Wow, what a great response to a posting! I will need some time to address all the thoughts from my perspective.
I do respect the choice of women who want to raise families and "stay in the kitchen" that has never been questioned. In fact I believe that the mass media that pushes the notion of "super mom" (working , raising a family, running a few non-profits while driving the kids to their hockey game at 5 am) is one way the evil one confuses focus on the real purpose of life which is to love God and experience his creation. so in that sense I support a simpler, quieter and even slower life (which I am working on) so that quality of the day may be introduced.
I will need time to address the other points (i.e. scripturally ordained, church infallibility on the role of women) and all that stuff. It's not so much those sources that I am challenging; it is more the exaggerated understanding grass roots traditionalists and Protestant fundamentalists have on the issue.
But more on that later.
Bruce Ferguson
How the hell can you challenge the "understanding," if you don't even know the Church doctrine itself that is being "understood?"
Feminism is a damnable modernist error. Period. It arrived on the world stage in the 20th Century and was promptly shot down by a clear, perfectly easy to understand condemnation by Pope Pius XI in Casti Connubii, cited above. Case closed.
The "grass roots traditionalists" (nice how you employ the association fallacy by lumping us in with Protestants who, to their credit, at least obey Natural Law), do nothing at all but live according to Natural Law and universal human tradition, as our grandparents, great-granparents, etc, etc ad infinitum, lived. Even the overhwelming majority of pagans lived this way. There's nothing at all complicated or confusing about it. But then confusion is something of a stock in trade for Modernists.
Behold the supernatural insight possessed by this great, sainted pope. Does it sound like he's describing one of the posters here?
"It is one of the cleverest devices of the Modernists (as they are commonly and rightly called) to present their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement, in a scattered and disjointed manner, so as to make it appear as if their minds were in doubt or hesitation, whereas in reality they are quite fixed and steadfast."-Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis