Tea at Trianon: Feminism and Fertility

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, October 30, 2015

Feminism and Fertility

From First Things:

According to the 2010 Vital and Health Statistics, 62 percent of women are on contraceptives. This widespread use is socially reinforced by advertising messages and widely promoted notions of women’s health that denigrate the value of a woman’s fertility. Such messages put a woman “at war with herself,” Franks writes, “Contraception must be the only case in which a person takes a pill solely in order to thwart the natural purpose of a bodily system, all in the name of ‘health.’”

The contraceptive culture is now the status quo, but it doesn’t have to remain this way. In her Essays on Woman, Edith Stein says that a woman’s primary vocation is two-fold: as a spouse and mother. A woman may wear many hats, but her role as a mother retains a special importance. While being made in and for themselves as personal subjects, Mulieris Dignitatem explains that “motherhood is linked to the personal structure of the woman.” Those who are unmarried or infertile can participate in the call of motherhood by developing in themselves an open and loving heart in which others may rest and find peace. (Read more.)