Why men and women have to work as a team

When author Carrie Gress says women have a key role to play in the New Evangelization, she is not talking about excluding or diminishing men.

“Men have a different calling,” she says. In her own parish, for example, roughly 160 men get together at 6:30 every Saturday morning to pray and learn about their vocation as men through the That Man Is You! program.

Gress draws a distinction between male-female differences and the aim of the feminist movement, which sought equality by making men and women exactly the same, not complementary with equal dignity. It is in the spirit of those dierences, she says, that women and men have to work together.

Sue Ellen Browder agrees. However, the author of Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement says women not only need to work with men, but also to defend them and their strength at a time when the importance of fathers is being eliminated in the culture. This includes, she says, defending God the Father and His image in men.

“We have to work as a team,” Browder says. “It’s not that we women are all by ourselves autonomously. Women need to defend men, men need to defend women, and we all need to defend the family.”

Browder says a vote by 57 feminists at the second National Organization for Women convention to insert the repeal of all laws prohibiting abortion into the group’s political platform split fathers and mothers. “And that’s why our culture desperately needs to see and experience strong, loving, nurturing mothers and strong, loving, nurturing fathers working together to build places of joy and peace – in the home, in the workplace, in the Church, in the schools or wherever we are.”