Let women be what they are

It’s time to let women develop their real gifts and not force them into following false models, says Marystella Ramirez Guerra.

New data published this month shows that women in the UK are 50% more likely to be low paid than men and the gender pay gap is widening. An article on the Living Wage Foundation’s website, giving data from a 2024 report, shows there are one million more women in low paid jobs in Britain than men.

But the pay gap doesn’t only affect low earners. It also hits women in higher wage brackets. You might remember the storm about athlete Allyson Felix who had a sponsorship from Nike but when she got pregnant, they wanted to cut her pay by 70%. She left Nike and went on to found her own sports shoe company. You can read about it here. and visit her store here. Realise this happened in 2017 not 50 years ago. 

And this is not just raw US capitalism. Back in Britain, a year after this it was revealed that women news’ presenters for BBC’s Radio 4 – you can’t get more institutional than that – were also being paid substantially less than their male counterparts.

That this continues to happen reminds us how much still remains to be done.

A change in mentality is needed at the global level to create a world where a woman can be a woman in whatever way she feels called to be. 

A world where a woman can be a mom and continue to participate in the world as she is. Where she can choose to stay at home with her children rather than work outside and not be shamed for it. Or where she can choose to combine work and having children and not be criticised for neglect. Or choose not to marry or not to be a mom to serve society in other ways and not be considered selfish. In sum, a world where building a family, in whatever form that takes, is seen for what it is: a fundamental basis for the building of a just and good society.

For quite some time now, a question has been nagging at me: “How can we create a world in which woman can be woman, however she chooses to be woman, and also participate actively in the world as woman?” 

And this has led me to the thinking of Edith Stein, a German Jewish philosopher and theologian who converted to Catholicism and who died (for being Jewish) at Auschwitz on 9 August 1942. 

Stein wore various hats over her intense life. She ended up a Carmelite nun but before that she was a top-level philosopher, disciple of the great phenomenologist Edward Husserl, and pioneer of women’s education.

Stein has been credited with writing about male-female complementarity but reading her original lecture on the topic revealed that there was more to her writing than that. This is largely to do with the difficulty of translating from German into English in a way that picks up the nuances of the German language in an English that has fewer words to express the same thing. 

For Stein, women and men have the same capacities, can study the same subjects and do the same jobs. At the same time, their differentiation and individuality come through in all they do as this too is part of human nature. 

For her, the concepts of form and matter, which she read in the work of the medieval philosopher/theologian Thomas Aquinas, were central to explaining the commonalities and particularities of the person. 

This points to the distinction between what is fundamental and what is accidental: there is a fundamental shared human nature between men and women, but it is expressed through various biological and psychological particularities. 

These particularities mean that a woman has something different from man, but the difference does not mean that women’s capacities are different from men’s, but certain aspects mean they bring a different execution, such as when one person solves a math problem one way and another person another way but they both get the same result. 

I believe Stein’s thinking can help us engage with many of today’s most common debates on how women live and behave in the public square, be this in the world of work or as stay-at-home mothers or a combination of the two.  

The increasing frustration felt by women at the demands made not just on their time but on how they use it comes through quite clearly in countless social media platforms but such demands are not necessarily the root cause of this problem. 

As a historian I could point out that debates about how women should behave or what they should do with their lives, how they should look, how they should dress, were already happening in ancient Greece. 

So what is the cause of this frustration? I think we find it in one of Edith Stein’s phrases:

“The world doesn’t need what women do, it needs what women are.”

And this is precisely what is not being recognised.

A good illustration of the problem is the so-called ‘mommy wars’, ostensibly begun when breastfeeding became popular again. Breastfeeding has many benefits for the baby’s immune system but not all mothers can breastfeed, either for health reasons or because some countries give very limited maternity leave. 

While this would seem to settle things and therefore avoid criticism of mothers who are using formula, sadly human nature seems incapable of not judging. Mothers who don’t breastfeed and mothers who do so in public are criticised alike. 

Every mother loses, no matter the choice she makes, because the focus is not on the who, the deeper reality that she, a mother – who carried, birthed and is rearing another human being, with the daily bodily and emotional sacrifice this implies, while also fulfilling multiple other roles – is doing so to the best of her ability, often tired, but with a love that only a mother can give. 

The focus is on the how, how she is feeding the child rather than on the fact that she is feeding it so it can live another day. And this reality, the judging of women based on how they do something, which always somehow is not quite right with society, is the root of the frustration. America Ferrara in the movie ‘Barbie’ expresses this frustration very well in her now famous speech.

What would a world which acknowledged and created the space for each woman to be who they are called to be, however that looks, look like? A world that appreciates what women are rather than what they did? 

Edith Stein was right, women can do every job a man can but they do it differently, because they have a different sensitivity. A woman as a boss will be able to fire a wayward employee but she is likely to feel concern for how that person will take the message. She may try to put it in gentler terms. 

This does not make her less effective; it is her way of doing things that responds to a woman’s inner tendency to consider the whole person. The employee will be fired but possibly they may feel a bit less despairing afterwards. 

This does not mean that a man would be hateful or always hurtful but there is a tendency in men to compartmentalise their world. This allows them greater focus on a single task or person at one time, but it also means they are less likely to think of the whole person unless they are specifically involved with them. 

Stein was aware that these natural tendencies in men and women could become distorted. Men might have a greater tendency towards overworking to the detriment of their personal lives, or women might be more prone to overly intervene in the lives of those closest to them as a distortion of their natural inclination to care for the whole person. 

So Stein saw education as a way to avoid men and women falling into distortions, but when she spoke of education, she was proposing a holistic education, one that helped each individual to think critically and independently about the realities they encountered in their lives.  

For her this extended towards helping men and women acquire the ability to discover in themselves what they are called to be, and how their talents can be best developed in such a way that they serve the common good of the society they live in.

For those who might eschew such a wide-ranging vision of education, it is worth remembering that education can, and often does, extend beyond the individual person. For instance, public authorities frequently mount consistent campaigns around specific topics, such as the dangers of smoking, to encourage a change in mentality in the general public. 

A campaign aimed at reminding the public that raising children in a home that is stable and clean, and where they can find support as well as warm meals, is central to the well-being of society. The aim of such a campaign would be to create a society which cherishes, respects and supports the work needed in order to maintain healthy family life. 

Such a campaign would have to be supported by laws which hold the well-being of children and their parents as central. In this same way, other aspects of family life, and in particular, mother- and fatherhood, would need to be protected by law. 

For example, returning to the topic of mothers working outside of the home – which would also mean fathers being more involved in child rearing – laws would need to be enacted which allow for more reasonable parental leave so that both father and mother can contribute to the care of small children while continuing to work.

What I am proposing is nothing short of a revolution in our way of thinking, but one which actually responds to our deepest desires: to grow up in a stable, loving family and, when the time comes, to help create such a family ourselves.

We’ve had enough of anti-family legislation and activism and the fruits could not be more bitter: the breakdown of the family with all the social problems and psychological fall-out we are seeing.

And all this brokenness has come about through a false understanding of feminism: instead of valuing women as we are, society foists upon us roles and expectations we were never called to.

Stein suffered at the hands of an evil regime which proposed a false ideal: the Aryan race. But because she stayed true to who she was, her ideas and example have lived on. 

It’s time for the State and other institutions (the university, the arts, etc) to stop attacking and start supporting family life. And with this to find creative ways for women to access these fields with their unique gifts while bringing their feminine genius to building family life which is essential for the future of our society.

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