The Making of a Woman?

First, do not expect gentleness from young women brought up on the female form of pornography, the sleazy and mind-emptying “romance.”  Do not expect it from them if they are taught to swear like sailors, without the know-how and the risk to life and limb and the rough camaraderie that make the sailor’s roughness pardonable.  Do not expect it if they place before their eyes the glossy magazines that slash the soul like steel knives. Do not expect it fi they are trained up in catfights.  …

Second, you might ask exactly how it helps a girl when a parent, usually the father, presses her into competitive sports, when the team or platoon or ship’s crew is not the pattern of female cooperation, when she knows that she will never be able to compete against her male counterparts at the same level, and when the development of her growing body is directed towards child-bearing, not towards loping across the savannah in pursuit of gazelle or hurling a harpoon to spear seals.  … They could be developing all kinds of beautiful and useful skills that would eventually bring sweetness and grace and health to their families and forge real social bonds among neighbors, but they are too busy learning to hit a softball in a field no bigger than the Little League stadium at Williamsport before a few other girls while the boys are off doing something else.  What, ultimately, is the aim?  Yes, there will always be tomboys, and I have no desire to tell girls that they should not be playing softball.  I do desire to tell girls that they should not be pushing softball upon them.

Third, how can a girl become a woman like Dickens’s Esther Summerson if she cannot do anything?  Consider what a mass of contradictions we are.  If a woman arranges flowers for a living, she earns our congratulations even if she doesn’t do anything else either because she doesn’t know how or because she is too busy at her flower shop.  If a woman cooks fine Italian meals for a living—if her gnocchi, with their wonderful hundreds of calories, are famous all over town—we sing her praises, even if when she gets home she is spent.  If a woman plays the violin for an orchestra or gives singing lessons, she can hope to find her name in the newspaper, even if she buys fast food for herself and her family on the way home from the music hall.  But if a woman, because she is well versed in all of the household arts, can do all these things and in fact does them for the people she loves and for those whom she welcomes into her home (and she is not afraid of guests, because her home is always just a whisk or two away from hospitality), we shake our heads and say that she has wasted her talents.  Not developed them, notice, and put them to use.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.126-127