A world where women can be women

I have a stomach bug....and so was scrolling in one of those moments in which I was awake. Right before getting sick, I submitted a paper on Edith Stein's concept of woman. My own question: "How can we create a world in which woman can be woman, however thy choose to be woman, and also participate actively in the world as woman?" had led me to this paper. Stein's had been credited with writing about complementarity but reading her original lecture on the topic revealed that there was more to her writing than that.  This is largely to do with the difficulty of translating from German into English in a way that picks up the nuances of the German language in an English that has fewer words to express the same thing. For Stein, women and men had the same capacities, could study the same subjects and do the same jobs. At the same time, individuality came through, that too was part of human nature. For her the notions of Act and Potency, which she read in Aquinas were central to explaining the commonalities and particularities of the person. These particularities meant that woman had something different from man but the difference did not mean that women's capacities were different from men's but certain aspects meant they brought a different execution, such as when one person solves a math problem one way and another person another way but they both get the same result. While I won't go into my whole paper here what I found out today reminds me how this continues to be a pressing issue: we need a world in which women can be women. 

In the old FB 'grapevine' I came across an article about the athlete Allyson Felix who had a sponsorship from Nike but when she got pregnant they wanted to cut her pay by 70%. She left Nike and went on to found her own sports shoe company. You can read about it here. and visit her store here.  Realise this happened just three years ago not 50. That it continues to happen reminds us how much still needs to be done and that the change in mentality necessary has not quite happened yet and it is that which we need, a change in mentality at the global level that makes it possible to create a world where a woman can be a woman in whatever way that particular woman feels called to be. That she can be a mom and still continue to participate in the world as the woman she is. A world in which if a woman chooses to stay at home with her children rather than work she isn't shamed for it. A world in which a woman can choose to work and have children and not be criticised for neglect.  Or that she can choose not to marry or not to be a mom and not be considered selfish. And a world in which the household chores and the education of children, in whatever way works best for that particular family is seen for what it is: a fundamental basis for the building of a just and good society.