WRITING for the CATHOLIC PRESS

by
Jack Fritscher

SALVE REGINA Magazine
Vol 10, No. 7 May-June 1961

Official Organ of the Cistercian Benefactors’ Society,
Cistercian Monastery, Irving, Texas

WOMEN, WORDS AND WISDOM

BY SOLANGE HERTZ, WESTMINSTER, MD.
The Newman Press. 184 pp. $3.50.

Book Review by John J. Fritscher (Jack Fritscher)

Article also available in PDF

Women, Words and Wisdom is a warm, often touching, and frequently hilarious series of essays espousing the philosophy of the dustpan. Assuming her audience to be men who “can’t understand women,” housewives, and young women contemplating marriage, author Hertz proceeds valiantly.

Apparently she knows whereof she speaks; for her style, as personal as it is personable, provides a wealth of spirituality glossed with an earthy humor. (“Poverty of spirit: Being able to wear muskrat-dyed mink.”) Drawing from her own experiences (she once had a cat for a spiritual director), she perpetrates aphorisms of the obvious with a twist and a flair that often open windows to an insight which would not enter by the door.

This Auntie Maine of the biblical quarterlies (she dotes on owning a complete set of the works of Tertullian) touches upon the main spiritual and physical problems of the housewife with sympathy and percep- tion, rejecting self-pity in favor of the joyful understanding of one’s role. (“It is the housewife’s special little share in the Redemption to be able to atone for others’ sins by washing others’ clothes.”)

She draws a close parallel between the housewife of today and the Housewife of Nazareth, emphasizing the definite Marian spirit that might pervade every woman with a domestic vocation.

Caution: addiction to this engaging book sets in at first reading and users return for more. And good reason—after all, she counsels housewives to be abandoned women, solves overweight, and advocates the art of nagging God.

©1961, 2002 , 2023 Jack Fritscher



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Copyright Jack Fritscher, Ph.D. & Mark Hemry - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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