2.3 Women Are Human Beings
In his famous essay by the same name, Wendell Berry asks the important question “What are people for?” A similar question could be asked about women. And the answer is connected. He makes the point that people are to be degraded and dehumanized in our current culture. Something similar has happened to women. They’ve been removed completely from their proper context and put into boxes - one side says they belong in a career, they ought to look just like men. The other side says they belong in the home and what they do there is limited. The idea that women are human beings has failed to occur to many.
Show Notes:
“You will find that you cannot help teaching children your own religion, whatever it is. If you are an atheist, that will be clear to them, even if you think you’re teaching nothing but social studies. If a belief in God motivates your life, the children are going to know that, too, whether you ever mention God or not. If you are more interested in money than anything else, that’s not going to escape them. You’ve got to accept the fact that you are basically not teaching a subject, you are teaching children. Subjects can probably be better taught by machines than by you. But if we teach our children only by machines, what will we get? Little machines. They need you, you as persons….What I am is going to make more difference to my own children and those I talk to and teach than anything else I tell them.”
- Madeleine L’Engle from A Circle of Quiet
“May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: "Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice, and looked on their adversity, etc. Let them therefore praise the Lord, because He is good, and His mercies endure forever. Yea, let them which have been redeemed of the Lord, shew how He hath delivered them from the hand of the oppressor. When they wandered in the; desert wilderness out of the way, and found no city to dwell in, both hungry, and thirsty, their soul was overwhelmed in them. Let them confess before the Lord His loving kindness, and His wonderful works before the sons of men."”
― Quote from William Bradford (1590-1657) from Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647
“It is the properly humbled mind in its proper place that sees truly, because – to give only one reason – it sees details.”
- Wendell Berry - People, Land, and Community
“I . . . have vices, hid, perhaps, from human eye, that bend me to the dust before God, and loudly tell me, when all is mute, that we are formed of the same earth, and breathe the same element. Humanity thus rises naturally out of humility, and twists the cords of love that in various convolutions entangle the heart.”
— Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) from “The Vindication of the Rights of Women.” HT: “The Burden and the Gift,” an Eve Tushnet interview with Erika Bachiochi on The Rights of Women
“Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there had never been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged about them, who never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated either as “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!”; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously, who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be “feminine” or jeered at them for being female; who had no ax to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious.” —Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) from “The Human-Not-Quite Human,” in Are Women Human? Penetrating, Sensible, and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 68.
Quote from J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
Find Emily at: https://agoodwilderness.substack.com/