Thomas Kazen, Dirt, Shame, Status

inherently receptive to new life and that this is an aspect of their essential nature which should never be overlooked as it contains the key to understanding what a woman is.The reader would not know this from the book, but perhaps it is worth noting that Sister Prudence was married and a mother of two sons before her marriage was annulled and she joined the Sisters of Mercy.She flourished as an academic philosopher and it is very much as a philosopher that she engages with her topic.She does not enter into the question of women's ordination.Her aim as a Catholic philosopher is to make a comprehensive argument for gender complementarity.Men and women are really different, they possess equal dignity, and are incomplete without one another.Together they form the foundation for wider community and a sane society.In terms of recent Catholic history, she aligns more sympathetically with Pope John Paul II's teaching on gender, based on his philosophical and theological reflections on the human body.Sister Prudence is a gifted and very lucid teacher.Just as examples, her analysis of Thomism and her invocation of Newman's principles on the development of doctrine would help any student of these topics; her application of their teaching to issues of gender is convincing and illuminating, as is her treatment of the married English philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach.They were both not only distinguished philosophers in their own right, they also managed to parent no fewer than seven children.There is a wit, too, which sometimes verges on harshness in her treatment of those she opposes.Some of the 'sexperts' of the last century get short shrift, including Alfred Kinsey, Michel Foucault, Mary Daly and Margaret Mead.In place of the distortions of contemporary gender ideology, Prudence Allen proposes a form of new feminism, based on what she describes as integral complementarity, in which men and women are at one and the same time whole and complete as individuals, while, together, forming something greater than they do apart.Of course, in many ways, her whole project is controversial to those who question sex and gender realism, arguing that the latter at least is socially constructed, and the former an accident of nature that should bind no one to any particular birth identity.Orthodoxy needs its advocates and this is a formidable and challenging contribution to a debate that shows no sign of ending soon

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