Une Minute avec Marie
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With her expansive understanding of the many ways women could bring their femininity to bear on their particular situations in life, Saint Edith Stein upheld the Virgin Mary as the ideal.
Womanhood, she said, “finds its most perfect image in the purest Virgin who is the bride of God and mother of all mankind. Next to her stand the consecrated virgins who bear the honorary title Sponsa Christi and are called to participate in His redemptive work. But her image is also perpetuated by the woman standing beside a man who is Christ’s image and helping to build up His body the Church through a physical and spiritual maternity.”
Assessing the situation of many women in her time, Stein wrote that “many of the best women are overwhelmed by the double duties of family and professional life” and there are also women who entered into a profession they loved, but found their expectations of happiness in it unfulfilled as they “have neither searched for nor found the means to make their feminine nature fruitful in professional life.” She also noted the situation of the “religious unsure of the full meaning of their vows or unable to maintain the total sacrifice required of their vocation after their first youthful ardor has declined.”
Her remedy for this sad state of affairs? “A woman’s life must be a Eucharistic life,” she argued, if it is to bear fruit. She was certain that “each woman who lives in the light of eternity can fulfill her vocation.”
She emphasized that “only in daily, confidential relationship with the Lord in the tabernacle can one forget self, become free of all one’s own wishes and pretensions, and have a heart open to all the needs and wants of others.”