feminism to valorize and equate with women’s progress: rabid individualism, the lifestyles of bad men, abortion, and the divorce of sex from marriage and children.
Now I do not want to give the impression that these leading teachings on women neglected the radical centerpiece of Christian feminism—women’s gift and task of imaging God in the world. The Letter to Women, for example, at one point thanks women simply for being women, for receiving what God has sent them, for doing the work that God entrusted women especially to do. And nearly all of these documents, while taking care not to fall into stereotypes or psychological or biological reductionism—sensitively highlighted some aspects of the female vocation that seem to stand the test of time and global cultural differences: most especially women’s capacity for the other person, her physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual motherhood, her defense of vulnerable life, and her tendency to elevate human beings over ideologies and systems.
Now having lived my entire career—forty years and counting—under the influence of these documents, I can attest that their affirmations were very inspiring, reassuring, and even illuminating of the situations I found myself in, on the matter of affirming various aspects of a women’s “capacity for the other.”
For example, I remember co-hosting a radio program with a bishop. A post-aborted woman called in. At different points in our interaction, it was clear that “only a priest would do” to answer her questions; but at other points, only a woman—who had both raised children, and lost them too, in my case to miscarriages.
And in my academic and public life, thanks to the guidance of the New Feminism, I was able to write family law books and articles from the perspective of society’s responsibility to children and vulnerable mothers and family stability, and to show the young women I taught—and who continue to call me weekly—that it is possible to put your higher education at service of the Church and have that gift received, to be pro-life not in spite of your fancy degree, but because of it. When the U.S. bishops’ conference administration did not want to let me work from home at all after becoming a mother, inspired by the New Feminism I was able to threaten to quit immediately, and to mean it, and to win.
And I remember after my husband Brian died and I was having dinner with his wonderful childhood friends. I told them that Brian would write me every Valentine’s day a note that said “I would have been dead by now without you,” and I took it as part of his crazy sense of humor. But to a man and woman they jumped in, Oh no Helen, he really would have been dead if you hadn’t married him. He was wild!! He lived as long as he did because you loved him so long, and made him a father. Ah, I thought . . . what only a woman could do.
But I think the instructions that I imbibed too much from the New Feminism 1.0 were too often in line with the Church’s focus on assuring women their this-world share of good things, like men had. For me, that meant a career previously little populated by women. Law—check. And an Ivy League law degree—check. And a big-firm-first-job—check. And even a position in a seemingly male-led institution, the Church—check.
I remember how proud I was when, after being appointed the public face of all the U.S. bishops on pro-life matters, I was asked to lector at one of their televised masses. I was wearing a red suit—very 90s—and said to my Father, “did you see me Dad? I was the one in red on the altar! And he replied, “Helen you were the only one with legs! Of course I saw you!” I ate it up.
I remember my absolute delight at being asked to go higher, to attend meetings or serve councils at the Holy See. I attended a small audience with John Paul II in 1998 during a meeting about women, when the Pope, before turning to his written remarks, looked up at us, held up his shaky finger and smilingly said “I am the feminist pope.” Before throwing back his head and laughing.
Meanwhile, I gave birth to three children in five years. And I read the new feminism to require me to put family first, but also to maintain all of my worldly accomplishments. After all it was for the Church, right? Or as my Brian used to ironically say: “You’ll show them, Helen! Getting up at 4:45 am, going to bed late, being exhausted at all times, pasting yourself together with makeup and Tylenol. Yeah that’s taking it to the man!”
And so as you are guessing about now, when I reflect back, I can see that even though I did some good for the Church in the world, and for the causes of women and children and family, I got a lot wrong (here is where the examination of conscience and confession come in). I did not stop nearly often enough to ponder thoroughly the central question of Christian feminism: am I doing God’s will? Am I doing what I am supposed to do to bring Christ to the world?
Am I first listening to the voice of God every day, with humility, with true receptivity, accompanied by that active receiving and strength of will necessary to bring to completion what I hear? Am I willing to go where it leads? Whether even deeper into the heart and needs of my family and friends or out into the world where my talents and skills meet particular needs . . . even if I am tired? afraid? might be ridiculed or worse? Am I fooling myself that I am justly attending to the particular work placed in my hands that no one else can do—my children and my spouse? Am I nourishing all the work given to me with prayer, with Mass, with quiet listening to God where I am not running my mouth? Regarding the institutions I occupy, even the Church—do I mimic stereotypical male standards, or meekly accede to their rules and structures if they hinder God’s will, if they hinder proper parenting, if they ride roughshod over loving human relations and consistent respect for life? And am I willing even to go further and denounce abuse and unjust exclusions, whether concerning women or others?
As I indicated before, although New Feminism 1.0 never lost sight of these central questions, it did spend a lot of its time assuring observers that the Church could meet the world’s standards for the good parts of secular feminism. But now that even the good parts of secular feminism as well as the New Feminism have been tried on the ground for some decades, it is clear that there remain questions and dilemmas that they have not sufficiently addressed. And that even us New Feminists sometimes forgot that it is not all about us, it is first about him. So perhaps a return to a purer form of Christian feminism—a New Feminism 2.0—might take us further along the right path. Let me consider this by highlighting some of the dilemmas still with us following the New Feminism 1.0 and think how a 2.0 might assist.
Q: Is a new Christian feminism disparaging any work for mothers save work in the home?
A: This seems a live debate among New Christian feminists still. I think the answer is clearly “no,” albeit, as I just suggested, this question of a mother’s total vocation comes with the demand for honest examination of conscience about whether justice is being done, first, to those committed to her care as Mom, for which task there simply is no substitute person. John Paul II and Benedict XVI especially, as reflected in the Compendium of Catholic Social Teaching, have been clear that God’s image and likeness in all its manifestations is required in every segment of society.
So I realized more than a few times during my career, that I really did have a vocation for public communication of the faith. I remember appearing once on the political food fight known as Crossfire, and being cut off at every turn by the head of N.O.W. and the opposing host. But I smiled and I managed to utter a few simple points, and I do not think I was ever flooded with so much mail from Catholic women telling them I made them proud to be Catholic. Ah, I thought, when the output that much exceeds the input, that is the Holy Spirit’s margin: my favorite vocational sign. Or there was the woman who approached me at a pro-life dinner to tell me how impacted she had been by my now-ten-year-old book chapter about my fear of having children and overcoming it. She then said, “So here’s my daughter Maria, nine years old.” Whoa, I thought again, Talk about output exceeding input!
But then I had to face my responsibilities honestly when the Vatican asked me to travel weeks overseas for its UN Negotiating team in Beijing, or Cardinal O’Connor asked me to be an official observer for a weeks-long synod in Rome, or the White House asked me to represent them at JPII’s funeral during a weekend when my daughter had an important event. No, no, no I answered. I frankly hated saying no, but I knew I had to. I thought, this is why John Paul II and Benedict XVI have told us women that we have to make our way, to pray our way, to stumble our way forward to a new feminism. It is hard to sort it. Our multiple vocations are real but can conflict. God’s will is not always apparent.
Q: What about aiming for influential secular work that men have previously dominated?
A: Again, we need women to bear Christ into every arena, but not of course with an eye to displacing or mimicking or trumping men. But if we do go to formerly male-dominated spaces, let’s be honest, we have to be braver than we have been. Think of famous Congresswomen, for example, or corporate leaders who not only have done nothing to change political or economic systems toward prioritizing vulnerable people or families, but have become pro-abortion zealots. And I will never forget being invited to a Washington welcome party for a new female pro-life Congresswoman who stated that it was her desire to make a better world for her little children that led her to leave them back in her far-away home state to come to DC. Maybe, I thought, maybe. But maybe no too.
Q: Has a new Christian feminism failed if it influences women to spend more time at home, or still disproportionately occupying service type jobs?
A: Nope, not if that is the result of prayerful discernment of God’s will as discerned from our talents, inclinations, and the needs of those in our orbit. Anybody here remember the Saturday Night Live skit called “the Cut”? A bunch of women hosting a baby shower tell the expectant mom—who presently has long hair—that she will not really be a mom until she gets the short, spiky haircut worn by every woman at the party. She protests, until the hostess’s teenage son, walking through, asks if there is dinner in the kitchen and the expectant mother offers to go in the kitchen and put it on a plate for him. Oh my gosh, she says, “why would I offer to do that for an able-bodied teen??” Instantly, she is wearing “the Cut.” We are supposed to be horrified. But no I think, even SNL knows we have the urge to serve kids.
Q: Do we need to spend a lot of time denouncing everything secular feminism got wrong? Do we need to ban the term?
A: John Paul II and the women’s UN team he established did not, nor did the Pontifical Council for the Laity during the time I assisted their women’s office. And I would not either. But I am not wed to the term, just the concept of devoting attention to women’s special circumstances and needs. I also think—whatever we call it—it is best not to look ungrateful for the good labors of secular feminists, who after all are our sisters in Christ, whether they know it or not. Remember the old Monty Python skit where a member of the People’s Front of Judea is complaining, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” And after members have mentioned a bunch of stuff, he says, “Sure . . . but aside from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, irrigation, roads, and freshwater, what have they ever done for us?”
Still, when speaking of a new feminism, a clear introductory-statement will be needed to the effect that secular feminists are totally off base to denigrate the class of men, deny God, deny reality, and to valorize as progress killing those vulnerable others we have been given precisely to protect. And to the effect that a new feminism will reach their nobler ends by nobler means.
Finally, I think a new Christian feminism has to state clearly that even its earlier incarnation set its sights too low. The glass ceiling we need to break is not the floor of the C-suite or even the top floor of the Chancery, but the ceiling of every building in the world, the ceiling that separates the visible from the invisible, the ceiling that obfuscates the divine sphere—which is to say God’s will that every woman in the world is called to reveal to the world things about God that only . . . she . . . can.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article was originally given as a lecture at the McGrath Institute’s conference, “True Genius: The Mission of Women in Church and Culture,” on March 28, 2025.