After the June 7 release of her latest album, "brat," the 32-year-old English dance-pop star Charli XCX started what has become known as "brat summer."

The indifference of the album artwork expresses the very nature of what it means to be brat: It's not a big deal to be nonconforming.

A brat is someone who's a little grunge, a little bit feral. She's chaotic and cool. The cover features a garish lime-green behind a blurred sans serif font spelling out "brat."

She's probably wearing sunglasses and an oversize leather jacket, likely smoking cigarettes or sipping a Diet Coke. Her eyeliner is probably smudged in a way that looks intentional but effortless at the same time.

Deeper, being a brat means embracing your imperfections and being unapologetic for who you are and what you desire. You live your life free of shame. You can hold multiplicity in what you desire.

You can be soft and selfish, enjoy life for yourself while also thinking deeply about meaning, feminism and motherhood. Brat culture very intentionally steps away from the male gaze, helping you reclaim parts of yourself only for yourself.

The first brat

Eve is the original brat.

She took a bite of the forbidden fruit and things were never the same again.

Contributed to the mortality of all humanity? That's brat. Unlocked the awareness of good and evil? That's so brat. She's the scorned one, but she embraced her imperfections and helped create and redeem our messy humanity.

She carried her shortcomings with her and became the mother of all living things.

The album's cut "Apple" even evokes that apple — the one that Eve tasted that introduced messiness and imperfection into humankind.

I imagine Eve of the Bible listening to the lyrics of Charli XCX's song "Apple," which feels evocative of the weightiness of Genesis 2 and 3:

"I think the apple's rotten right to the core/ From all the things passed down/ From all the apples coming before/ I split the apple down symmetrical lines/ And what I find is kinda scary/ Makes me just wanna drive."

Historically, Eve has been blamed for any feminine shortcomings.

We're told that because of Eve's original sin, we can never fully trust ourselves because women are sinful and seductive, and we should be fundamentally ashamed.

For many women, their shame stems from the ways biblical passages have been misinterpreted, often by male authorities, to keep women in low places.

"It's so confusing sometimes to be a girl," Charli XCX sings in one of her new songs.

Last summer, the release of Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" movie set off what quickly became known as the "Year of the Girl," where girls embraced the vastness of girlhood and girl culture. They wore lace and ruffles and ribbons and leaned into softness.

Now at last, girls are unapologetically girls.

They can be girly or bratty or both. They wear bows in their hair and embrace all the things that they've been told to be embarrassed about: softness, sensuality and hyper-femininity among others.

These facets of womanhood are often considered frivolous and silly, yet the idea of brat summer helps women feel unashamed. Free of judgment, they can explore the wildness of what it means to be a girl.

Alongside Charli XCX, pop culture figures like Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter are unapologetically expressing their deepest desires to be sensual, playful and a little mischievous, for their own sakes.

Rather than viewing Eve as a low character in the Old Testament for eating the forbidden fruit, I want to reclaim her and bring her into the brat fold.

Some people want Eve, and all women as collateral, to feel perpetual shame for eating the forbidden fruit. But what if Eve moved forward instead?

Charli XCX has described a brat as "that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes. Who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of, like, parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things."

This is the heart of being a brat.

Celebrating Eve

Women make mistakes but are able to own up to them and continue to enjoy their lives.

Eve needs to be celebrated for her complex and beautiful story because she helped to create our story. We are sure to make mistakes, but we don't need to be weighed down by them. Our mistakes aren't our whole story. Eve deserves the same grace.

In the middle of her party girl hits, Charli XCX contemplates the possibility of becoming a mother in the song, "I think about it all the time."

"'Cause maybe one day I might/ If I don't run out of time/ Would it give my life a new purpose?/ I think about it all the time," she sings.

She touches on women's complex and seemingly conflicting desires, admitting her fear of missing out on motherhood and that her career feels "so small in the existential scheme of it all."

At no point does she contemplate under the male gaze. Instead women get to desire multiplicity for themselves, which brings us back to Eve.

Brat summer's truest message is that women and girls are wonderfully messy, and we can create life.

Women have permission to have flaws, to receive redemption, create new life and, like Eve, help redeem others.

• First published by Religion News Service
• Olivia Bardo is an author at Religion News Service.

Her name before becoming a nun was Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez, and she was born around 1651. Nicknamed "The Mexican Phoenix" and "The Tenth Muse", she advocated for the feminist cause long before it had a name.

Sor Juana was a fearless defender of the cause of education for women, she persistently rejected the life that was assigned for her as a woman of the 17th Century, and she relentlessly pursued an education, in a time in which women were not entitled to one.

Sor Juana is now considered a national icon in Mexico. Her face is featured in the 200 pesos bill, and her convent is now an important centre of higher education.

Last year, Netflix produced "Juana Inés", an original series based on her life.

One of her most famous verses reflects how she was a woman ahead of her time:

"O foolish men who accuse

women with so little cause,

not seeing you are the reason

for the very thing you blame:

for if with unequaled longing

you solicit their disdain,

why wish them to behave well

when you urge them on to evil?"

"You think highly of no woman,

no matter how modest: if she

rejects you she is ungrateful,

and if she accepts, unchaste." Read more

Human embodiment matters because we are our bodies rather than being some sort of disembodied minds that happen to be piloting meat suits.

Consequently, feminism focused on effacing the differences between men and women does not serve women's interests.

Harrington writes from experience.

After an extended adolescence exploring and experimenting with sexual liberation and queer theory, she lost her faith in progress and discovered the value of marriage and motherhood.

She explains that she had

"taken for granted the notion that men and women are substantially the same apart from our dangly bits, and ‘progress' meant broadly the same thing for both sexes: the equal right to self-realization, shorn of culturally imposed obligations, expectation, stereotypes or constraints. The experience of being pregnant, and then a new mother, blew this out of the water."

A unisex world of atomised individuals freed from the limitations and obligations of tradition, faith, family, and even embodiment is not good for women.

Harrington traces the sources of this ideology through material and intellectual developments, emphasising the importance of technological change in driving social change.

She begins with the Industrial Revolution, which increased economic asymmetry between the sexes by moving production out of the home.

Consequently, households became consumers of wages earned elsewhere, and labour became defined by wage earning.

This shift away from a home-based economic interdependence provoked an emphasis on companionate marriage and the "cult of domesticity."

This was an attempt to protect women's interests and assert the continued interdependence of the sexes, even as men became the sole breadwinners.

The home was held up as a refuge amidst the competitive instability of the market—a haven in a heartless world.

Given the reproductive asymmetry between men and women, in which the latter bear far more of the risks and burdens, this division between breadwinners and homemakers was defensible as the genuine pro-women view against more liberationist strains of feminism that sought to have women compete with men in an androgynous world of autonomous individualism.

The Pill ended the duel between these two forms of feminism.

Contraception seemed to liberate women from the perceived handicap of their natural fertility.

Control over fertility meant that sex would no longer render women at least potentially dependent upon men for support, and they could pursue education, careers, prestige and sexual pleasure with all the freedom and independence of men in the modern liberal world.

But it was not so simple.

Nature persists, and contraception and abortion did not eliminate all of the sexual asymmetry between men and women.

As Harrington puts it:

"A few short decades of sexuality unmoored from reproduction via technology are no match, it seems, for millennia of evolution."

Sexual liberation has established a ruthless relational and sexual market that creates a lot of losers and inflicts a lot of pain.

Far from establishing solidarity, the sexual marketplace exacerbates the war between the sexes. Instead of encouraging stable interdependence, it pushes men and women to exploit each other in highly sexed ways.

The result is increased alienation, loneliness, and—despite the promises of the sexual revolution—sex that is less frequent and less satisfying.

Harrington concludes that for "men and women alike, then, the sexual revolution has not delivered in practice.

Rather than grant all a marvellous new world of polymorphous sexual freedom," it has delivered "mutually antagonistic caricatures of those features of male and female sexual differences which persist despite our best efforts."

The result is a world of dating apps and camgirls, incels and OnlyFans. And in this world relationships and commitment are declining, and fertility is falling. Continue reading

Enough.

As a girl back in the 1970s, strong women surrounded me.

My mother, my grandmothers, my four aunts, my great-grandmother and my countless great-aunts were all uninfected by the feminist belief that they were failures unless they replicated their husbands' paid work.

These were high-contributing women who moved through the world with joy, energy, and unshakable respect for their own worth.

They ran beautiful homes. They filled life with love and laughter, intelligence and appreciation, determination and dynamism.

Some of them worked, most of them didn't.

Some of those who didn't work would have liked to, but, working or not, they all valued themselves as women.

I looked forward to growing up and becoming a strong woman like them.

Life for me would be even better, I thought, because feminism had liberated girls and women into a thrilling new age of freedoms.

We could be all that we were - female people with rational minds, active bodies, and womanly hearts.

We could have careers if we wanted them, children if we wanted them.

Reality began to crumble

As I left university in the mid-'80s, I entered a world I only half-recognized.

Gone were the proud women of my mother's, aunts' and grandmothers' pre-feminist generation; in their place were self-rejecting women who denied and despised their contribution as mothers and managers of a home.

Instead of seeking a workplace timetable that accommodated their pre-existing work as housewives and mothers, these women slammed a 9-to-5 working day designed for a man down on their own heads.

It was difficult to reconcile their claims to be ‘strong' women with their hostility to their own validity, contribution and needs as housewives, mothers and the central force of humanity that all good women are.

I liked working in my twenties and early thirties, but I also liked the uniquely female work I did—running and decorating a home, cooking, going out on household errands, and staging festivities like Christmas.

Or rather, I liked the female work I tried to do.

Working on a masculine 9-to-5 timetable hobbled my attempt to be a powerful woman in charge of her domestic work.

What should have been domains of fulfilment—unpaid work at home, paid work in a career—were domains of frustration.

A female workplace timetable? It didn't exist. Feminism refused to provide it.

Motherhood was a shock

An even bigger shock was single motherhood.

That a movement that calls itself ‘pro-woman' could let fathers desert mothers was dumbfounding.

I know beyond any doubt that feminism has failed me.

What should have been a life of possibility has been a life of disempowerment and disappointment.

Any time a woman wants to be more like a man, feminism flings open the doors and makes it happen.

When she wants to be a woman—that is, when she wants her work as a mother and housewife validated, and when she wants a workplace that accommodates it—feminism slams the door in her face.

What we women have been living in since the 1980s isn't a pro-woman society. It's a masculinist society that urges us all to work like a man in order to self-actualize as a woman.

Take our careers away, and we are no longer valid human beings, in feminism's eyes.

My book, Roar Like A Woman: How Feminists Think Women Suck and Men Rock (on sale 5 now) explores the many ways feminism has failed to serve us—and looks at how we women can put it right.

• Natalie Ritchie is the author of Roar Like a Woman: How Feminists Think Women Suck and Men Rock, released in June 2018.

  The book explores the many ways feminism has failed to serve us—and looks at how we women can put it right.

  Natalie is a mother of two teens, and lives in Sydney. Opinion piece first published at www.roarlikeawoman.com. Republished with permission.

"The ship has sailed. The horse has bolted," says Shelly Bridgeman in her opinion piece in the New Zealand Herald.

"So now it's up to the audience and the advertisers to show their disapproval."

"Potential viewers can do this by simply not watching it."

"Brands and retailers can do this by specifying that their television commercials do not appear during episodes of The Bachelor NZ."

"As a feminist, I find few things more torturous than watching The Bachelor," wrote Lizzie Marvelly, after watching an episode of The Bachelor NZ last year.

"Feminism is meant to give women choices, and one of those choices may well [bafflingly] be to take part in a reality television show that makes women compete for the ultimate prize of a man."

"The very premise makes my heart hurt: a group of women vying for the attention of a man for some sort of validation that can only be found on national TV,"

"It's the kind of idea that would have Kate Sheppard spinning in her grave."

Casting sessions were held to find the bachelorettes. As part of the selection process members of the public were invited to vote "yes" or "no" for a list of five prospective participants.

But there was no casting call for the Bachelor - instead the selection process in secrecy.

Last Friday Mediaworks announced that Zac Franich has been chosen as of The Bachelor NZ for 2017

The 28-year-old from the Hibiscus Coast works full time as the head coach at the Orewa Surf Life Saving Club.

Source

• stuff.co.nz
• www.nzherald.co.nz
• newshub.co.nz
• www.newshub.co.nz
• Image: nzherald.co.nz

Dr. Mary Anne Case, a law professor at the University of Chicago, answered in the affirmative, while Erika Bachiochi, a visiting fellow at the University's Ethics and Public Policy Center, answered in the negative.

Bachiochi argued the church offers "a genuine pro-woman theology which not only safeguards and protects her stance as a feminist, but also enhances her ability to be strong in all aspects of her life".

Case counter-argued that while Catholic feminism exists, the institutional Catholic Church - ie the Vatican and Magisterium - is overtly anti-woman.

She says the church has let women down. Where the early church and gospels were not anti-woman, the later church has shown itself to be so.

"The problem with the Catholic Church is that all authority flows from ordination. The Magisterium - as it need not be - is composed of men and cardinals," Dr. Case said.

Bachiochi argued Case's ideas "reeked of clericalism".

"I have no less authority than a priest as a baptized Christian," Bachiochi said.

"A priest has authority to represent Christ in a sacramental way, and I have the authority to represent Christ in every other area of my life,".

She also noted "Mary, the Mother of God, is heralded by the Catholic Church as the single greatest human that has ever lived."

"The greatest among us are not the clerics, but the saints," she said.

Source

• CNA
• Patheos
• Image: The Sydney Morning Herald

When I was young, I always imagined I would be married by 25 and have a brood of kids. Jesus said in the Gospel of Matthew to "make disciples," and I thought it would be cool to take that verse literally and have 12 kids. I wanted enough kids to fill a baseball team, a hockey bench and a big house full of love.

That obviously didn't happen.

Or it hasn't happened yet. But I love my life. I spent last weekend learning how to scull on the Potomac River. I have good friends, a great family, hobbies and one of the best jobs I've ever had.

Do I feel a void because I'm not married and I don't have children yet? Sure. Do I wish I were having sex? Of course.

But I believe that I'm living a fuller, better life because of my commitment to sexual integrity. I spend all day, every day doing the things that I want to do, because I'm not wasting my time worrying about waking up next to a stranger, contracting a sexually transmitted infection or missing a period.

The truth is, I am able to live the feminist dream because I'm not stressing over the things that sex outside of marriage often brings. And I'm not alone.

A recent study in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior showed that young people - specifically millennials - are now more than twice as likely to be sexually inactive than the previous generation.

Although there are many possible causes for this shift, it's quite reasonable to believe that this generation doesn't want the stresses that sex outside of marriage brings - unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, to name a few.

Maybe they realise that a condom doesn't protect the heart, and that true love is something worth waiting for and fighting for. Continue reading

• Kate Bryan is a writer in Washington, D.C., who has worked for conservative and anti-abortion organizations.

I beg to differ.

I originally sent this piece to Daily Life in the hope of engaging with Hamad on this important women's issue, but the response I received was: "unfortunately it's not quite right for us." This lack of openness to dialogue is disappointing from a news publication.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and I may not see eye to eye on many things, but we do agree on this: you can be a feminist and pro-life. How do I know this? Because I am both.

I am passionate about women's rights and achieving equality for women in all areas of life.

But I am also passionate about human rights, starting with the inherent dignity and right to life of all human beings, no matter their age, capabilities, sex, race and so on. I could not be pro-women and pro-women's rights if I were not first pro-human and pro-human rights.

Hamad's reasons for why one cannot be a feminist and pro-life essentially boil down to four myths.

Hamad maintains that feminism is about women's liberation and thus entails the freedom of women to control their own bodies. She asserts that this includes the freedom to decide when and if she should reproduce and the choice to have an abortion if she does not so wish.

According to Hamad, one cannot therefore be a feminist without supporting the right of women to make their own choice as to whether or not to have an abortion.

Our culture's obsession with autonomy often means that choice is heralded as one of the greatest goods or even a right, often with little regard for what is being chosen. However, choice is not a good in itself. It is essential to consider what is being chosen. Continue reading

• Rachael Wong is a barrister from New Zealand. She is currently working with the Law Reform Commission in Samoa to bring about legislative reform to improve the lives of Samoan women and girls.

Reaction from the bishops' critics didn't take long. Some said the bishops themselves have very serious problems with pornography; others pointed out the not-so-distant sex abuse crisis.

The upshot was that the bishops ought to have different priorities.

One could be forgiven for confusing this disagreement with one from the 1980s.

Didn't it play out over a generation ago — with the result that our culture basically accepts porn as part of sexual liberation?

Perhaps. But the era of magazine and video porn has been replaced by online porn, and this may lead us to wonder if Catholic teaching on this topic is worth a second look.

Indeed, the bishops' new initiative resisting porn is likely to gain many unexpected allies, including many feminists.

The digital age has produced a situation in which on-demand video of virtually any sexual act is available for free at the click of a mouse. Last year, one site alone had 18.35 billion visits, leading some to call porn "the wallpaper of our lives."

And as virtual reality porn becomes available, it is difficult to see how this trend might reverse itself.

The result has been that porn now dominates the American sexual imagination. What sex is for has been "pornifed."

The rise of "hook-up culture" is instructive here: Such casual and impersonal sex is, unsurprisingly, very similar to a porn scene.

Feminists — from Andrea Dworkin in the ‘80s to Naomi Wolf today — are among the few allies joining the Catholic bishops in energetically resisting this trend.

The porn industry, it turns out, is overwhelmingly patriarchal and works out terribly for women. Continue reading

• Charles C. Camosy is associate professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University.

Her novels, written under the name Fiorella De Maria, include Poor Banished Children, Do No Harm, and her latest, We'll Never Tell Them.

She was interviewed for Catholic World Report by email:

CWR: In addition to being a novelist, you are also quite active in advocacy on pro-life issues, and are a researcher for the UK's Society for the Protection of Unborn Children. How did you first get involved with this type of work?

Fiorella Nash: I became involved with pro-life activism as a student, but I came to it from the less-usual route of left-wing social justice campaigning.

I always imagined that I would be a professional campaigner and writer when I left university, but I expected to end up working in theatres of war or earthquake zones.

I practically grew up marching and holding candles at vigils for prisoners of conscience, my parents were heavily involved with our local Amnesty group for years, before Amnesty became entangled in the whole sexual-rights agenda, and I learnt a lot about the world of campaigning and what motivates people to become involved in good causes.

A big reality check for me came while at university.

I was not involved in the pro-life society for my first couple of years, but I had always opposed abortion and I could not get my head round the fact that people could talk in passionate terms about standing in solidarity with the most vulnerable—the poor, the homeless, the stateless—but when it came to the unborn, it became: "my body, my control, my lifestyle, my right to do whatever I like and to hell with the vulnerable person in the way."

For me, being pro-life was the ultimate social justice campaign—protecting the most vulnerable human lives—and it was when I realized how little support and protection there was for the unborn and for women in crisis pregnancies that I began to dedicate more time to the pro-life movement. Continue reading

Source & Image:

• Catholic World Report

The Pontifical "Antonianum" University and four embassies to the Holy See sponsored the conference held on Tuesday.

It came after Pope Francis's invitation to seek a "more widespread and incisive female presence" in the Church.

According to Vatican Radio, the conference was a "no-holds barred conversation about the structures and mentalities which continue to impede that vision and limit the leadership roles of women in the Church today".

Religious and lay women and men asked questions about why there are not more female professors and pastoral trainers in seminaries and universities?

Other questions included: Why can't a women head pontifical councils and congregations, preach a retreat to the Roman Curia or be included in the Pope's council of closest advisors?

If there is a unique "feminine genius", as Pope John Paul liked to say, then why is it not being heard and included in the decision making process at both local and universal level, the Vatican Radio article continued.

Among the conference speakers was Sr Carol Keehan, CEO of the Catholic Healthcare Association of the United States.

She is best known in the secular world for her support of President Obama's Affordable Care Act.

Sr Carol said the advancement of women is not about personal or feminist agendas.

Rather, it is about enabling the Church to put the Gospel message into practice, in those places where it is needed most, she said.

She said it is right to be more concerned about the woman who doesn't have clean water for her children than about "our little bit of opportunity".

But if having a woman in a position of influence meant the Church could better serve the woman without water and her family, then "heaven and earth should be moved to get that woman in that job".

Sources

• Vatican Radio
• Image: Vatican Radio

Since the beginning of this year, that love started to disappear and his weekly columns in the Bay of Plenty Times had become a chore.

That's why he's decided to put away his pen and focus on enjoying the days he has left.

George, who has terminal cancer, said perhaps it was the pain medication he took, but the writing had stopped flowing like it used to.

He said in the past few months, his columns had been a good way of keeping his mind off what was happening to him.

He said he'd appreciated the freedom to write about whatever he wanted - and realised that the editors of papers often put up with "a lot of crap" because of his columns.

"Part of it is the fact that I have been blatantly Christian. A lot don't like that at all."

It's that Christian message shared through his Christmas and Easter columns in particular that he is most proud of.

Source

• www.nzherald.co.nz
• Image: truebluenz

Fordham University theologian Sr Elizabeth Johnson told an assembly of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in Nashville that tension between the Vatican and women religious has historical, sociological and ecclesiastical roots.

But a solution could be found, she said told the sisters, who had honoured her with an Outstanding Leadership Award.

Sr Johnson said there have always been tensions between religious communities and the hierarchy.

This is because one is based on a radical living of the Gospel and the other is based on administration, which requires order.

The issue is also sociological, she said, according to the National Catholic Reporter.

"The Church did not start out this way, but as an institution, it has evolved a patriarchal structure where authority is executed in a top-down fashion and obedience and loyalty to the system are the greatest of virtues," Sr Johnson said.

Finally, she said, the tensions are ecclesiastical because women religious have undergone the renewal called for by the Second Vatican Council and the hierarchy has not.

"Certainly, the LCWR and the sisters they lead are far from perfect, but they have got the smell of the sheep on them," she said.

"Post-Vatican II renewal has not taken place at the [Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith]."

The decision to honour Sr Johnson led CDF prefect Cardinal Gerhard Muller in April to order that future speakers at LWCR assemblies be approved by a Vatican representative.

Cardinal Muller had noted the US Bishops' conference criticisms of Sr Johnson's writings because of the "gravity of the doctrinal errors".

But Sr Johnson said Cardinal Muller's comments showed he had not read her writings and simply reiterated the US bishops' criticisms.

She said the latter were deficient and unworthy of the teaching office of bishops.

Investigating women's orders was unconscionable when there were grave issues like covering up abuse and financial mismanagement in the Church, she added.

The LCWR has been undergoing a Vatican-ordered doctrinal investigation since 2009.

In 2012, the CDF ordered the group to reform its statutes and appointed an archbishop to oversee changes.

Sr Johnson praised the sisters for their commitment to "meaningful, honest dialogue" and urged them to stay the course.

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter
• Religion News Service
• Image: National Catholic Reporter

She was a staunch atheist, and spent the evening telling me, as many have done before, that Christianity is unavoidably and embarrassingly patriarchal.

She urged me to throw off the shackles of my misogynistic faith.

I am surprised at how frequently this happens at feminist gatherings.

Regularly I find myself the only Christian present, treated like an anomaly in need of conversion to fully fledged, religion-free feminism.

Often it takes me a while sheepishly to admit my faith in these circles.

Finally I pipe up that actually I do "believe in that stuff", between the tirades of "God is dead" and "Religion is the oppressor!" that usually emanate from the microphone.

In years of attending feminist seminars and marches, one thing has become clear: you are about as likely to meet another Christian there as you would a vegan at a meat-feast buffet. Continue reading.

Vicky Beeching is a theologian, writer, and broadcaster who is researching the ethics of technology.

Source: The Church Times

Image: Worship Leader

Indeed. Forty years after that statement and fifty years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique, the road that Friedan embarked upon has led women to places they have never been before—entering the workforce and academia in ever-higher numbers, yes, but also historically low fertility rates, no-fault divorce, and abortion on demand. The emotional consequences for women have not been rosy. Stevenson and Wolfers report that, in spite of the fact that all objective measures of women's happiness have risen, both women's subjective well-being and their well-being relative to men have fallen since the 1970s. For the first time in the last 35 years, men report higher levels of happiness than do women.

Friedan's diagnosis of "the problem that has no name"—women's sense of purposelessness—was justified, but her prescriptions have been disastrous. The road that Betty Friedan and second-wave feminists paved has led women to lives new and unfamiliar, but not to a solution to the problem. In following the impact of feminism through three broad categories of the life cycle—education, child-bearing years, and the empty nest—we see that the promises of feminism have fallen flat, as women have bought into a feminist mystique that has left them more alone and conflicted in their pursuit of fulfillment than ever before.

Friedan oft laments what she calls the "sex-directed education" of women. Women, she discovered when interviewing college girls to write her book, embark upon higher education primarily to meet a man and cannot be bothered with academic pursuits. Continue reading

Sources

• The Family in America
• Image: tumblr

Two "Band of Brothers" seminars were arranged by Matakana School to help fathers get more involved in their sons' lives, and as a forum for dads to share their issues. One session was for dads and another was for fathers and sons. Continue reading

In a chapter entitled Rediscovering Forgotten Features: Scripture, Tradition and Whose Feet May Be Washed on Holy Thursday Night, Rushton conducts a detailed investigation into the feet washing rite.

Her concern is with the little known history of the insertion of the word viri (men) into the feet washing rite, an innovation that she says "departs from tradition which prior to our own time never excluded women formally." She concludes that, "Both scripture and the history of the tradition of the foot washing critique the present rubric as ‘distorting' and gendered."

Rushton is one of three Mercy sisters to contribute to the book, Reinterpreting the Eucharist: Explorations in Feminist Theology and Ethics, which is a collection of writings on the Eucharist by female scholars.

It was launched in Melbourne on 28 February.

Source

• Sisters of Mercy New Zealand
• Image: Patheos

It was a statement that seemed directly at odds with her circumstances: the 37-year-old is one of the most powerful women in the technology industry, Google's first female engineer and now head of a Fortune 500 company. After the birth of her first child just months into her new role, she resolved the angst of mother-child separation by building a nursery alongside her office so that she could bring the baby to work.

Mayer might not call herself a feminist, but in smashing through the glass ceiling of a male-dominated industry she is standing, in part, on the shoulders of all those feminists from decades and centuries past who spent their lives fighting for gender equality.

While her comments have offended the women for whom the connections between modern-day female liberty and the feminist movement are still obvious and strong, they also highlight the way in which progress has transformed the feminist ideal in the western world.

Although women still earn considerably less than men for the same work, are not well-represented at senior levels in business and politics and are often valued for their youth and beauty rather than their skills and expertise, they exist in a largely egalitarian milieu when compared to women in developing countries.

In Australia, girls are outperforming boys at school, more of them are going on to university, and less of them are being discriminated against in the workplace. There is no need for militant drive and a chip on the shoulder when the fight has already been won.

Despite all this, feminism is still as relevant as ever, if only as a structure with which to maintain the advancements that have brought us to this point and to ensure that we don't regress. Continue reading

Sources

• Catherine Marshall in Eureka Street
• Image: Literatur Haus Stuttgart
  

Catherine Marshall is a journalist and travel writer.

She goes on to speak about how it is that she is a feminist and still a Catholic, and that while she finds in the Church "things that abhor and disgust me ... none of these takes away from the core tenets of my faith: that Jesus is both human and divine, the son of God, and in him I am saved".

• Read Kristina Keneally's address
• Image: Illawarra Mercury

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