A woman's femininity

During this Women’s Month, we appreciate with gratitude, the significance of the role of women in society, mainly through their important contribution in helping build pleasant and well-managed family life and in forming children, our future. The welfare of women, especially those in the workforce, merit immediate attention, given their added responsibilities in family life. Women have an irreplaceable role in taking care of the home, family and children. In addition to this important duty, some women still work outside the home, in order to help augment family income. Thus, laws should address needs providing support for women who earn a living outside the home, with dignity, fair remuneration, and flexible working hours, so as to be able to properly attend also to the family and children’s needs. 

Saint Josemaría Escriva, the Saint of ordinary life, aptly advised on “Women in Social Life and in the Life of the Church,” that “the home and the family will always occupy a central place in the life of a woman. For it is obvious that when she spends time on her family she is fulfilling a great human and Christian role. Nevertheless,” the Saint continued, “this does not exclude the possibility of her having other professional work — for housework is also professional work — in any worthwhile employment available in the society in which she lives.

“Even on the personal level one cannot flatly affirm that a woman has to achieve her perfection only outside the home, as if time spent on her family were time stolen from the development of her personality. The home — whatever its characteristics, because a single woman should also have a home — is a particularly suitable place for the growth of her personality. The attention she gives to her family will always be a woman's greatest dignity. In the care she takes of her husband and children or, to put it in more general terms, in her work of creating a warm and formative atmosphere around her, a woman fulfils the most indispensable part of her mission. And so it follows that she can achieve her personal perfection there.”

Saint Josemaría Escriva further enlightened, in this interview with him, that “what I have just said does not go against her participating in other aspects of social life including politics. In these spheres, too, women can offer a valuable personal contribution, without neglecting their special feminine qualities. They will do this to the extent to which they are humanly and professionally equipped. Both family and society clearly need this special contribution, which is in no way secondary to that of men.

“Women are called to bring to the family, to society and to the Church, characteristics which are their own and which they alone can give: their gentle warmth and untiring generosity, their love for detail, their quick-wittedness and intuition, their simple and deep piety, their constancy... A woman's femininity is genuine only if she is aware of the beauty of this contribution for which there is no substitute and if she incorporates it into her own life.”

(Conversations with Msgr Escriva, 87; http://www.escriva.org).

Thank you and a Blessed Easter!

-- Ching D. Aunario
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