than in parts, that women's “minds do not dissect an object: they grasp it in totality.”55 This aspect of
her vision allows her to form a fuller vision of the reality in God's safekeeping.
Edith Stein states that women have an exceptional
receptivity for God's work in the soul, and sees the
empathy of women as suited and helpful in any
vocation. Stein describes the spousal role of a woman's
fuller vision as helpmate writing in her “Essay on
Feminine Vocations”:
[she] not only participates in his work; she complements him, counteracting the dangers of his
specifically masculine nature. It is her business to ensure to the best of her ability that he is not
totally absorbed in his professional work, that he does not permit his humanity to become
stunted, and that he does not neglected his family duties as a father. She will be better able to
do so the more she herself is mature as a personality; and it is vital here that she does not lose
herself in association with her husband but, on the contrary, cultivates her own gifts and
powers.56
Stein expands the application of this fuller vision to the role of mother writing:
this demands an even more refined gift of sympathy because it is necessary to comprehend the
dispositions and faculties of which the young people themselves are yet unaware.57
In fact Stein sees ways a woman can employ her sympathetic vision in every field. She wrote in her
essay on “Woman's Value in National Life”:
Woman's intrinsic value can work in every place and thereby institute grace, completely
independent of the profession which she practices and whether it concurs with her singularity or
not. Everywhere she meets with a human being, she will find opportunity to sustain, to
counsel, to help. If the factory worker or the office employee would only pay attention to the
spirits of the persons who work with her in the same room, she would prevail upon the troubleladen hearts to be opened to her through a friendly word, a sympathetic question; she will find
55
56
57
Ibid., 61.
Edith Stein, Essays on Woman. Translated by Freda Mary Oben, Second Edition, Revised. (Washington, D.C.: ICS
Publications, 1996), 109.
Ibid.
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