Embracing Pandora’s Box

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan argued that American women suffered from a malaise she called "the problem that had no name." Her critique of domestic ennui helped launch the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s, leading to many of the advances women now take for granted. But not everything has changed. So we asked women to answer this question: If you had to pinpoint today's problem that had no name, what would it be? Read the other responses here. [2]

I never read The Feminine Mystique. I know Betty Friedan changed a lot of women's lives, because whenever I was with her women would interrupt us to tell her she had changed their lives. But the ennui described in The Feminist Mystique-educated middle-class women trapped in the homemaker role, wondering if there was more to life-was outside the realm of my experience.

In 1963, I was entering the real world, emerging from a working-class Catholic girlhood, including a year in the convent at the age of 19. My early education with the sisters was filled with holy cards depicting medieval nuns. These women had defied parents and suitors and entered convents to be free of male control and the burdens of reproduction. In my view, they lived the life of the mind. Compared to my mother's life-four children, two failed marriages with men who abandoned her, followed by the 11 p.m.-to-7 a.m. shift as a telephone operator in the late '50s-religious life appeared to promise both freedom and security.

But the problem, I came to see through my own experience, was that for women in the convent, as in the world, the act of seeking freedom is suspect. You are not secure, you are vulnerable. You either accept this or you go crazy.

Take the women on those holy cards. The church said give up sex and we will give you some freedom. They escaped marriage, but ended up tortured by patriarchy's need to subdue their drive for freedom. History indicates it was a bad bargain. If they were the Joan of Arc type, they got burned at the stake. Mystics like St. Teresa of Avila had imaginary love affairs with Jesus, but beat themselves and committed "holy anorexia" by inducing vomiting (in her case using olive tree twigs). St. Catherine of Siena, a 14th century nun, philosopher, and diplomat, actively engaged in brokering the return of the Avignon pope to Rome, only to end her life by starving herself to death out of love for her heavenly bridegroom Christ.

Things have changed a bit since I was regaled in high school with stories of St. Maria Goretti, the teenage Italian girl who fought off her rapists to save her virginity for God and died from multiple stab wounds. But Catholicism still makes saints out of women who deny their bodies and sacrifice their lives obeying church rules. In 1994, Elizabetta Canori Mora was beatified by John Paul II. What made her worthy for consideration as a saint? She stayed married to her husband in spite of the fact that he beat her and abandoned her. In 2004, Gianna Beretta Molla refused to have an abortion while pregnant so that her fourth child could be born, only to die of cancer one week after her daughter's birth. These are the examples of good women the Vatican presents to young girls: We can't all be virgins and mothers like Mary but we can be strong enough to sacrifice our lives as these women did.

And some women have it even worse. In the Muslim world, they are not even offered the option. Their lives are simply taken from them by fathers, brothers, husbands, and governments when they demonstrate any form of independent thought. They are stoned, beaten, burned, blinded, and otherwise destroyed by the rage men still feel when women take the least control of their lives.

This phenomenon, this fear of women, deeply rooted in religion, is not limited to religion. It is ubiquitous in all of society for all time including the present. This is why, even with the advent of second-wave feminism, the fear of women's sexuality and reproductive power did not abate; it was somewhat muted among well-educated elites, but it was there simmering under the surface. Men were more insecure than ever. For all their power, they cannot give life. For most of history, they could console themselves with the reality that women's ability to give life was so dangerous that we died in childbirth. And, because men controlled us in marriage, we could not freely decide when we would get pregnant or how often. With second-wave feminism, the advent of the birth control pill, and the legalization of abortion, our control over life became almost God-like. We could bring children into the world when we wished, with whomever we wished, and we could also say no to life. We could decide to abort their child.

What's more, feminism's rejection of the Christian version of women's sexual sinfulness threatened all men and all religion. The religious backlash against feminism, whether Catholic or fundamentalist, wasn't about equal pay for equal work. It was about feminists who asserted that sex was good with or without marriage, and science cooperating by severing the link between sex and reproduction.

Unfortunately, in some ways, feminism is no longer about personal freedom. Perhaps we bought into the patriarchy's charge that we were selfish and individualistic. Second-wave feminists seem increasingly unwilling to talk about sexual freedom. It seems the only feminists left who are willing to name the enemy in the fight for women's sexual freedom are lesbians and good Catholic girls. Perhaps that's because the nuns and our mothers told us that life was not a popularity contest; it was about doing the right thing. And the right thing for 21st Century feminism is to go back to basics: "No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body." It is as true today as it was when Margaret Sanger had the guts to say it in 1920.

Our bodies are still the focal point of the struggle for women's freedom. And it is still religion that says we do not own our bodies-and, more shockingly, still asserts that suffering will make women free. There are indeed many feminisms. But all need to be passionate about a woman's right to do more than avoid pain, to be more than men's equal. We need to be uncompromising and unashamed of the pursuit of pleasure.