A Tale of Two American Women: Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton and Feminist Betty Friedan

This is a tale of two very American women who had a great and lasting impact on America and its women.

Their stories are similar in that they both embraced their faith in God.

Saint Elizabeth Ann Seaton was a Catholic and Betty Friedan was Jewish.

It is important to understand both of these women to grasp what it means to be a real woman.

Sadly, today far to many refuse to even define the term “woman”, including recently appointed Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is a woman.

The two women we are presenting are real American women.

Both dealt with family versus working issues. Both faced challenges that cut to the core of their womanhood, personal strength and faith. Both were mothers and wives.

Both were uniquely successful in their work to further women’s rights and act to better women in general.

Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton

Catholic Online has this biography of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seaton, the first American woman to be canonized by the Catholic Church. Catholic Online wrote this about Saint Elizabeth,

Born two years before the American Revolution, Elizabeth grew up in the upper class of New York society. She was a prolific reader, and read everything from the Bible to contemporary novels.

In spite of her high society background, Elizabeth’s early life was quiet, simple, and often lonely. As she grew a little older, the Bible was to become her continual instruction, support and comfort -and she would continue to love the Scriptures for the rest of her life.

In 1794, Elizabeth married the wealthy young William Seton, with whom she was deeply in love. The first years of their marriage were happy and prosperous. Elizabeth wrote in her diary at first autumn, “My own home at twenty-the world-that and heaven too-quite impossible.”

This time of Elizabeth’s life was to be a brief moment of earthly happiness before the many deaths and partings she was to suffer. Within four years, William’s father died, leaving the young couple in charge of William’s seven half brothers and sisters, as well as the family’s importing business.

Events moved quickly from there with devastating effect. Both William’s business and health failed. He was finally forced to file a petition of bankruptcy and, in a final attempt to save William’s health, the Setons sailed for Italy, where William had business friends.

Unfortunately, William died of tuberculosis while in Italy. Elizabeth’s one consolation was that he had recently awakened to the things of God.

The many enforced separations from dear ones by death and distance served to draw Elizabeth’s heart to God and eternity. The accepting and embracing of God’s will – “The Will,” as she called it – would be a keynote in her spiritual life.

Elizabeth’s deep concern for the spiritual welfare of her family and friends eventually led her into the Catholic Church.

In Italy, Elizabeth captivated everyone by her kindness, patience, good sense, wit, and courtesy. During this time Elizabeth became interested in the Catholic Faith and, over a period of months, her Italian friends guided her in Catholic instruction.

Elizabeth’s desire for the Bread of Life was to be a strong force leading her to the Catholic Church.

Having lost her mother at an early age, Elizabeth felt great comfort in the idea that the Blessed Virgin was truly her mother. She asked the Blessed Virgin to guide her to the True Faith and officially joined the Catholic Church in 1805.

At the suggestion of the president of St. Mary’s College in Baltimore, Maryland, Elizabeth started a school in that city. The school had originally been secular but once news of her entrance to Catholicism spread, several girls were removed from her school. It was then Seton, and two other young women who helped her in her work, began plans for a Sisterhood. They established the first free Catholic school in America. When the young community adopted their rule, they made provisions for Elizabeth to continue raising her children.

On March 25, 1809, Elizabeth Seton pronounced her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, binding for one year. From that time she was called Mother Seton.

Although Mother Seton became afflicted with tuberculosis, she continued to guide her children. The Rule of the Sisterhood was formally ratified in 1812. It was based upon the Rule St. Vincent de Paul had written for his Daughters of Charity in France. By 1818, in addition to their first school, the sisters had established two orphanages and another school. Today, six groups of sisters can trace their origins to Mother Seton’s initial foundation.

Seton’s favorite prayer was the 23rd Psalm and she developed a deep devotion to the Eucharist, Sacred Scripture, and the Virgin Mary.

For the last three years of her life, Elizabeth felt that God was getting ready to call her, and this gave her great joy. Mother Seton died in 1821 at the age of 46, only sixteen years after becoming a Catholic. She was beatified by Pope John XXIII on March 17, 1963 and was canonized on September 14, 1975 by Pope Paul VI.

Feminist Betty Friedan

According to the Jewish Women’s Archives, Betty Friedan, 1921 – 2006, was a writer, activist, and pioneer in the American Feminist Movement. Joyce Antler writes this about Friedan,

If there was any one woman who could be called the mother of feminism, it was Betty Friedan. Though “second-wave” feminism was a collective endeavor that had many founders, Friedan was the spark plug whose furious indictment of “the problem that had no name”—the false consciousness of “happy housewifery”—set off a revolution more potent than many of the other social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s. The impact of this social movement is still being felt around the world.

[ … ]

“Was the feminine mystique” a mistake, she was asked; at that point in her life, worrying whether her daughter in medical school could combine her future career with motherhood, she felt it might have been. Some feminists accused Friedan of abandoning the feminist vision she had done so much to promulgate, but she argued in new work, like The Second Stage, that her vision required the participation of men and needed to incorporate the desires of women for family as well as work. Though the issue of career-vs. stay-at-home motherhood has been framed in more complex fashion by economists, sociologists, and others who look carefully at workplace inequities as well as unequal burdens of parenting, the dilemma Friedan raised as she acknowledged her “mistake” remains deeply relevant to contemporary women.

Friedan admitted that she made another mistake in regard to her Jewish identity. Early in life, she rejected religion almost entirely, but feminism brought her back to reclaim her Jewish roots and she did so proudly.

It is time to look back and remember what French lawyer Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his opus work Democracy in America about American women,

“[N]ow that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.”

Neither Elizabeth or Betty cared about being politically correct and they certainly didn’t give a hoot about offending someone by not using their personal pronouns. They didn’t care about the color of a woman’s skin, they focused of the content of the woman’s character and the well being of every woman.

These were women making a mark on our culture, society and American persona. They were of the gender female (XX) and everyone who knew them respected them for their intellects, audacity, faith and devotion to the God of Abraham.

It is time to restore women to their proper roles in America, that of the creators of our next generations of Americans and the mothers of our nation.

Our uniquely American women in whose hands truly lays the future of our Constitutional Republic.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

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