Graglia against Feminism: 13

A continuing series; see here for the introduction, and here for more on feminism in the Catholic Church in the UK.

From Domestic Tranquility, p183.
If she is to leave her child in order to compete in the workplace equally with men and childless women, the tie that binds a mother to her child--the strong emotional pull that child exerts on here--must be weakened. A mother must steel herself if she is to leave her baby in a crib in a day care center or at home with a caretaker. She must suppress her longing to respond to the baby's cries and to satisfy that yearning for contact with her baby's body that her own body had been groomed to anticipate and desire. She knows, moreover, that her baby's cries will be answered by one with no special feeling of love for the child, but at most only a feeling of obligation to do as well as possible the job for which one is paid. To leave her baby requires a kind of defeminization of the women, a constriction of the longing to be with and care for her child that is integral to woman's humanity. It requires her to develop an attitude of remoteness and withdrawal from her baby reminiscent of those mothers who boarded their infants out with wet nurses in sixteenth to nineteenth century Europe.