Catholic women set the record straight about sex, motherhood, marriage, prayer and contraception

Catholic women in their own words

By Emily Stimpson - OSV Newsweekly, 5/20/2012

If you’re female and Catholic, it’s been an interesting few months. 

Ever since President Barack Obama’s administration announced its decision to require religious employers to provide coverage of contraceptives, abortifacient drugs and sterilization procedures (and the Church announced its unequivocal opposition to said mandate), the airwaves and Internet have been populated by pundits and politicians galore, all claiming to speak for Catholic women. 

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As for what the majority of those pundits and politicians have had to say? Well, their message goes something like this: “The Church’s teachings on contraception are outdated and ignored. The Catholic hierarchy is oppressive and misogynistic. And Catholic women want change.” 

As Providence would have it, however, around the same time this storm of punditry was unleashed, a series of books rolled off the presses that told a very different story. All written by faithful and intelligent Catholic women, these books gave Catholic women a chance to speak for themselves about their faith and set the record straight. 

Those books include Hallie Lord’s “Style, Sex, and Substance: 10 Catholic Women Consider the Things That Really Matter” (OSV, $14.95), Kate Wicker’s “Weightless” (Servant, $12.99), and Mary Eberstadt’s “Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution” (Ignatius, $19.95). 

Recently, OSV spoke to the women who penned those pages. We put questions to them about marriage and motherhood, work and prayer, femininity and beauty, and much, much more.  

Here’s what they had to say. In their own words. Read more here...