Restless Consciences

When a woman speaks too loudly, dares to voice uncomfortable truths, or challenges the established order, she is all too often labeled as “mad”. The first women who broke the mafia’s code of silence were considered crazy. Locas—insane—was the name the Argentine mothers of Plaza de Mayo were so called, as they demanded the return of their children who had disappeared, or at least their bodies. The mystics, who discovered in their ecstasies and visions a channel for expressing a deep and often revolutionary spirituality, were seen as teetering on the edge of reason. Heretics were deemed possessed, as witches. Out of their minds, too, were the jurodivaja, the “fools for Christ” of Russian tradition, who lived on the fringes of society.

The price to pay has often been extraordinarily high. Many “mad” women have been persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, and even burned at the stake. Others have been confined to psychiatric institutions, and subjected to brutal “treatment”, stripped of their dignity and their voice. Society has tried in every possible way to protect itself from these restless consciences.

Yet women, historically deprived of the right to speak in public, have learned to use this very label as a shield, and transform this stigma into a power.

The suffragettes of the early 20th century deliberately abandoned the composure expected of women of their time. Instead, they engaged in acts considered insane; for example, they chained themselves to gates, fasted to the brink of death, all the while facing violence and ridicule. Feminism itself, in its early days, was seen as a manifestation of collective madness.

Notwithstanding these obstacles, thanks to those women who dared to embrace madness as an existential stance, who shattered silence and widespread inertia, today we can imagine the world a different place. Their fury was generative, the vanguard of change, a foretaste of the social and cultural revolutions that have reshaped our way of life. Today, the prophetic Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Ávila, and Thérèse of Lisieux, are Doctors of the Church.

The Biblical scholar, Marinella Perroni, writes that this dynamic is rooted in the very origins of Christianity. Women were the first witnesses to Christ’s resurrection. Mary Magdalene and the others who went to the tomb and found it empty carried the astonishing news to the apostles—who at first “these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them” (Luke 24:11).