Being A True Lady

So yesterday I was hanging out with some of my friends and I said something to one of my guy friends about chivalry. His response was to go on a bit of a huge rant about how "Chivalry is DEAD! and it's women's fault! You look at all these magazines about how to get soft skin and then all the other women think that they have to be like that and they think they're a failure if they aren't!" And even though his rant kind of came out of nowhere, I think he has a legitimate point. If the idea of chivalry is partly for the sake of women, what happens to chivalry when women forget what it means to be a woman?

Chivalry! :D

Society today is always trying to make women and men the same. It suggests that the dignity of women comes from acting like men and accomplishing the same things as men have accomplished. But what happens to chivalry when there's no real distinction between men and women except their physical features? Can chivalry continue in society if society's definitions of "woman" and "man" are always changing? I don't think it can. If men and women are really pretty much the same as each other, why is it important to be chivalrous? To modern society, it's not.


The media has also put false ideas of womanhood into the heads of women everywhere. The media tries to suggest that the dignity of women comes from their physical beauty. If a woman doesn't have the kind of physical beauty that the media says they should have, they think that they don't have womanly dignity. This idea of womanly dignity is clearly wrong because a woman is not merely a physical being. This definition of the dignity of woman doesn't account for the whole of what woman is, and so is incomplete and drastically incorrect.


Rather, womanly dignity comes from the virtue of the woman, not from her accomplishments or her physical beauty. Society and the media do not define the dignity of a woman. The definition of womanly dignity is found within a woman herself in her virtue.  In his letter to the Colossians, St. Paul said, "Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience."  He didn't say, "Clothe yourselves with really cute clothes and really awesome achievements." Not that there's anything wrong with either one of those things. They're just not as important for a woman as having true virtue. The best example of a woman with true virtue is, of course, Our Lady. Church tradition holds that when men saw Mary, her virtue was so beautiful and apparent that they didn't even notice her physical beauty. So if we truly want to be the best women we can be, we should strive for virtue above all else. 

That is why it's important to act like a lady and dress modestly. No one is going to be able to see the virtue of a woman if they're too busy looking at their body. The beauty of the clothes we wear reflects our inner beauty. When we dress immodestly, we are letting our bodies define us, not our inner beauty. When we try to act like a man instead of a lady, we are basically letting men define us, and I'm sure no feminist would ever be remotely even okay with that. 


So let's bring chivalry back by acting like true women of God. :)


P.S. Sorry for saying inner beauty, it's really a rawther corny thing to say. :P