Dawn Beutner

Is feminism good or bad? What is feminism? What is the role of women in culture? Or even more fundamentally: what is a woman?
Arguments over these questions have become so contentious that it’s dangerous to even raise the topic. Perhaps the wisdom of a twentieth-century German woman can help us find talking points to use with those who are willing to have a serious discussion about these issues.
Edith Stein was born in 1891 into a large Jewish family in the city of Breslau. Although her native city is now known as Wrocław, Poland, it was a German city during her lifetime.
In the early twentieth century, Germany was a prosperous, powerful, and respected nation. Although Edith and her family certainly experienced discrimination because of their Jewish faith, the real hardship of her childhood was the death of her father. As the youngest of eleven children, Edith grew up in a large household with sisters, sisters-in-law, and many other male and female relatives. But it was her widowed mother who became the anchor for their home, a leader in the family business, and a strong but thoroughly feminine role model for her.
Like many young people today, Edith turned her back on God and her Jewish faith when she was a teenager. When she arrived at college at the age of twenty, she soon became active in a controversial political cause: voting rights for women. She was a hard worker and brilliant student at the university, and she found a job as a teaching assistant under the famous philosopher Edmund Husserl. Although her studies were interrupted by her service as a nurse during World War I, she eventually earned a doctorate under his direction.
Although Husserl was not a practicing Christian, his philosophical ideas caused his students to ask deep questions about how we think about reality, questions which eventually led many of his students into the Christian faith. Edith’s encounters with Christians and an accidental discovery of Saint Teresa of Avila’s autobiography helped to open her heart to God. Her decision to become a Catholic caused her mother so much pain that Edith put aside her initial plan of becoming a Discalced Carmelite nun. Instead, she pursued a career as a teacher.
Despite her brilliant doctoral dissertation and a personal recommendation from Husserl himself, Edith was flatly rejected in her efforts to be given a job as a full professor. The reason? She was a woman. Edith therefore wrote articles, taught at a college for teachers, and gave public lectures about many topics, including the role of women. Her second attempt to receive a position as a professor failed as well, despite her growing popularity as a lecturer.
Soon after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, his government passed laws which penalized racial minorities, particularly Jews. Not only did this legislation destroy her hopes for teaching at a university, she was forced to resign from her teaching job. She and many other German Jews quickly found themselves unemployed and unemployable in Nazi Germany.
But divine providence had a hand in the timing of this apparent setback. The career options she had been working toward were now closed to her, and her mother had had a decade to come to terms with her daughter’s Catholic faith. Edith Stein was finally free to do what she had been thinking about since her initial conversion and enter the Discalced Carmelite order. Several months after she entered a convent in Cologne, she became known as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
When Nazi persecution of the Jews increased several years later, the Carmelite order smuggled her and her sister Rosa (who had also become a Catholic and entered the convent) to the Netherlands. On August 2, 1942, Nazis arrived at that convent and arrested both her and Rosa during a roundup of all Catholics of Jewish birth in the area. The two sisters were placed on an overcrowded train and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
Survivors from the train later recalled that Sister Teresa Benedicta spent much of her time caring for children whose mothers were in shock and immobilized by fear. When the train arrived at the camp, Sister Teresa Benedicta was one of the many Jews who were immediately taken to be gassed to death, probably on August 9, 1942. In 1998, Pope Saint John Paul II declared her to be a saint.

What does Saint Teresa Benedicta’s life teach us about the role of women, and how we can use her story to explain that role to others?
Saint Teresa Benedicta was only a child when she began learning about what it meant to be a woman. School curricula and movies did not educate her about this: her mother did. Through her mother’s personal devotion, the way she handled the different personalities of her children, her willingness to work hard and make sacrifices to provide for her family, all described in her autobiography, Teresa Benedicta grew up knowing how a true woman behaved. Frau Stein was a real-life version of the strong woman of faith described in Proverbs, chapter 31.
Every culture has its weaknesses, and young people are quick to notice them. When Teresa Benedicta recognized the injustice of the prohibition against women being allowed to vote, she became active in that movement. Despite the stigma associated with women who worked outside the home, she pursued the career to which she believed God was calling her. When she was unjustly prevented from being considered for a position simply because she was a woman, she recognized that injustice too. But she chose to play by the same rules as her male counterparts, racking up an impressive number of publications about philosophical issues.
Teresa Benedicta was, by nature and training, a philosopher. The discrimination she experienced led her to analyze the differences between men and women as a philosopher and a Catholic in her many published essays. She made distinctions between the separate vocations of man and woman and described the unique spirituality of women, as women. She dared to suggest that better education should be made available for women and proposed the startling argument that a woman having a professional life outside the home did not violate the order of nature and grace. In her essay, “Ethos of Woman’s Professions”, she raised the question about whether there is a natural feminine vocation for each woman and then made this controversial statement:
“The clear and irrevocable word of Scripture declares what daily experience teaches from the beginning of the world: woman is destined to be both wife and mother.”

One of her final works, The Science of the Cross, was a reflection on the spirituality of Saint John of the Cross, a fitting meditation for someone about to face a gas chamber. But her final action—serving as a substitute mother for frightened children, even though she was a consecrated virgin—was also a fitting end for such an intelligent, thoroughly feminine woman.
We should not settle for allowing ourselves or anyone else to be educated about the role of women by popular entertainment, mindless slogans, and acts of violence. Instead, we can reflect on those women whom we have known and who best exemplify the role of women. We can address real acts of injustice against women with hard work and charity. We can study the issues of womanhood, feminism, and work so that we are ready to explain our beliefs to others. And it wouldn’t hurt if we started reading the works of Edith Stein.