Extraordinary Ordinary Women

One of the main intentions for this blog is to bring to the foreground positive models of femininity. Unfortunately, these stories are really hard to come by in the media, especially in main-stream media. Thankfully however, every now and then, the local media give us little gems of reality as an encouragement and a lesson.

María Keller and Shegitu Kebede are two ordinary woman who have attracted a sliver of media attention. What do these women have in common? Both have endured great suffering, both are immigrants in the US, and both are living exemplary lives of service to their local community.

Kebede grew up an orphan in Ethopia, whence she managed to escape after almost four years of dangerous and taxing journey. She, among many other women at the time, was subject to violence and rape that ran rampid in the country, even and especially by their own government officials during epochs of war.  After she made it to the US with her children, she was soon joined by her husband, which only added fuel to the fire of her wounds. More suffering befell her as she endured abuse for years before finding the courage to leave her husband.

Kebede has found healing through service. Now in the Twin Cities, she spends her life helping refugee immigrants establish themselves and find communal support, recruiting student volunteers to tutor refugee children, and helping women who have been abused find healing and rediscover their dignity.

María perhaps has a less spectacular story, but lives an equally admirable life. She left her native country of Peru, where she met her husband who was serving as a missionary, to be with him in the US. After having overcome initial difficulties that she encountered as an immigrant, she did nothing less than put herself at the service of those with whom she could empathize. Maria’s service to struggling immigrant families is one of welcoming into a new nation, and encouragement to uphold the family values and faith they have received in their own countries. This mother of three children also works as a psychotherapist for at-risk teens in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA through a community based educated agency, the Guadalupe Alternative Programs.

This sensitivity toward the human person, toward the suffering, and the generous response to give, to serve, is part of the essence of woman.

Read all about it! A Prostitute's Life.

An article on the life of a prostitute is featured today on the homepage of NYTimes.com. Barbara Terry has spent almost her entire adult life working as a prostitute in the Bronx. This jaw-dropping “character study”, as the paper defines it, gives a glimpse into Ms. Terry’s outlook on her “job” as a prostitute, her motives, and the struggles she has encountered but has learn to overcome.  She is presented as being proud of her “job” and of the fact that she is one of the oldest women in the business.

Just in case anyone has doubts, prostitution is indeed illegal in New York. A summary of the laws can be viewed here.

We don’t hear about any regrets. Her adult children, however, continue to beg her to get off the streets. “I’m the mother, so they can’t say anything,” she says, “when I’m ready to get off, I’ll get off.”

On one hand, we have a woman who has no idea of her dignity as a woman, as a human person. She sells a most intimate part of herself for the pleasure of another. There is also a trivialization of the sexual act and a person’s sexuality (which we also saw in the sexual abuse phenomenon commented on in the last post). Then, we have this reality publicized and left without analysis or contextualization.

It is hard to guess what would be the intentions of the journalist or the paper with this article. This life as a prostitute is portrayed as something normal and even acceptable, at least by Ms. Terry.

It goes against Ms. Terry’s dignity to publish an article on her life as a prostitute, whether she thinks so or not. But the article written as such fails to orient the reader. What kind of information is this? Here is a woman who lives a degrading (and illegal) life and she is cool with that. That’s it; the article ends there.

This is the one article on the homepage today that is centered on a woman. This is the only model of woman given to the public by this major paper today. The photo of Mr. Terry, a 52-year old expert prostitute and mother of four, is the featured photo of the homepage.

It is no doubt that we are in a need of renewal of culture, to rediscover what is means to be a person, to be a woman.

Sexual Abuse: Why All the Fuss?

Jane Brody’s article in the New York Times, The Twice Victimized of Sexual Assault, addresses the overwhelming victimization of women by sexual abuse, and the problems they encounter when they report it. Though the tone of the article is a bit crude, the reality is of the content is even worse. The majority of American women are sexually abused, assaulted or harassed in some way, and usually it is by someone they know and trust. Only 40% of the cases, however, are reported. Studies highlight various reasons for failure to report, one being fear. Some women, however, don’t even realize the seriousness of the suffering they endure. In other words, they don’t even realize that they really are victims of a grave violation to their person, and therefore, do not think it is something that ought to be reported to authorities. 

Many women consider it to be a personal problem, something of a bad day, to suffer through and get over on their own. How can this even be?

If you don’t even know what your dignity calls for, what your dignity demands, how you are going to know what damages it?  People say that the fight against the sexual revolution is over. However our society continues to be plagued with a trivialization of the sexual dimension of the human person. It’s enough to simply turn on the television for 3 minutes (even during commercials) or to open your eyes to street ads and shopping windows when walking around in a city. You’ll see what I mean. And if your response is “what’s the problem?”, then you’ve proven my point.

President of the Spanish Forum of the Family, Benigno Blanco, was recently quoted in an ABC article on repercussions Spain is feeling after a year and a half of legalized abortion in full effect: the collective conscience is being desensitized as the act of abortion is being made trivial. Though that may be changing in the US, with a longer history of legalized abortion and the progress made by grassroots pro-life orgs over years, we can affirm that we are still in the thick of sexual degradation being the norm.

A culture that showcases the dysfunctional as comical: the need for positive creativity

Women are the core of FOX’s newest sitcom, I Hate My Teenage Daughter, that made its debut this past Wednesday. Two divorced mothers try so hard to be liked by their teenage daughters, for whom they desire the popularity that they never had in high school. Result: the daughters are spoiled brats who run the show and bully their moms.  Hmm, how would you rate the quality of this “comedy”? Thank you, FOX, for your contribution to American television and American culture!

This only gives further support to Franco Olearo’s recent article, Adolescents in series published through Family and Media’s web portal. Olearo says that we’ve moved far from the sitcom style of the 70’s, the Happy Days era, “where parent-child confrontation never became a dispute. Love was always sought, and it lasted a lifetime”.

Sometimes, laughing in the face of difficulties can help us get through them. It is a good sign when a person can trip over their own two feet, lock their keys in the car, or get caught in the rain without an umbrella and in the end, laugh about it all. I wouldn’t say that it is a bad thing to take lightly the insignificant and silly troubles of family life that everyone goes through. I would hold though that there are some realities of human suffering or cultural illnesses that really are not funny.

It seems that the show does try to teach a lesson, in a twisted way. The mother’s warped parenting approach ends in a disaster. It is important to expose problems for what they are. But there is a way to do so. A mother’s hatred toward her daughter ought not to be taken lightly. A daughter’s complete disrespect and dominance over her mother shouldn’t become our entertainment.

Society’s leisure reflects the values of their culture. What kind of culture are we propagating by this kind of entertainment? What is dysfunctional is portrayed as common and comical. Embedded into the culture, it becomes seen as normal and insignificant, not worthy of our worry.

What we need is the creation of positive culture. Ideals ought to be presented. We need models that embody these ideals, give us hope, and indicate the way to reach these ideals. Being far from the “happy days”, it is quite difficult to implement positive culture into the mainstream. But little steps, and small contributions, are better than inactivity and no contribution. That’s why we ought to applaud and support even the small efforts create a positive culture. As the old Chinese proverb goes “it is better to light a match than to complain about the darkness”.

Trade caregiving for well-being

Get your journals ready to write down these words of wisdom! Journalist, speaker and writer Gail Sheehy spills the beans on the secret to woman’s long-term happiness. In her last article in USA TODAY, she presents Mary Claire Orenic as the “happiest woman at midlife”, being that she is an accomplished woman with a happy family life and a limited number of children. In Mrs. Orenic’s case, she has only child, which is one child less than “the ideal number contribute to a woman's long-term happiness”, based on the “massive data search by Gallup-Healthways for USA TODAY” (which, by the way, is not accessible through the article).  Sheehy writes that the “greatest impact on a woman's well-being at age 50 is to be free of caregiving responsibilities for children in the home and to have healthy parents who don't need care.”

Perhaps Mrs. Orenic is a very happy woman. It does indeed seem that she is devoted to her son and husband, and that value can be admired from cultures across the board. Her personal case is not for study here, but rather the confirmations made in light of her case and the Gallup-Healthway data collection.

I don’t know what took me more off guard: 1. the attempt to literally calculate happiness according a specific number of children and a cut-off age for having children; or 2. the assertion that being free of “caregiving responsibilities”, as she puts it, augments a woman’s happiness. (Note that Sheehy uses the word “well-being” and happiness interchangeably in the article.)

Let’s talk numbers. Another woman known for her happiness and publically awarded for her contributions and “success” didn’t even have one child: Mother Teresa of Calcutta, winner of the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. Accomplished? She founded a religious community which by her lifetime, reached nearly 4000 members just in the female religious branch, 157 communities in 123 countries throughout the world, all completely dedicated to taking care of the most destitute and unwanted (the poor, the dying, the orphans, the marginalized). A woman with no physical children, but carried out her "caregiving" responsibilities until she died, leaving a legacy of good behind her. In a way, she continued to engender life well past her midlife period.

She may not have coined, but she sure did promote, the phrase “the joy of giving”. For her, these weren’t just words; they were a mentality, a lifestyle, a spirituality. In her bold and rich Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Mother Teresa tells a story about a Muslim mother who divided rice among her eight children and a neighboring Hindu family who brought Mother Teresa (and the rice) to them in the first place. She said: “I didn't bring more rice that evening because I wanted them to enjoy the joy of sharing. But there were those children, radiating joy, sharing the joy with their mother because she had the love to give. And you see this is where love begins - at home.”

In his encyclical letter Mulieris Dignitatem - On the Dignity & Vocation of Women- John Paul II states that “Woman can only find herself by giving love to others.”  Fulton Sheen highlighted the same point from a different perspective in his work, The World’ First Love "Woman's unhappiest moments are when she is unable to give; her most hellish moments are when she refuses to give.”

Sheehy’s “freedom from caregiving responsibility--happiness” theory is not compatible with the “fulfillment in giving” perspective that has no room for limits or calculations.  The giving of self in love may be expressed in many different forms and lifestyles, from the woman with one, eight, or no children of her own. Though a constant gift of self may not always be pleasurable or easy, it is more than just noble or admirable, and more than beneficial for just the woman herself. The ripple effects extend to the family, the community, to society itself. Think about it. What would happen if women “free” themselves of giving?