The Feminine Genius at Work

As Catholics, we believe that God created people as men and women—that we are made to be different, though equal in dignity. While both genders have both feminine and masculine traits, our physical and spiritual differences give rise to unique gifts. Pope John Paul II called the unique gifts of women “the feminine genius.”

Women who work in business, who live one of several vocations (single or married, with or without children), have a special opportunity to use their feminine genius—to make a difference in the lives of other people and in society and culture more broadly. “Women will increasingly play a part in the solution of the serious problems of the future,” wrote the Pope.

“It is thus my hope, dear sisters,” he continued, “that you will reflect carefully on what it means to speak of the ‘genius of women’, not only in order to be able to see in this phrase a specific part of God’s plan which needs to be accepted and appreciated, but also in order to let this genius be more fully expressed in the life of society as a whole, as well as in the life of the Church.”

What Is the Feminine Genius?

What is this genius of women? What does it mean to fully express it? And, how can we do so in the context of business? John Paul II said it isn’t just “great and famous women of the past or present” who live out the feminine genius in ways that impact the world but also “those ordinary women who reveal the gift of their womanhood by placing themselves at the service of others in their everyday lives. For in giving themselves to others each day women fulfil their deepest vocation.”

Mothers give themselves to others each day; it’s perhaps the easiest example to come to mind. But, in business, women have many small (and large) opportunities to give themselves to others each day, too. How often have you seen a colleague struggling and comforted him with a smile? How often have you gone the extra mile with a client and, perhaps, given her the boost she needed that day? How often have you mentored a less experienced employee and helped her discover her gifts and grow them? John Paul II might say that these examples are ways that “women acknowledge the person, because they see persons with their hearts … They see others in their greatness and limitations; they try to go out to them and help them.”

The unique gifts that God gave women have existed since Eve, and since Eve, many people have attempted to identify and understand them. Two 20th-century Catholic philosophers did so extensively: Edith Stein (also known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) and Pope St. John Paul II, who drew on Edith’s work and canonized her in 1998.

Edith Stein was born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1891. She gave up religion as a teenager and studied philosophy, ultimately converting to Catholicism when she was 30. Edith immediately felt called to become a Carmelite nun but had to wait 12 years to do so. She spent that time teaching and writing, and it was during that period that she wrote the essays and lectures that were later collected into her well-known “Essays on Woman.”

Though Edith was killed in Auschwitz in 1942 when she was still only 50 years old, she left the Church and the world with a tremendous body of work. Her “Essays on Woman” can help us understand what it means to be a woman and how we can leverage our unique gifts in a variety of contexts, including business.

“Only the person blinded by the passion of controversy could deny that woman in soul and body is formed for a particular purpose,” she wrote. “Woman naturally seeks to embrace that which is living, personal, and whole. To cherish, guard, protect, nourish and advance growth is her natural, maternal yearning.”

It’s notable that this statement was written by a woman who never married and who later became a nun. Edith was a spiritual mother; she taught and wrote, guided and helped, and she ultimately died with the hope that her suffering would be united with Christ’s. Edith knew well that womanhood doesn’t always lead to childbirth, but it always leads to maternity.

This innate capacity for motherhood leads naturally to other aspects of the feminine genius, a term first used by Pope St. John Paul II in his 1988 apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem (“On the Dignity and Vocation of Women”). Edith Stein identified several “true feminine qualities,” including feeling, intuition, empathy, and adaptability, which enable women to care for, cultivate, help, understand, and encourage others. She described the female soul as expansive and open, quiet, warm, clear, self-contained, empty of itself, and mistress of itself. In a 2005 article for Catholic Answers, author Mary Jo Anderson identified four aspects of the feminine genius, based on Mulieris Dignitatem, which have become popular in discussions of Catholic femininity: receptivity, sensitivity, generosity, and maternity. Here, we’ll distill these approaches to the feminine genius into five aspects: receptivity, empathy, generosity, reflectiveness, and maternity.

Receptivity

We can see our receptivity literally, in our capacity to receive life—but our receptivity is also spiritual and emotional, Anderson wrote, pointing to the woman whom John Paul II described in Letter to Women as “the highest expression of the ‘feminine genius’”: Mary, our Blessed Mother. Like Mary, when we are receptive, we listen to God’s voice and say “yes” to his will—and, according to Anderson, we are “personally fulfilled and the community around [us] is blessed by the feminine aspect of the human experience.” As Edith wrote, “The intrinsic value of woman consists essentially in exceptional receptivity for God’s work in the soul.”

Receptivity, therefore, also involves discerning our gifts and how God wants us to use them. Each of us has the gifts of femininity God gave us, but we possess them in varying capacities and are called to use them in different ways. We each, by virtue of our Confirmation, have the gifts of the Holy Spirit, but we also have specific charisms we are called to use in service of others. Our receptivity enables us to understand these gifts and apply them, including in the workplace.

Empathy

Edith Stein wrote that the feminine soul is “fashioned to be a shelter in which other souls may unfold.” As women, our bodies are created to shelter another person. This physical reality points to a spiritual reality: that we are created to care for people in other ways, too. Our openness and expansiveness means that “nothing human should be alien to” our soul, whose “principal interest is directed to people and human relations.” It leads us to be empathetic, “to see beyond the exterior and look into the deepest needs of the heart,” as Anderson wrote when she described the feminine gift she called sensitivity.

Edith believed that the Holy Spirit is the source of this “womanly love and compassion” and emphasized the importance of women’s empathy in all areas of life, including work—as did Pope John Paul II, who wrote in Mulieris Dignitatem, “Our time in particular awaits the manifestation of that ‘genius’ which belongs to women, and which can ensure sensitivity for human beings in every circumstance: because they are human! – and because ‘the greatest of these is love’ (cf. 1 Cor 13:13).”

Because of our empathy, we have what Edith called a “singular sensitivity to moral values and an abhorrence for all which is low and mean.” She also said that women “have ears for the softest and most imperceptible little voices.” We can use these ears as advocates, as comforters, as supporters, and as leaders.

Generosity

Springing forth from our empathy is generosity, which Anderson wrote “makes a woman available for the needs of her community and her profession—needs that go far beyond operational efficiency.” She pointed to the examples of many women in the Gospels, including Our Lady as well as Martha and Mary: “Jesus trusted women’s generous hearts with his own human need for hospitality, support, and understanding of his mission.”

Women helped fund Jesus’ work; St. Luke tells us that Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, Susanna, and others “provided for” Jesus and his apostles “out of their means” (Luke 8:1-3). In Mulieris Dignitatem, Pope John Paul II pointed to the widow in the Gospel of Luke who gives two copper coins to the treasury; Jesus says that she “put in more” than the wealthy who technically gave more than she did, because she “put in all the living that she had” (Luke 21:1-4).

When it comes to making money, it can be easy to fall into the sin of greed—but it can also be difficult to discern the line between greed and the desire to earn money to support one’s family and give back to the Church and the community. As women, we can use our generous hearts to identify that line and ensure that we use our income for good. After all, it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evils—not money itself (1 Timothy 6:10).

Generosity doesn’t just apply to our finances, however. We are also generous with our time and talent, serving as volunteers in our parishes and our community and giving of ourselves in the workplace and within our family and friend groups. Our feminine generosity can serve to counteract corporate greed, helping our organizations to serve rather than mindlessly count dollar signs. Without the feminine genius, it’s all too easy for companies to ignore workers’ needs, such as parental leave, or to create products in unethical ways. Anderson wrote that “women’s generosity, a weapon against dehumanizing scientism, is manifested when women emphasize the social and ethical dimensions to balance the scientific and technological achievements of mankind.”

Reflectiveness

Edith Stein believed that the woman’s soul is inclined toward quiet and reflection, though she noted that “at first sight, the contrary seems to be true.” In the hustle and bustle of daily life, how many of us feel quietness in our soul? We often feel more like Martha, “anxious and troubled about many things” (Luke 10:41-42) and too distracted to sit in silence at the Lord’s feet. However, Edith concluded, “the faculty for this quiet must be there,” because there are so many women “in whom one takes refuge in order to find peace”. Fortunately, God is there to help us find the quiet we need—and Edith said that asking God for that help comes more easily to women than it does to men.

This quietness leads us to reflection, as teacher and former lawyer Daniella Palmiotto points out. We can look to Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the supreme example of quietness and reflection; we are told more than once in the Gospel of Luke that she takes the events that happen to her and her family and keeps them in her heart to ponder (Luke 2:19 and 2:49). Taking the time to reflect makes us more self-aware, more able to ask God for help when we need it, and more able to thank him for his gifts.

Maternity

The final aspect of the feminine genius Anderson identified is maternity. She quoted Letter to Women, in which St. John Paul II told us that women (educators in particular) have “an affective, cultural and spiritual motherhood which has inestimable value for the development of individuals and the future of society.” Again, Edith Stein is instructive here, applying women’s maternity to our occupations: “Let us … refer to the women occupied in communal or national administration and in the Parliament as ‘mothers of the people,’” she writes.

Imagine if more of us thought of our professions as extensions of our motherhood. This practice might come more easily to teachers, counselors, and health care providers—but women working in business can think of themselves as mothers there, too. Managers can use their maternity to care for their employees as individual human beings rather than as tools to produce work. Salespeople can identify and help solve customer needs rather than trying to make a buck any way they can. Communications professionals can commit to sharing the truth rather than trying so hard to persuade that they lose sight of the humanity of their audience. Engineers and designers can keep the needs of their user front and center when creating their products and solutions. Accountants and financial advisers can empower their clients to become more confident in their use of money rather than only filing their taxes or making investments for them.

Leadership is also a way that women can live out our feminine genius in the workplace—and women have our own special brand of leadership, as we are particularly gifted servant leaders. A term first identified by Robert K. Greenleaf in 1970, “servant leadership” is defined as “a philosophy and set of practices that enriches the lives of individuals, builds better organizations and ultimately creates a more just and caring world.” Servant leaders are more focused on the people they work with than on their output; they “[share] power, [put] the needs of others first and [help] people develop and perform as highly as possible”—for their own sake, not just for the sake of the company. With our innate maternity, women are natural servant leaders, and the research bears this out.” (see here, here, and here, for example).

Nurturing the Feminine Genius

If these traits of the feminine genius sound like a tall order, it’s because they are. As Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wrote in his 2007 encyclical Spe salvi (“Saved in Hope”), “Man was created for greatness—for God himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched.”

God created us to be great, because he created us to be with him. But we are weak and must rely on him to grow into that greatness. Fortunately, as St. Francis de Sales wrote, “if you undertake … any work, whatever it may be, for the glory of God and out of obedience, he will take care of you and has pledged himself to provide everything you will need.”

Stretching our hearts to achieve the greatness to which we were destined, to fully embrace our feminine genius, involves prayer, the sacraments, and personal and professional development.

Prayer and the Sacraments

Edith Stein wrote that for women to practice their work effectively and with “their true womanliness,” they need “an intense spiritual stamina … but this stamina perishes in the long run if not refreshed by the eternal wellspring.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church identifies “several wellsprings where Christ awaits us to enable us to drink of the Holy Spirit”: the Word of God; the Liturgy of the Church; and the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. These wellsprings sustain us in the Christian life, but the Catechism also notes that the Holy Spirit is available to us at every moment of the day, whatever we are doing—which includes when we are working. If, as St. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, we are to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17), then we must make our work a prayer, too. Doing so will help us embrace the feminine genius at work.

The sacraments, including Confession and the Eucharist, are also essential to the life and work of the Catholic woman. St. Zélie Martin, mother of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, was a successful business owner whose busy life included raising five daughters (though she gave birth to nine children), being a devoted wife, running a household, and making lace and managing employees in her business. Still, she and her husband (St. Louis Martin) began each day with Mass, and she received the Eucharist as often as she could. It is only by grounding herself in Christ that Zélie could leverage her gifts to be the wife, mother, and business owner God called her to be.

Personal and Professional Development

Learning and building upon our skills is, of course, important in all professions. But focusing on our personal and professional development can also help us cultivate our feminine genius. Becoming better at discernment can help us be more receptive. Learning about the needs of underrepresented groups of employees can help us be more empathetic. Developing our time management and budgeting skills can help us be more generous with our time and our money. Nourishing our prayer life and developing our relationship with the Lord can help us be more reflective. Learning how to mentor or coach others can help us be more maternal.

From the Catholic perspective, personal and professional development go well beyond self-help books focused on improvement for one’s own sake. When we build our skills, we enhance our ability to use them for God’s kingdom. We do so with humility, knowing that our gifts were given to us by God, and we do so with confidence, knowing that with his grace, those gifts can make an impact.