The bee in my bonnet

...Why has the struggle been necessary...

...They decided to raid the pool of women students, and devil take the women's colleges in the process...

...If this fragmentary and imperfect perception of woman is, as I think it is, at heart a theological perception, and theology is, as we know it is, a speculative science, it is not enough to try to evolve a theology of woman, but it is necessary to educate the imagination of those who so speculate and those who study the results of such speculation...

...This will help the boys know what women are like...

...Unrelated as the examples above may seem they are threads in that rich tapestry...

...known the dumb misery of the Chinese peasant wife in Pearl Buck's A Good Earth...

...My idea is simple...

...Mothers, daughters, wives, sisters, slaves, concubines . . . always in context, . . . this basic perception persists, despite certain refinements and advances, in the thinking of both men and women...

...These men and women do not know it, but they can only conceive of woman as a relational being...

...And, once again, as in the days of the early Christians, women and the Church might forge a creative union for the rebuilding of society...

...And they can only do that vicariously...

...Oh, it was time, it was time," he said, "Why, when I came out of there, I didn't know anything about women at all...

...If he was right the perception is clear: the interests of the women's colleges-even their survival-was a secondary matter...

...There is a whole literature filled with suffering, joys, heroism, and the wonderful endurance of women-and that built on only a handful of names saved from historical oblivion and representing multitudes...

...Perception-the presence of the young women would be of service to the young men...

...I have had occasion lately in connection with a writing project to talk with faculty and alumni of formerly all-male institutions which have accepted women students in recent years.'' Why," I asked the vice-president of one, "did you want to make the change...

...In order to perceive women as full human beings like themselves men need to experience what women experience...

...If every seminary and every school of theology had a required course in the experience of woman based on scripture, biography and autobiography, fiction, drama, poetry, and the developing literature of women's history, taught, interpreted, and enriched by qualified women, a well of understanding might spring forth from the church and flow forth into the rest of society...

...To share a full humanity...

...Perception-too obvious to spell out...

...Teresa of Avila to her community, "how fortunate we are that we do not have to yield to the whims and humors of any man...

...I asked a fifty-year-old alumnus of a prestigious Catholic university...

...felt the numbing grief of Mother Jones, the labor organizer, as she washed and laid out the bodies of her children, as, one after the other, they died in an epidemic, and knew the zeal she was to show later for the men in the mines...

...It is, at base, a theological perception-an answer to the question-why were women created...

...who has learned of women in relation to each other-subtle, complicated, loving-in novels like Rumer Godden's House of Brede, and the superior literary works of Mary Gordon and Gail Godwin-I cannot believe that men who have really had this vicarious experience will not see women as more than the second sex, and be ready to make the next step...

...This perception is so lasting and people hold it so unconsciously that they are genuinely unaware when it pops up in their speech and thinking, and when it clearly affects institutional and social policy...

...What a history of hurts and petty humiliations lay behind that observation...

...And thus we come to the bee in my bonnet...

...For some time now I have been coping with a bee like that...

...Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy THE BEE IN MY BONNET RELATIONAL WOMAN, INTEGRAL WOMAN "SHE has A bee in her bonnet,"-it was the expres-sion my grandmother and the women of her generation used for someone seized by an idea...

...Imagination builds on experience...

...Sackville-West...

...I have listened to them all, and in not one does he make fun of women, or sisters in particular...

...It can be a real revelation to reread the letters, diaries, and lives of the saints searching them for the women's experience, seeing them through a woman's eyes...

...At least it would be a start...

...Until this perception is changed, until woman can be seen as an integral full human being of equal worth to man in the sight of the Creator, there will always be an illusory quality to any progress women seem to achieve...

...What an ambiguous picture of relational woman...

...Quiet for a time, like the trapped bee, it would wake and buzz and bumble about demanding attention...

...The male president of a Seven Sisters college observed rather sourly that he thought his colleagues at the men's colleges were dissimulating: "They saw the demographics-a downturn in enrollment coming...

...Such a person was not so much obsessed by the idea, as I understood the expression, but unable to get rid of it...

...Oh," said he, "I thought the presence of young women on campus would be beneficial for students-make them clean up their acts-help them to learn how to behave socially...

...There is the puzzling vocation of Mere Marie of the Ursulines, who left her ten-year-old son to enter the convent...

...And a contemporary nun wrote of the tapes made of Thomas Mer-ton lecturing to his novices-"He is so fine...

...So many of the setbacks women have suffered stem from this very basic perception-not from any real ill will on the part of men, or any recalcitrance on the part of women who will not ally themselves with the efforts of women to reach social and economic equality...

...On one occasion he collected a band of schoolfellows, who besieged the convent with sticks and stones, while a piping voice rang through the house crying: 'Give me back my Mother...

...Think, sisters," wrote the redoubtable St...

...What did you think of the change at your college...

...Sometimes it can be a shock...

...There is no better time than the present, when women are temporarily halted in their forward march toward equality, for us all to sit back and give serious thought to the roots of the struggle which has surged and receded, surged and receded for almost two centuries...

...And what questions it raises...

...In the simplest terms-because one half of the human race perceives the other half as something less than fully human, as existing only in relationship to the first half...

...And heal its division...

...They need to experience it emotionally, intellectually, em-pathically...

...I cannot believe that someone who has really lived through the pages of Sigrid Undset's marvelous sweep of the history of a woman's life from baptism to deathbed in Kristin Lavransdatter...

...The welfare of the male institution was paramount and women, fortunately enough, were in existence and could insure it...