“A sexual revolution promised to liberate women from oppression,” she noted, “and wound up liberating men from commitment.” It also ushered in a devaluation of marriage, a 50 percent divorce rate and a popular culture which floods homes with pornography and pressures the young into promiscuity.

    “The modern feminist impulse to blame men first strikes us as heavy-handed and unhelpful,” said Campbell. “And most of us quietly relish the satisfaction that comes from caring and sacrificing for those we love.” She added, “As much as I sympathize with those who dismiss the modern feminist movement as an unmitigated disaster, I cannot agree. I am one of its beneficiaries.”

    Referring to women’s “dueling desires for respect and love, freedom and commitment, action and contemplation,” she noted there is a new urgency in modern times when a woman must “navigate a girlhood stripped of innocence, play a dating game devoid of rules, nurture a marriage in a culture of divorce, tend to children and aging parents in a society that does not value our care-giving and balance career and family without making an idol of either.”

    There is also, she related, an inner emptiness women are encountering and it is the same emptiness described by feminist Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, her book that helped launch the modern feminist movement in 1963. Friedan’s proposed solution to this “existential angst” was that women seek fulfillment in careers and politics, rather than marriage and motherhood, which became a mantra for women in the ’60s and ’70s.

    That movement sparked the sexual revolution, continued Campbell, providing the underpinnings for the collapse of traditional gender roles and mores and leading to everything from no-fault divorce to the daycare revolution. Straying from its high-minded beginnings, the women’s movement, she related, wound up sharply criticizing women who found fulfillment in their families and upheld the wisdom of traditional religion and values

    The children raised in this chaos, not surprisingly, have come to question this brand of feminism and have actually become more pro-life than their parents, she reported. “They reject modern feminist attempts to define fulfillment in purely materialistic terms of political power, professional achievement or sexual license,” she said. Instead, they are embracing what Pope John Paul II referred to as “The Feminine Genius.” In his 1995 encyclical, “The Gospel of Life,” he wrote: “In transforming culture so that it supports life, women occupy a place in thought and action which is unique and decisive.”

    This, he said, includes a special capacity for nurturing new life and recognizing the intrinsic dignity of the human person and is something women should use to defend the rights of all persons, especially the weak, the poor and the vulnerable. “In other words,” said Campbell, “we should use our feminine genius to transform the world.”

    Foreshadowing the pope’s writing here were the writings of brilliant feminist Edith Stein, a Jewish convert of the 1930s whose life ended at Auschwitz and whom John Paul canonized a saint in 1998. “Taken together,” said Campbell, “the work of these two Christian philosophers offers us an inspiring portrait of woman as a vessel of grace in the world, a person endowed by God with the unique gift for teaching the world how to love.”
We cannot understand our humanity apart from our masculinity and femininity, she related, as men and women each reveal something unique about God. “John Paul argued that our human longing for connection with others reflects the mysterious inner life of the Trinitarian God who created us,” she said, adding that men and women are called to live this communion of love in the world, demonstrating the love that exists in God. The most obvious example of this would be through marriage, but there are other manifestations of this, the highest being loving surrender to God himself.

    Although men and women were created in God’s image, she pointed out this became diminished in us after the fall of Adam and Eve and is prefigured in the sex specific curses meted out by God at that time. “Men face the particular temptation to objectify woman by dominating and possessing her,” said Campbell, while women face the temptation of allowing themselves to be objectified and used in attempting to posses men.
“This cycle can only be broken through God’s grace,” she added, through which we can navigate our relationships with the opposite sex and achieve the communion of love that God intended for us.

    She noted Pope John Paul’s Theology of the Body shows us three guiding principles for an authentic, Catholic feminism. First is the belief that every person has a God-given, innate dignity. While society tends to judge a person by his productivity, possessions, age or appearance, he noted that women have a special capacity to learn and teach authentic values. “If we want to live in a culture that respects our rights, we must respect the rights of all human persons,” Campbell said. “If we want to realize our full dignity as women, we must uphold the dignity of every human person.”

    The second principle of the New Feminism builds on this by acknowledging that men and women are equal but not identical, she related. “Our differences are an innate part of who we are as men and women,” she said, “and they allow us to complement each other in every way — physical, psychological, even ontological, that is, at the deepest level of our being.”

    “In romantic relationships,” she said, “a woman who believes that there are no innate differences between the sexes will feel embarrassed by her natural modesty, her longing for commitment and her wish to be pursued and honored, rather than treated as ‘one of the guys’ or a ‘friend with benefits.’”

    Rather than seeing the feminine instinct for nurturing as a hang-up to overcome, said Campbell, a woman should acknowledge this as a special gift from God. She related that Pope John Paul had an admiration bordering on awe of women’s “heightened capacity for accepting those who are different, caring for those who are weak, nurturing the growth of others and demonstrating heroic self-sacrificing love.”

    She described the third theme of the New Feminism as communion with God. “No amount of romance, professional success or even family joy can fulfill our feminine vocation apart from God,” she said. “Our thirst for love is too powerful to be quenched by anything less than God’s infinite love.”

    She noted, however, Edith Stein’s warning that our maternal instinct to nourish and protect can be overdone, leading to over-involvement in the lives of loved ones, which we should guard against. Two ways to avoid this are physical, objective involvement in tasks (a masculine trait) and God’s grace, found in prayer, the sacraments and the Scriptures.

    “By reminding us of the ultimate source of our fulfillment,” she said, “the New Feminism addresses both the spiritual emptiness of secular feminism and the superficial sentimentality against which modern feminists originally rebelled.” Friedan’s answer to the problem, Campbell noted, failed because it failed to account for our nature as males and females created in God’s image, created for love.

    The answer to the question of feminism that continues to confront us today, she said, is the authentic, Catholic feminist view that the only thing to truly satisfy the human heart is God himself — words so eloquently expressed by St. Augustine: “Our hearts were made for you, O Lord, and they are restless until they rest in you.” The New Feminism, Campbell said, points our restless hearts to the God who created us in his image and endowed women with the special gift of teaching the world how to love.

    “May God give us the grace,” she concluded, “to use that gift as he intended. And may he give us the courage to tell the world about the dignity of women and to share with our mothers and daughters, our sisters and our friends, the surpassing joy of being a beloved daughter of God.”