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TAN Books - Kimberly Cook

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122 pages

English

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The journey of popular podcaster Kimberly Cook was that of many directionless young women in recent decades. Unfortunately, her family fell away from the Catholic Church right before her critical high school years. Having been stripped of any healthy spiritual resources upon which to rely just when she needed them most, she quickly fell in with several outcasts, one of whom was a self-proclaimed "feminist." She had never really heard the term before, but "liked the anti-conformist confidence that her new friend exuded among the crowd of kids stepping over one another to fit in." In her words, "feminism opened a whole new world for me and led me down a twisted path that would eventually find me shrieking political rhetoric from stages across the country." Happily, God intervened. Returning to the Church in her early twenties, she struggled to let go of the feminist ideals that had been engrained in her - especially the disdain for motherhood. "As much as I came to fully understand (in my head) that motherhood was a good and worthy vocation, I just couldn't get it into my heart." In fact, it took numerous years, but eventually she came to embrace the vocation of marriage and motherhood and came to understand how very wrongheaded and destructive feminism is. Motherhood Redeemed is a book that challenges feminism in the modern world, with the reminder of the simple truth that all women are called to be mothers in one way or another.

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Publié par	TAN Books
Date de parution	13 novembre 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781505116502
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Motherhood Redeemed
MOTHERHOOD REDEEMED
How Radical Feminism Betrayed Maternal Love
Kimberly Cook
TAN Books Gastonia, North Carolina
Motherhood Redeemed: How Radical Feminism Betrayed Maternal Love © 2020 Kimberly Cook
All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts used in critical review, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible—Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition), copyright © 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Caroline Green
Cover image by TairA / Shutterstock
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020942442
ISBN: 978-1-5051-1648-9
Kindle ISBN: 978-1-5051-1649-6
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-5051-1650-2
Published in the United States by TAN Books
PO Box 269
Gastonia, NC 28053
www.TANBooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
To Cory, whose love and masculine virtue has encouraged me to discover my own authentic feminine genius
“A woman’s soul … is also fashioned to be a shelter in which other souls may unfold. Both spiritual companionship and spiritual motherliness are not limited to the physical wife and mother relationship, but they extend to all people with whom woman comes into contact.” 1
—St. Teresa Benedicta (Edith Stein)
_______________
1 Edith Stein, Essays on Woman , vol. II (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2017), 132.
Contents
Introduction
Part One: The Genesis of Feminism
What Is Feminism?
Fighting Her Disenfranchisement – Nineteenth Century
The Brave Old Maid and the Feminine Knight
Abortion – Nineteenth Century
What Say the Suffragettes on Abortion?
Part Two: Voluntary Motherhood
A New Era of Feminism – Twentieth Century
Margaret Sanger and Birth Control
The Spearhead
Planned Parenthood
The Sexual Revolution
The Catholic Response
The Power of Masculine Virtue
Part Three: The Dignity of Women
A New Beginning
Holy (and Not So Holy) Women
Mother of God
The Christian Household
I Am Mother
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Introduction
T he pain of motherhood is a cleansing fire. I experience this each time I birth a child, a true phenomenon of hanging on the precipice between life and death. In one moment, I’m recalling the pain and horror of being cast out of the Garden of Eden as my body trembles in the pain of childbirth. In the very next moment, as I hold my newborn child, I’m being ushered into the sweet relief of heavenly glory. There is no moment on earth like the moment of giving birth for a mother. Likewise, there are no tears to compare with those wept from the eyes of a mother who has lost her child in this lifetime.
A woman’s motherhood is not limited to the physical sphere. The heart of our nation has long been shaped by women who were driven to respond to the concerns afflicting humanity. Great women—though not always immortalized in history books—have come forth from every generation, demographic, and race to challenge injustice, fight for freedom, and uphold truth, goodness, and beauty. When women are allowed the space to assert themselves and nurture those they love, their full potential can be reached. Throughout history, many women were not given the freedom to assert themselves. Currently, women feel they must hide their nurturing gifts or divorce them from their work.
One of the greatest betrayals of women in today’s American culture is the deconstruction and denial of their physical and spiritual maternity. Women are put at enmity with their bodies and their sex: pregnancy is a disease to be avoided, and children are its curse. As one of the leading American women of the nineteenth-century women’s movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, said, “Wonder not that American women do everything in their power to avoid maternity; for, from false habits of life, dress, food, and generations of disease and abominations, it is to them a period of sickness, lassitude, disgust, agony and death.” 2 In the twenty-first century, women not only avoid physical maternity but shrink from embracing their spiritual maternity as well. This is their immense capacity of self-gift and an acceptance of others that brings unity and peace to the human family.
We’ll see how the suffragettes and abolitionists decried American patriarchy for robbing women of their personhood and reducing humanity to mere possession. For many, patriarchy became the enemy of justice, and even religion seemed to champion female oppression. This has paved the way for relativism and led masculinity to become defined by culture instead of divine revelation.
But who are we as women in the eyes of God? Where is the Christian woman’s place in the history of activism and the fight for her freedom and rights? How does our immeasurable maternal influence continue to echo throughout the chapters of American history?
I seek to illuminate the inseparable union of maternity—both biological and spiritual—and women. Motherhood extends beyond biological children and is the highest expression of femininity. As the great twentieth-century Jewish philosopher and Catholic convert St. Teresa Benedicta (Edith Stein) said, “Both spiritual companionship and spiritual motherliness are not limited to the physical wife and mother relationship, but they extend to all people with whom woman comes into contact.” 3 Stein said that “no woman is only woman ,” and regardless of her “individual specialty and talent,” her feminine nature offers something to the world that the male nature cannot .
This book weaves my personal experience of radical feminism with an overview of key points in the American feminism movement. By sharing my personal encounter, the reader will hopefully gain a balanced understanding of the leading feminists and philosophies of the movement. I also challenge the deconstruction of conception, sex, and gender while defending the great vocation of women, as upheld by the teachings of the Catholic Church.
Feminism was my rebellion against conformity and my expression to the world that I didn’t need anyone’s approval to dissent from traditional perceptions of women. It exuded power and resounded a unified female voice throughout history, which I came to discover wasn’t quite so unified. It also further removed me from embracing my innate feminine reality. This isn’t to discount the many goods rightly won for the freedom of women—continuously ending their undue oppression—but so few of these causes are justifiably exclusive to an unbiased feminism. The threads of feminism have been woven with harmful ideologies concerning women’s bodies, reproduction and participation in marriage and family life. Women have been influenced to reject both their nature and feminine virtue in the most vehement manner. When feminism was left unanswered, it allowed us to slide into our current cultural reality, in which you can’t question non-binary gender without being labelled an unenlightened transphobic or a bigot.
As I became more influenced by feminist philosophies, I rejected both government and religion. A disdain for motherhood began to develop within me, especially for women who sacrificed their education and career for the sake of motherhood. But worse than that was my own potential as a woman to undergo such a curse. I saw every pregnancy as a crisis pregnancy. Near the end of my involvement in the feminist movement and close to my own ruin, I discovered how the influence of feminism had deformed my soul. I became a disciple of St. John Paul the Great’s writings on the dignity of women and the feminine genius : the unique predisposition women have toward spiritual intuition, sensitivity, generosity, and fidelity. It was then that I knew what I was truly fighting against: a better version of myself, the woman God had created me to be.
For a long period of time, I believed that I could never be married or have children because of the residue of my disdain for motherhood, which might still lurk in the crevices of my soul. Discovering God’s love and wanting to serve him regardless of my woundedness, I considered a religious vocation where I could learn to love with maternal abandon. My fierce dedication to serve women was elevated through my faith and allowed me to participate in the healing work of many women. I went into the wilderness of Wyoming to serve young women deemed “hopeless” by their families and the justice system. I counseled and fought for women in Washington, DC, who were pregnant and often alone (many poor immigrants without basic means, medical access, or support). I taught students from many diverse backgrounds and shared the joys and sorrows of their young lives as I worked to get my master’s degree in theology.
To my great surprise, God did call me to marriage and to motherhood, my hardest and most rewarding task. Through motherhood, I encounter my ugliest vices as well as the elevated beauty of each human soul. Motherhood has unlocked the simple truth that love is not divided but rather multiplied. Every sacrifice, talent, and gift I have to offer is better because I am a mother. Now I work with God in becoming the best version of myself as I grapple with the awesome vocation of being entrusted with souls that are not my own.
It is no wonder that images like the Pietà and meditations of Jesus’s mother at the foot of the cross affect us so deeply. In experiencing the great suffering of loss through miscarriage, my heart was consumed with an emptiness that seemed impossible to overcome. The love that I had for my child who was not yet born, but whom I carried in my body, was sacred. It was as real as the true hidden presence of Jesus in the tabernacle. Through the loss of that child, my body ached for the pains of pregnancy and the labor that would bring tha