Modesty and beauty - the lost connection
by Regina Schmiedicke
In his book Man and Women, Dietrich von Hildebrand points to a particular "perfection" of the feminine nature: "We find in women a unity of personality by the fact that heart, intellect, and temperament are much more interwoven...This unity of the female type of human person displays itself also in a greater unity of inner and exterior life, in a unity of style embracing the soul itself as well as the exterior demeanor."(1) In other words, women possess a special genius for harmonizing their outward appearance with their interior life-for incarnating their beliefs and ideas in concrete, visible ways.
Sadly, just as many women have forgotten what it means to be feminine, we have also forgotten how to attain this unity. In short, while many of us Catholic women believe strongly in chastity and purity, our dress does not always reflect our convictions. In order to correct this situation, we need to recover a sense of the reason why women in the past dressed modestly, and how modest dressing "befits" the dignity and vocation of women.
In our fragmented society, scanty clothing has somehow become associated with women's social progress-as if the "right" to wear less indicated that we are moving up in the world. But my casual overview of history leads me to almost the opposite conclusion. It seems to me that in most cultures, the more clothing a person wears, the more important that person tends to be in society. (Read entire article)
Here is a humorous but compelling article, "In Praise of the Skirt."
6 comments:
Some of this goes *far* beyond the reach of this article. But scientists, obviously not funded by the chemical industry, have been tracking the relative strengths of estrogens and androgens in humans for the last 60 years. (It turns out, that it doesn't only matter how much estrogen or testosterone you have,) but also what the relative ratios between them are.
In the 1950s, they found that it was *very rare* but not unknown for a woman to have distinct hormone patterns that were customarily found in men. Today, they report that 33% or so of all women show these patterns.
If I had to guess what the causes are, my money would be on environmental and medicinal estrogens. In any event, it certainly would be interesting to research this.
That is interesting, sc. I wonder if the use of contraceptives has anything to do with the change?
SC's comment is really interesting. I think, however, that the aggressive behavior of women influences the hormone level and not the other way around. Unless we believe in materialism as the secret of the universe, rather than God, it is mind that is more important than matter. Women's aggressive behavior, cultivated by the feminist movement and the pervasive liberal media, consistently denigrates the feminine virtues of humility and self-sacrifice. Instead, we live in a culture that effectively demands that women respond and live as men, including an obsession with power and an embrace of sex as a physical act rather than the spiritual union of two people, and the consistent and relentless denigration of God. No wonder women's hormones are a little off-kilter, since their minds--bridled by society's norms of me-first-and-only--are constantly striving psychologically to suppress their female hormones.
Linda,
I'm afraid I can't agree. If you adjust these hormone levels before the age of 8 or perhaps 10, the children grow up to be normal adults. If you don't, they continue to evince the evidence of having had abnormal hormone levels.
And it's not limited to estrogen vs. testosterone (gonadal hormones); if a certain pituitary hormone is overly prevalent, the odds of the patient getting cancer are spectacularly good...
I have yet to hear of the person who claims that it's mind over matter when it comes to arsenic with or without old lace, or to the methamphetamines; why this should be different with the estrogens eludes my limited mind.
Of course, this doesn't belie the notion of free will per se.
A once notorious kook by the name of Galileo Galilei was rehabilitated by Holy Mother Church. I do not exclude the possibility that one day Planned Parenthood, the Democratic Party and the People for the American Way will hold conferences at which they beat their breasts, and ask Holy Mother Gaia, and all the activists and sponsors to forgive them for the injustices and calumnies they heaped on Paul VI and his successors.
The link to the article is broken -- it is now here.
Thanks!
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