I read a comment on a blog yesterday. Someone suggested that a tomboy is someone who likes to read books about the virtues that boys like, such as honor, resolve, and steadfastness. My jaw started bouncing on the floor but it took me quite a while to sort out all the reasons why. 

I thought a tomboy was someone who liked to climb trees instead of reading. 

I also thought being a tomboy was about activity preferences, not about virtue preferences. 

I did not think there were different virtues for boys than there were for girls. And I still don’t.  ****

I have thoughts about this for lots of reasons. But here’s a primary one. 

Who taught those boys or their sisters to have any virtues? 

Hint: It’s whoever had care of them when they were very little.

That’s usually a woman. What the woman teaches can come from all sorts of places, but Aristotle, Saint Ignatius Loyola, and Vladimir Lenin all agree that the first years of a child’s life are crucial and that the person a child will become, is already present within, by the age of (either five or) seven.

Something that is very simple but very true about any society is this. If women don’t have children, and make sure they are brought up properly, that society will die. This is a truth so simple that we have forgotten to say it. The encyclical Castii Canubii (Pope Pius XI, 1930) says quite clearly that the care and education of children is of equal importance with having them. Great. Except that in the current world we have decided that having children is not important. It follows then that caring for them and educating them is also not important. And this society is sick.

Societies don’t last forever. Lots of things might take them down. But the most fundamental takedown is no children, or at least, no children with the values that will keep a particular society operating.

There is a value beyond any given society that Christian parents must address. That’s the question of how to get to Heaven. Saint Willibald’s parents, Saint Richard and, possibly, Saint Wuna, had three children but no grandchildren. Their children, Saint Willibald, Saint Winnibald, and Saint Walburga, were all monastic, and then went as missionaries to Germany with Saint Boniface, also a relative. This counts as success for all of them, even though they had no further genetic descendants.

Pope Saint John Paul II said clearly that everyone has a parental vocation. All men are called to be fathers, and all women are called to be mothers. Coming from a man who either had no children, or had all the world for his children, this is an important concept. It relates directly to all those saints with funny names who were helping to build society, either the one they lived in, or the one they evangelized.

On the other hand, I read an article many years ago from a woman who had some sort of job and a child (and probably also a husband, as you will see). She wrote an article about how she read about being a good mother. Then, she said, she fell into the trap of believing that she should bring up her son and run the house so she quit her job, and went home. She wasn’t very happy. Her son asked her why she was doing the maid’s work, instead of whatever she had been doing. Horrified at this comment, she went back to work and hired another maid.

From my perspective she ruined her son. She taught him that there is work that is demeaning, it should be done by lower class people, and you should look down on them. Why didn’t she just say, I hate doing that work, but it is important, and we should NEVER look down on people who do very important work that we hate?

Part of Saint Benedict’s impact on civilization was his belief that physical labor and prayer were NOT incompatible. Work done properly is prayer. My little example above was tearing at that foundation.

I think there is room in society, not for different virtues, but for different applications of the same virtue, in different circumstances.

****If I did sort virtues into male and female, I wouldn’t award steadfastness to the male side of the equation. In this, I am following an old argument. Behold Anne Eliot arguing with Captain Harville about constancy in love from Persuasion.  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/105/pg105-images.html 

(Captain Harville)  “No, no, it is not man’s nature. I will not allow it to be more man’s nature than woman’s to be inconstant and forget those they do love, or have loved. I believe the reverse. I believe in a true analogy between our bodily frames and our mental; and that as our bodies are the strongest, so are our feelings; capable of bearing most rough usage, and riding out the heaviest weather.”

“Your feelings may be the strongest,” replied Anne, “but the same spirit of analogy will authorise me to assert that ours are the most tender. Man is more robust than woman, but he is not longer lived; which exactly explains my view of the nature of their attachments. …