"NYET" SAY THE POPES

Rupert J. Ederer

Rupert J. Ederer is ProfessorEmerilus ofEconomics at Buffalo State College in New York and the author of Economics as if God Matters.

The Sovietization of American Women

Being retired, I regularly have the pleasure of accompanying my wife on trips to the grocery store. There I am sometimes treated to the sight of young, modem women handling with aplomb one of the toughest assignments in a challenging but rewarding vocation: They are mothers pushing shopping carts through the aisles with a baby sitting onboard and a toddler or two tagging along. It is heartening to see mothers with their children and children with their mothers; I'm reassured to know that there are still some stay-at home moms.

But such sightings are growing rarer. Statistics from 1996 show that, of American mothers who have husbands and who have children under 18 years of age, 70 percent work outside the home (up from 45 percent in 1975). Of such mothers with children under six years old, the proportion who go away from home to work is a full 62 percent (up from 37 percent in 1975). We are creating a breed of demi-orphans housed in daycare centers and semi-mothers walled off from their offspring in offices and factories.

There will always be some mothers who have no choice but to take employment outside the home - widows, victims of abandonment and divorce, and wives whose husbands for one reason or another are unable to work at gainful employment. Given the much-publicized abuses of the present welfare system, it appears unlikely that our society will come to appreciate that in the long run it would be better to enable such mothers to stay at home and care for their children. My focus here is on the woman with a husband present, a husband willing and able to work to support his family. Even with a loyal breadwinner present, many mothers feel compelled to enter the labor market, given the present state of our economy. We all know, or should know by now, what the attempt to restore so-called free market capitalism has brought in its wake. Fragments of the old "iron law of wages" still operate; but it is not rising birthrates (because they are not rising) that bring wages down toward subsistence. Doubling the labor supply eventually makes it possible for profit-maximizing employers to hire both husbands and their wives for what approximates one living wage.

We face problems like those to which Pope Leo XIII responded more than a century ago in his historic encyclical On the Condition of Labor (Rerum Novarum). Conservative thinking had become inured to 19th-century Scrooge-andMarley economics, and the Calvinistic vestiges in our culture had helped to secure approval of a capitalist-employer class able to work its will on the mass of the non-elect. To a world accustomed to plenty of talk about political rights - including the right to vote for people they knew little about - but conveniently ignorant of economic rights, the great Pope spoke out on the right of workers to organize in order to secure, among other things, a just family wage.

And where are we today? The notion of a just wage has evaporated, and the efficacy of labor unions has been reduced to a shadow of what it was during the 1940s and 1950s. Add to this the agitation by militant feminists to coax women away from child-rearing and homemaking. Eventually you end up with a powerful confluence of forces
enabling the buyers of labor to roll wages back toward subsistence level. If you allow the so-called free market "laws" to operate - among them unregulated demand and supply, and free competition for labor and for jobs - then doubling the potential labor supply by adding women to it will begin to reduce wages toward half of what they were when men constituted the labor pool. When both husband and wife need to work, it is not surprising that large numbers of married couples opt against trying to raise a family. Enter the sterile society.

In the past there were certain sectors of our workforce that were - whether rightly or wrongly - considered especially appropriate for female workers, such as nursing and school-teaching, especially at the lower grade levels. Society came to look upon these occupations as of the nurturing, maternal genre. Given the prevailing market mentality, they were remunerated in wages that were not expected to support a family. The occasional male workers who strayed into such occupations felt the effect of what typically happens to wage rates in female- dominated labor market sectors. We had there a frightening foreshadowing of what was to become in our time the universal case, given the latter-day return to the so-called free market: Double the labor supply, and you halve the wage rate.
At the moment there is much chatter about the low level of unemployment and the large number of new jobs being created. It would be better if we discussed seriously the grim fact that on an ever-widening scale it now takes two workers husband and wife - to earn what is needed to support a family in modest comfort. While I am convinced that the majority of sensible women would still prefer to remain at home and do the all-important work of raising and educating their own children, economic conditions in our "free market" economy make that ever more difficult. Consequently, our unemployment figures at present are as phony as the glowing full employment statistics the Soviet Union used to present to the world. Isn't it remarkable how we have now gotten to the same point via our celebrated capitalistic system? We have also come full circle from where we used to look down censoriously on the Russian women doing hard physical labor in mines, mills, and factories. A look at our assembly lines and road crews reveals how we have proceeded to sovietize our American women. We boast that the Communists failed to transform the world according to their economic blueprint, but we are only partly right. In 1933 Lenin's wife published a small book (On the Emancipation of Women) stating what her husband had to say about the matter. It contains all of the jargon and argumentation that became the stock in trade of our own Bella Abzugs and Betty Friedans. Their anti-family propaganda has led us by the nose into the socialistic daycare culture of our time.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church is one of the last holdouts against the mass exodus of mothers, from the home and from their traditional role of child-rearing. The Church does not shift with the prevailing winds: That is at once her great strength and her handicap in dealing with fickle mankind. I mentioned Leo XIII and the just wage. He was only the first of several great teaching popes of the modem era who have made it clear that the place of mothers is in the home, and who have stated uncompromisingly the right of every full-time, adult worker to a just wage. Let us look briefly at their principal teachings.

Leo XIII

In Rerum Novarum the just-wage doctrine first appeared in its rudimentary form, when that Pope opposed the argument that any wage is just so long as it is "freely" arrived at in agreements between workers and their employers. "Freely" was the joker. How "free" is the rank-and-file worker standing by himself in dealing with the fellow who owns the factory? As often as not, it becomes a question of accepting what is offered or facing unemployment and hardship. That is why Leo XIII inserted the qualifier that there was a "dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man" (RN 45), namely, "wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage earner." In fact, wages were to be "sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children..." (RN 46). Clearly the wage which was sufficient to support also "his wife, and his children" posits the urgency of having the mother at home taking care of the children. The Pontiff stated: "Women, again, are not suited for certain occupations; a woman is by nature fitted for home-work [i.e., work in the home], and it is that which is best adapted at once to preserve her modesty and to promote the good bringing-up of children and the well-being of the family" (RN 42).

The basic message is: Mothers are needed at home to raise and educate their children. (In a saner, pre-sexualrevolution world the proposal that female modesty is best preserved in the sanctuary of the home would also find acceptance.) The minimum just wage - owed to every conscientious, full-time adult worker - is to be adequate for the worker and his family. Pope Pius XI, building on the Leonine foundation, developed the just-wage doctrine significantly.

Pius XI

In 1930, a few months before his encyclical on labor entitled Quadragesimo Anno appeared, Pius XI issued his definitive encyclical on Christian marriage, Casti Connubii. In it we find, among other things, remarkable early warnings about the abortionists, the contraceptionists, the no-fault divorce advocates, and the militant feminists, given at a time when their destructive messages seemed to many just distant rumblings and not matters of urgency. That Pope, who faced down the dictators of his time - Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin - had a way of coming to grips with issues early and firmly.

Referring to the "false teachers who try to dim the luster of conjugal faith and purity," Pius XI scored those who were proposing that the "emancipation of women has been or ought to be effected" (CC 74). According to him, what they were championing "is not the true emancipation of woman, nor that rational and exalted liberty which belongs to the noble office of a Christian woman and wife; it is rather the debasing of the womanly character and the dignity of motherhood, and indeed of the whole family, as a result of which the husband suffers the loss of his wife, the children of their mother, and the home and the whole family of an ever watchful guardian" (CC 75).

It is clear now that Pius XI was ahead of his time. He did not stop, however, with this chilling prophecy of what lay ahead for women, the family, and society. He also contributed an accurate definition of what equality truly means. "This equality of rights which is so much exaggerated and dis torted must indeed be recognized in those rights which belong to the dignity of the human soul and which are proper to the marriage contract and inseparably bound up with wedlock" (CC 76). Our current misunderstanding of equality, of course, confuses equality with alikeness, a preposterous notion that gets us into ludicrous situations such as the attempt to make warriors out of women in the armed forces and in our urban police forces.

Pius XI's understanding of the feminine character and the role of the mother was complementary to his interpretation of the just-wage doctrine in Quadragesimo Anno. There we find that "the wage paid to the working man should be sufficient for the support of himself and his family" QA 71). Whereas it is "proper that the rest of the family contribute according to their power toward the common maintenance, as in the rural home or in the families of many artisans or small shopkeepers ... it is wrong to abuse the tender years of children or the weakness of woman." Therefore, he wrote, "mothers should especially devote their energies to the home and the things connected with it." Lest there be any misunderstanding of that position, the Pope added, "Most unfortunate and to be remedied energetically, is the abuse whereby mothers of families, because of the insufficiency of the father's salary, are forced to engage in gainful occupations outside the domestic walls to the neglect of their own proper cares and duties, particularly the education of their children" QA 71) (emphasis added).

We have here a clear and uncompromising position on mothers working outside the home. It allows for the kinds of work that mothers have always provided in farm families or in small family retail or craft businesses, where mothers are seldom far from the children who are at home with them. How different from the mother who must commute, often long distances, each day to spend eight hours at a factory, store, or office. Again, the Pope makes clear that the basic just wage is one that can support the mother in the home. To assure such a wage, Pius XI's successor Pius XII for the first time introduced into the just-wage discussion the idea of "an increased wage ... in view of increased family burdens." He praised such initiatives, and subsequently many countries established what are known as family allowances.

Pius XII

Over the course of his 19-year pontificate, Pius XII presented such an abundance of remarkable teachings on so great a variety of topics that his successor, John =11, enthusiastically anticipated his being declared officially a "Doctor of the Church." Pius XII had much to say about the unique role of women and about mothers. His outstanding address "An Allocution to Italian Women" (delivered in 1945) covered all of the main issues.
First of all, to counter any misconceptions about what the undeniable equality of men and women means, the Pope stated:
In their personal dignity as children of God, a man and woman are absolutely equal, as they are in relation to the last end of human life which is everlasting union with God in the happiness of Heaven. It is the undying glory of the Church that she puts these truths in their proper light and honorable place and that she has freed woman from degrading, unnatural slavery.

To dispel the simplistic and pernicious tendency to confuse equality with alikeness, Pius XII continued:
But a man and woman cannot maintain and perfect this equal dignity of theirs, except by respecting and activating characteristic qualities which nature has given each of them, physical and spiritual qualities which cannot be eliminated, which cannot be reversed without nature itself stepping in to restore the balance. These characteristic qualities which divide the two sexes are so obvious to all that only willful blindness or a no less disastrous utopian doctrinaire attitude could overlook or practically ignore their significance in social relations.

That expresses what would be clear and unquestioned in a sane society. But we live at a time when precisely such a "willful blindness" and "doctrinaire attitude" are rampant. The Pope goes on:

Now the sphere of woman, her manner of life, her native bent, is motherhood. Every woman is made to be a mother; a mother in the physical meaning of the word or in the more spiritual and exalted but no less real sense. For this purpose the Creator organized the whole characteristic makeup of woman, her organic construction, but even more her spirit, and above all her delicate sensitiveness. Thus it is that a woman who is a real woman can see all the problems of human life only in the perspective of the family. That is why her delicate sense of her dignity puts her on guard any time that a social or political order threatens to prejudice her mission as a mother or the good of the family.

There we have an important reference to woman's specific psychological makeup, a fact overlooked or denied by the feminist clamor that equality means sameness. Pius XII says that woman's "spirit" and "delicate sensitiveness" are of greater significance even than "her organic construction." in our culture, which appears determined to ignore or minimize even the most obvious organic differences and differing physical abilities of the sexes, one could scarcely expect due deference to these more subtle psychological differences to which Pius XII was attuned.

Referring to Communism, the Pope lamented that "equality of rights with man brought with it her abandonment of the home where she reigned as queen, and her subjection to the same work strain and working hours" which "entails depreciation of her true dignity and the solid foundation of all her rights which is her characteristic feminine role...." That was said a half-century ago while Communist society was at the peak of its power and was threatening to engulf all of Europe. But the wise Pontiff was fully aware also of where an increasingly secularized capitalistic society was heading: "On the other hand, can a woman perhaps hope for her real well-being from a regime dominated by Capitalism? We do not need to describe to you now the economic and social results that issue from it. You know its characteristic signs and you yourselves are bearing its burdens."

And what might those burdens be? Pius XII. knew that many women work outside the home out of necessity rather than by choice: "A woman is, in fact, kept out of the home not only by her socalled emancipation but often, too, by the necessities of life, by the continuous anxiety about daily bread. It would be useless then to preach to her to return to the home while conditions prevail which constrain her to remain away from it."

But the consequences of such constraint are dire, which is why the Church, since Leo XIII, has announced in her social encyclicals a program for protecting family life. Those consequences have been especially hard on women and girls:

We see a woman who, in order to augment her husband's earning betakes herself also to the factory, leaving her house abandoned during her absence. The house, untidy and small perhaps before, becomes even more miserable for lack of care. Members of the family work separately in four quarters of the city and with different working hours.... To such painful consequences of the absence of the mother from the home there is added another, still more deplorable. It concerns the education especially of the young girl, and her preparation for real life. Accustomed as she is to see her mother always out of the house and the house itself so gloomy in its abandonment, she will be unable to find any attraction for it, she will not feel the slightest inclination for austere housekeeping jobs. She cannot be expected to appreciate their nobility and beauty or to wish one day to give herself to them as a wife, or mother.
An all too often overlooked practical aspect of having the mother work outside the home did not escape the astute Pontiff's attention: "As to the working classes, forced to earn daily bread a woman might, if she reflected, realize that not rarely the supplementary wage which she earns by working outside the house is easily swallowed up by other expenses or even by waste which is ruinous to the family budget." How many working women today justifiably complain that most of their salary goes to childcare, transportation, and clothing for work - not to mention higher taxes?

Finally, lest anyone think that the Church suggests a return to a kind of old-fashioned passivity on the part of women, the Pope adds:

The fate of the family, the fate of human relations are at stake. They are in your hands. Every woman has then, mark it well, the obligation, the strict obligation in conscience, not to absent herself but to go into action in a manner and way suitable to the conditions of each so as to hold back those currents which threaten the home, so as to oppose those doctrines which undermine its foundations, so as to prepare, organize and achieve its restoration.... She is to collaborate with man towards the good of the State in which she is of the same dignity as he....

Later in his pontificate, Pius XII made it clear that woman, as woman, is not to be discriminated against solely because of her sex. In an address to the Federation of Italian Women in 1956, referring to the Creator's command to subdue the earth, he said:

Because of this temporal goal there is no field of human activity which must remain closed to woman; her horizons reach out to the regions of politics, labor, the arts, sports; but always in subordination to the primary functions which have been fixed by nature itself. The Creator with his wonderful ways of bringing harmony out of variety has established a common destiny for all mankind, but he has given the two sexes different and complementary functions, like two roads leading to the same destination.

In this regard, it is noteworthy that it was this same Pope who many years previously had insisted on the principle of "equal pay for equal work" for men and women.

John XXIII

Pope John XXIII carried on the same tradition. In 1961, addressing several Italian women's associations on the topic of woman's role in society, he said:

Finally, one must always keep in the foreground the very special claims of the family, which is the most important center of woman's activity and the place where her presence is indispensable. Unfortunately, economic necessity often forces women to work outside their homes. No one will fail to realize how such dissipation of effort and prolonged absence from home place woman in the position of being unable to fulfill her duties as wife and mother. This causes a loosening of family ties; home ceases to be the pleasant, warm, and restful haven where everyone straightens out his life in the warmth of family love. It is precisely to bring wives and mothers back to their proper functions in the home that We, in Our encyclical Mater et Magistra, just as Our predecessors did in memorable documents, expressed our concern that salaries be big enough to support workers and their families.

Once again, the beloved Pope was not trying to "imprison" wives and mothers in their kitchens. He joined in the legitimate complaint of women that modern social structures are still far from allowing woman, in the exercise of her professions, to achieve the fulfillment of her personality, and they do not allow her to make the contribution which the Church and society expect from her. Hence the urgency of finding new solutions, if we are to achieve an order and a balance more commensurate with woman's human dignity. Hence, too, the need for the forces of Catholic women to become aware of their obligations. Such obligations do not end, as they did once upon a time, within the confines of the family circle. Woman's gradual ascent to all the responsibilities of a shared life requires her active intervention on the social and political plane. Woman is as necessary as man to the progress of society, especially in all those fields which require tact, delicacy, the maternal intuition.

Paul VI

The great service of Pope Paul VI to women, and to mothers specifically, was his encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968. Paradoxically, it divided Catholics as seldom before; but the fact remains that it has been vindicated by events of the past three decades. Womankind, for all of the babble about emancipation, has in fact been set back to the kinds of exploitative conditions that prevailed in pagan eras. In our Playboy culture, woman has become a thing to be used for sexual enjoyment and has been encouraged to regard man as a similar thing. Motherhood is a malady that "smart" women seek to avoid by chemical and mechanical contraception, "mistakes" are rectified coldheartedly by abortion-on-demand, and "emancipation" - or more accurately alienation - from motherhood and from the home is all but complete. The results are family life and social life in grave disrepair. What Paul VI taught in Humanae Vitae would have saved womankind from the crass sexual exploitation we have come to accept as the norm. This landmark encyclical was designed to salvage a proper respect for women, for motherhood, for family life, and ultimately for human life. Ignoring it has led to our current anti-life barbarism - to what Pope John Paul II refers to grimly as the "culture of death."

John Paul II

From Pope John Paul II has come a continu at ion of the great social encyclicals initiated by Leo XIII. In his teachings we find a renewed call for the just wage and an updated development of that doctrine, begun in Rerum Novarum. But even before he issued Laborem Exercens in 1981, the Pope gave us a clear indication of where he was going in the matter of women and their proper role in society. On January 10, 1979, shortly after his election as pope, John Paul II told a General Audience:

Motherhood is woman's vocation. It is an eternal vocation, and it is also a contemporary vocation.... Everything must be done in order that the dignity of this splendid vocation may not be broken in the inner life of the new generations; in order that the authority of the woman-mother may not be diminished in the family, social and public life, and in the whole of our civilization....

On the same day, the Pope continued the same theme to a group of young people who had come for the General Audience.

I wish to remind girls in particular, that motherhood is woman's vocation: it was yesterday, it is today, it will be always; it is her eternal vocation. There come to my mind the words of a song of my country. These say that "a mother is the one who understands everything and embraces each of us with her heart." And they add that today the world is "hungrier and thirstier" than ever for that motherhood which physically or spiritually is woman's vocation, as it was Mary's.

The newly chosen Pope thus contrasted the traditional Christian esteem for motherhood with the cheap valuation of it in secularized Western culture, in particular with the advent of the new militant feminism. He carried this posture into Laborem Exercens, the first of his three social encyclicals, wherein he affirmed and updated the justwage doctrine. "Just remuneration for the work of an adult who is responsible for a family means remuneration which will suffice for establishing and properly maintaining a family and for providing security for its future" (LE 19).

At this point, Pope John Paul II introduced a new aspect to the traditional just-wage doctrine. Perhaps because of some intervening discussion as to how such a wage can be determined, given the variations in the number of children involved, he suggested that "Such remuneration can be given either through what is called a family wage - that is, a single salary given to the head of the family for his work sufficient for the needs of the family without the other spouse having to take up gainful employment outside the home - or through other social measures such as family allowances or grants to mothers devoting themselves exclusively to their families" (LE 19). He continued: "These grants should correspond to the actual needs, that is, to the number of dependents for as long as they are not in a position to assume proper responsibility for their own lives" (LE 19). In the years following the first mention of family allowances in an encyclical by Pius XI (Quadragesimo Anno 71), many countries introduced and have continued paying family allowances (Germany and Canada, for example), which makes it easier to arrive at a workable figure for the basic, minimum just wage for all full-time adult workers.

It is clear that the just wage, in whatever form, implies the mother's being exempted from "gainful employment outside the home." This was made yet more clear by the Pope's proposal that "there must be a social reevaluation of the mother's role, of the toil connected with it, and the need that children have for care, love and affection in order that they may develop into responsible, morally and religiously mature and psychologically stable persons" (LE 19).
There are signs of a dawning of some dim awareness even in secular circles of what the Pope warned about in this encyclical:

It will redound to the credit of society to make it possible for a mother - without inhibiting her freedom, without psychological or practical discrimination, and without penalizing her as compared with other women - to devote herself to taking care of her children and educating them in accordance with their needs, which vary with age. Having to abandon these tasks in order to take up paid work outside the home is wrong from the point of view of the good of society and of the family when it contradicts or hinders these primary goals of the mission of the mother (LE 19).

Having ruled out the desirability of having mothers at work outside their homes, the Pope acknowledged the presentday reality of large numbers of women who are doing just that, and spoke out strongly for their rights:
It is a fact that in many societies women work in nearly every sector of life. But it is fitting that they should be able to fulfill their tasks in accordance with their own nature, without being discriminated against and without being excluded from jobs for which they are capable, but also without lack of respect for their family aspirations and for their specific role in contributing together with men, to the good of society. The true advancement of women requires that labor should be structured in such a way that women do not have to pay for their advancement by abandoning what is specific to them and at the expense of the family, in which women as mothers have an irreplaceable role (LE 19).

Less than two months after Laborem Exercens appeared, Pope John Paul II issued his apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio. The English title - The Role of the Christian Family in the Modem World - indicates clearly what the document intends. It speaks to the sociological aspects of family life rather than the specifically economic ones. Certain common factors exist, however, so that the Pope repeated his insistence on the "equal dignity and responsibility of women with men." He also indicated disapproval of the "lack of access to public functions which have generally been reserved for men." Nevertheless, John Paul II insists that "the true advancement of women requires that clear recognition be given to the value of their maternal and family role, by comparison with all other public roles and all other professions." Women can perform many of the tasks traditionally reserved to men, but only women can be mothers. "Therefore the Church can and should help modem society by tirelessly insisting that the work of women in the home be recognized and respected by all in its irreplaceable value." The clincher follows: "While it must be recognized that women have the same right as men to perform various public functions, society must be structured in such a way that wives and mothers are not in practice compelled to work outside the home, and that their families can live and prosper in a dignified way even when they themselves devote their full time to their own family" (all quotations, FC 23). Directly on target is the admonition: "Furthermore, the mentality which honors women more for their work outside the home than for their work within the family must be overcome."

Summary

These papal teachings need no protracted exegesis. Perhaps all that remains to be added here is a brief summary of them.

First, men and women are equal in all that is essential: They are created by God with body and soul, and have an eternal destiny.

Second, women are uniquely ordained to be mothers and uniquely suited by their specific psychological endowment to be nurturers.

Third, motherhood is a full-time responsibility which demands that women who become mothers be allowed to fulfill this responsibility in the home without economic or social penalty.

Fourth, the economic order is to be arranged in such a way that mothers be spared having to work outside the home. This means that the wage for fathers must be just - that is, a wage sufficient to enable mothers to perform their functions as mothers and wives in the home.

Fifth, women who are not mothers, or whose maturing or grown children no longer require great care, have a right to work at all occupations for which they are capable according to their own specific nature as females.
Sixth, whenever women are performing work that is equal, they are entitled to equal pay.

These principles need no exegesis, only enactment.

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