Lady Day? Women's Day? Can Protestants Observe Either?

(Updated to improve and enlarge the book list!)

This is Women's History Month, and the eighth of March has been designated as both "Women's Day" and "Lady Day." Yes, the intention of most of the people publicizing both celebrations is to polarize women into thinking we have to pick just one.

Here, at a site that has steered several readers to this site, is the case for "Lady Day"...I was going to leave this one to the Catholics, but whether the second e-mail about it was addressed to me personally, to all women readers, or to all readers, I felt goaded by the e-mail to write a full-length post in response. (Yes, a sponsor paid cash for a full-length post this morning.)

http://www.returntoorder.org/2018/02/true-motherhood-will-clash-feminist-theme-march-8th-2/

Non-Catholics may be most familiar with the phrase "Lady Day" as an ironic nickname for the legendary singer and addict known as Billie Holiday, whose biography has very little in common with that of the Mother of Jesus.

For those who don't remember...

Catholics observe "Lady Day" as one of several celebrations of the Virgin Mother Mary.

Here's our Protestant e-friend's book about...actually there's some debate whether Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene may have been the same person, but Mary of Nazareth was a separate person from either.

Among Christians, not to mention Jews and Muslims, there's a wide range of belief about who Mary was and what it means that she was a "virgin mother." The simplest interpretation is that she became the Mother of Jesus on the occasion of losing her virginity in the normal way, to her husband Joseph or to someone else; in support of this interpretation, the Bible records that Jesus let people refer to him as Joseph's son. The traditional Christian belief is that she became the Mother of Jesus by a miracle, without (ever?) having normal marital relations with her husband. Catholics have built a whole set of minor religious holidays on the further interpretations of this miracle story that people have come to believe. The position of this web site is that which, if any, religious tradition you find believable is probably determined by your life experience or even your neurological wiring, so this web site is not going to argue about the details of Mary's private life.

Jaroslav Pelikan had read enough to be qualified to write an overview...

What we do know about Mary, historically, is that she had the most common given name for women of her generation, and shared that name with as many as five other early Christians; that Jesus was called her "firstborn," and that at least four men and two women were called his brothers and sisters; that she was present at the Crucifixion, where one of Jesus's last words was an order that she and "beloved disciple" John adopt each other; and that she was revered as a leader, a mother figure, by the apostolic church.

From the fact that Jesus "knew letters, having never learned" in a recognized school, many also infer that either Mary or Joseph, or more likely both of them, had been Bible scholars and had taught Jesus at home. During the period of captivity in Babylon many Jewish Rabbis had adopted a Pagan opinion that girls were unfit to study the Bible, but Jesus did not hold this opinion, so it's likely that his grandparents didn't either. (The ancient Roman Empire was actually quite literate; working-class Jews, and even enslaved Greeks, often read extensively and sometimes were employed as teachers.)

Beyond that, the Holy Family themselves seem to have guarded their privacy well. We know that the apostles solicited Mother Mary's opinion while she was alive; we don't know what her opinions were, nor can historians be certain whether she helped Luke write his Gospel, or contributed to the Epistle to the Hebrews, or went to Europe with other early Christians, although legends suggest that she may have done any or all of those things. (What survives in the way of history from this period also makes it clear that there were other noteworthy people called Joshua or Jesus, Miriam or Maria or Mary, John or Jochanan, and Joseph or Yusuf; at least one other person with each of those names was also active in the apostolic church, and some of them were related to each other, which makes the extrabiblical record super-confusing. Unbelievers were particularly apt to confuse Jesus whom Christians call Christ with a different man, Jesus son of Pantera, whose mother was also called Mary; they seem to have lived about a hundred years before the events recorded in the Gospels.) We do know that the best of all mothers was not "tied down to the nursery" or considered unfit for leadership positions among adults.

This web site recently reviewed a long book that examines the religious and social history of the early Roman Empire, with particular attention to the backlash of sexist bigotry that formed in reaction to the excessive sexual freedom of some early Christian groups. It's too soon to go back there again. Let's just say that some authentic statements by some early Christian writers were misinterpreted by later generations who were more bigoted than the original writers were. "Hating" the idea of sex, even the company of the opposite sex, when you are young and full of hormones and determined to practice celibacy anyway, has nothing to do with hating fellow believers of the opposite sex. The apostolic church did not hate or oppress women; it attracted masses of women for that reason. The medieval church, unfortunately, often did hate and oppress women. An emotional need for special celebrations of very private events in the life of a very private lady, as manifested in some of the Catholic "festivals of Mary," seems to have been a backlash to that earlier backlash. To modern-day Protestants, all these festivals in honor of Mary seem distinctly weird.

"Lady Day" is at least a celebration of Mary's public image rather than the mysteries of her private life, so in theory Protestants can join Catholics in honoring the Ideal of Christian Motherhood.

In "Mother" Teresa's case, that would be spiritual motherhood...

We all had mothers. Most of us still have mothers. We should all be able to find something to celebrate about our mothers, even if they were inadequate and still are annoying.

Mine was inadequate in one outstanding way: she was disabled by a genetic disease, which made her hard enough to live with, and on top of that she went around proclaiming how much less sick she was as a result of eating a "California health food freak" diet--while still visibly existing at a level of health people wanted to avoid, at any cost.

Apart from that, and in view of that, she was a rather heroic mother. She still is. She was the beauty queen who chose to be the chaste, modest, and obscure consultant to women who wanted to be "stars." She had to fight, physically fight off bigger and stronger people, to give birth "naturally" so we children would be minimally damaged by her disaster gene. Her home teaching, before we went to school, was what made me the child prodigy and my brother the real "genius" we were. She homeschooled my neurologically damaged natural sister. While being no example of healthiness herself, she succeeded in working a few "miracle cures" for private patients as a home nurse. She never became "too old to learn"; in her sixties she joined a Messianic Jewish temple (in order to be a home nurse for a dear friend) and made Bas Mitzvah; at seventy she became the good example of gluten-free good health she'd always wanted to be, and was a leader in a celiac support group. At eighty-three, she's still complaining that Wal-Mart's afraid to hire her as a "greeter" (unarmed guard)--she wants to walk to a job that keeps her on her feet!

Like most mothers, she's capable of annoying the living daylights out of me. Like most daughters, I appreciate that we have two different houses and work very hard to keep this the case, but I admire and love my mother. If Protestants canonized saints, I think my mother might be one.

We don't, of course. We don't believe we know whether anyone has been fast-tracked into Heaven or promoted to any special position there. We don't even claim to know whether Mother Mary is still resting in peace until the Final Judgment, or is watching us from Heaven. No Protestant would doubt that, if any mortal is watching us from Heaven, Mary would be; but we don't know. (A Protestant friend once quoted a Catholic friend having asked him, "Do you believe that Jesus would leave his mother in the grave?" I don't know that you have to have grown up with a hypothyroid celiac mother to understand how a loving son might have been well trained not to disturb his mother's sleep.)

All Protestants officially think about the great saints is that their lives are moral examples to us. Mary's certainly was. We can celebrate her dedication to a great and terrible lifework, her love of her son, her fortitude in appearing publicly as his mother at the foot of the Cross, her "motherly" position among his followers during what was probably at least a double bereavement--Joseph does not appear in the Gospels after Jesus appears as an adult...

Our Catholic e-friend's post, with its photographs of random girls acting bratty at a pro-abortion demonstration juxtaposed to a particularly young and pretty European aristocrat, contrasts two extremes while overlooking a vast middle ground.

Most women do not, in fact, even have the option of choosing full-time motherhood instead of a "worldly career." Probably, throughout most of history, most women have always had to work. The titled ladies of feudal Europe, like the titled lords, were exempt from having to work and were in fact socially penalized if they even learned any marketable job skills--but poor women, and children, worked in coal mines. Likewise the wealthy could "modestly" cover every inch of skin with yards of expensive material, often dyed and even embroidered in beautiful colors, while the poor were lucky if they could keep the rag they wore day in and day out, and any animal hides they might have been able to throw over it in winter, intact enough to cover all of their sensitive parts at the same time. (When the Bible writers spoke of "clothing the naked," they did not mean the people wearing secondhand clothes.) Today, rather than support women who want to choose full-time motherhood even for a year, some young men will bully the mothers of their children into "choosing" abortion. Historically, when that kind of men weren't aware of abortion as an option, some of them murdered the mothers; or, in countries where they had the options, sold the mothers into slavery or prostitution.

Amazon link to the classic ballad about a woman who was murdered by the "baby daddy," even after allegedly pleading, "Have pity on your baby, and spare me my life. I'll go as a beggar if I can't be your wife."

Then there are the women who might or might not have "had to" work if the option of being full-time mothers had been available to us, but for one reason or another, it wasn't. As the human population fills up the Earth, increasing congestion correlates with increasing sterility among would-be parents, increasing interest in the "dual income, no kids" lifestyle among couples, increasing homosexuality, increasing asexuality--and if we don't heed those things as warnings, I believe we'll see increasing violent insanity and perhaps cannibalism, as found in overcrowded animal populations.

I might have been able to have children, and would even have been legally allowed to marry, during the years when (for the educated class only, at that time) everyone was screaming that I was "under age" and needed to be "innocent" and "protected" and treated like a "little girl." Like every red-blooded baby-boomer I felt ready to be an adult at fourteen, much less at eighteen--but I wanted to be a celibate adult. No gambling with birth control pills and gadgets for me. I had no idea what the family curse--the celiac gene--really was, but I had seen that, for the women affected by it, it formed a vicious cycle with pregnancy. Celibacy seemed the best way to postpone or reduce the damage. So although I didn't particularly like being an awkward baby-faced adolescent, I accepted the security of being one and worked the "little girl" angle as long and as hard as possible. Then, around the time when older people started to think it might not be the end of the world if I'd felt any interest in marriage, the PCOS kicked in and I became sterile. And I was glad. Even after going gluten-free for years, I saw some evidence that I would have had, at best, problem pregnancies that produced unhealthy babies--while all those other relatives who looked like me, only without the celiac gene, were producing beautiful, strong, healthy babies. As a little girl I'd wanted to play "aunt" or "teacher" more than "mother," and as a mature woman I believe that was the best choice for me.


So obviously there's no way I can endorse any idea that there's anything particularly virtuous about a young woman choosing full-time motherhood over a "worldly career." The closest to that I can get is to agree that, if people want to be parents, then at least one of them should be a full-time parent for at least five or six years after birth. For the first year that practically has to be the mother, and after that, even if the father wants a turn at being the full-time "househusband"--mine did--at best the family can hope to be considered heroically eccentric.

But even the Mother of Christ never locked herself into "the home" and renounced having a "worldly career." She reared competent children (whether or not the other six or more were related to her), and when those children were adults she was qualified to work with at least her own son's colleagues in their job.

Young women who choose Mary as an example would be well advised to train for the best "worldly careers" for which they have any talent. They should plan to work as independently as possible, and either work from home, take their babies to work in their own businesses, or take a few years away from their corporate careers to rear their babies. Rather than disparaging women who need to have decent jobs in order to educate their children, older people might do better to urge more employers to think of marriage as a skill-building detour on a young person's career track, comparable in many ways with military service.

The science in this book is as debatable as the theology in the other books, but it's based on facts.

All mothers risk their lives. (All soldiers and sailors commit to risk their lives, but in reality many never leave the security of a "home base" where their jobs don't necessarily even involve heavy lifting.)

All competent mothers build special, hard-to-measure cognitive skills that can be identified as a solid asset in a corporate career--specifically in management. All competent military personnel build special, hard-to-measure cognitive skills that can be identified as a solid asset in a corporate career--specifically in maintaining discipline and watching details.

Good mothers build a nation by producing the next generation of people. Good military personnel preserve a nation by defending it against its enemies.

Mothers don't punch time clocks and log hours in the federal bureaucracy; they're entitled to hope to be supported and cared for, when necessary, by their adult children. Military personnel are entitled to expect pensions because their service may have left them unfit to bring up children.

Not all mothers made a free, untrammelled choice to become mothers. Not all military people made a free, untrammelled choice to become soldiers or sailors. Though both decisions ought to be made freely and prayerfully, in fact a lot of people have been bullied into making both by financial need and/or social pressure. Amazingly, many of those people have risen to the challenge and been good mothers, or soldiers...

And reality is that even good mothers don't usually have the option of being "Ladies" in the feudal European sense.

In the Southern sense of choosing to act with honor, yes. Though even my English-aristocrat ancestors have been untitled Americans for ten generations, and I personally live in a shabby little old farmhouse on an Internet writer's pathetic income, I was not brought up to consider myself inferior--or allow myself to be inferior in any moral way--to the Duchess of Oldenburg. I was not brought up to believe that a fellow Virginian whose ancestors came from a country that had no feudal aristocracy, or even came here as slaves, may not be as much a Virginia Lady as I am, or as the Duchess would undoubtedly be if she were a Virginian.

Still, when people evoke feudal associations by contrasting "ladies" with "women" of the working class, reality is that most good mothers are, and most always have been, women. Aristocrats are by definition a minority. That minority is defined by an accident of birth and, even if we believe that God may have planned accidents of birth to put people in the positions for which they are best fitted, a lot of the world's aristocrats have accomplished remarkably little good with what they've had, compared with non-aristocrats like Helen Keller or George Washington Carver. In Europe feudal traditions of expecting every aristocrat to be the natural leader in every group may still exist...well, in America, that kind of thinking is what we've put behind us. In terms of social thinking, we are the butterfly in flight, and Europe is the damp, raw, crumpled butterfly still heaving itself out of the chrysalis.

A blurry picture is appropriate since Nancy Ward lived before photography existed...anyway, there's a real lady for you.

So, American Protestants have to identify with "women"...though not necessarily with that sorry-looking mob of abortion apologists at that ReturnToOrder page. I don't want to pass judgment on half-grown girls who are probably going through nobody-wants-to-know-what kind of drug-fuddled emotional aftermath from less than fully voluntary abortions. Any woman or man could have been raped; almost any woman could have become pregnant as a result of rape; many women, and I'm a textbook example of the genotype, could have had a spontaneous abortion as the result of an involuntary pregnancy. We should try to pity more than blame those girls, although I also pity the parents of the ones making obscene gestures for the camera.
Tomorrow, American Protestants are invited to find some way of celebrating womanhood itself--our own womanhood, or our mothers', sisters', daughters', or wives'. Here are a few more book links, in case anyone can use any further suggestions...

One of those left-wing feminist books...that contains a particularly eye-opening essay all Internet users should read.

In this book, a left-wing feminist studies other ways women were liberating ourselves, tries to be fair, and, in my judgment, mostly succeeds. This one is a rare treasure.

And in this one, one of the younger activists Burkett's book interviewed speaks for herself. 

We Protestants have much to learn from Jewish Bible studies...I think this is a different edition of one I remember as a particularly broad-ranging and interesting read.
(Update: I was wrong. This is a book I borrowed from the library about twenty years ago, and appreciate...but the Jewish Bible study book I bought was Five Books of Miriam. Typical mistake generated by trying to finish a post fast.)

And here's volume one (sorry, Amazon's not showing a boxed set) in a series of thoroughly Protestant studies of biblical models for modern women.

Right. More books, more inclusiveness...

Jewish study of women in the Torah, containing much extrabiblical tradition, Hebrew word studies, examples of midrashic commentary...

What this book is, of course, is The Woman's Bible Commentary. It was titled for shock value. 

Episcopalian feminist, utterly "ladylike," reflecting on (among other things) the writing of the novel that's about to come out as a star-spangled blockbuster movie.

Sisterhood is global but, if women overseas are going to make progress, they need to make it for themselves; they do not necessarily want to be "empowered" to be just like Americans.

And what women want to be empowered to do may, in fact, be to support the same just causes our men support.