In most stories of women martyrs there is a strong focus on virginity. The Passion of Sts Perpetua and Felicity (203) focuses instead on the power of two mothers—one with a nursing babe, the other 8 mos pregnant—to fully serve as “other Christs” in their female bodies. (Lentz👇)
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These 2 women from Carthage—Perpetua and her servant Felicity—are arrested and sentenced to death for confessing Christ. Their husbands are not mentioned, but Perpetua’s refusal to obey her father dramatizes the explicit resistance to patriarchy.
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This uniquely personal document is full of painfully intimate details, free of the stereotypical conventions of later hagiography. P emerges as a fully realized person, subject to hunger, fears, and even—as a nursing mother, separated from her child—the pain of swollen breasts.
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Throughout we sense the struggle of a woman to claim her own identity and vocation amid the various competing claims imposed by society. Perpetua: “For this cause came we willingly unto this, that our liberty might not be obscured. For this cause have we devoted our lives.”

Mar 7, 2020 · 3:09 PM UTC

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Before “the day of their victory” Felicity gives birth, rejoicing that her child is born in safety and so she comes now “from blood to blood, from the midwife to the gladiator, to wash after her travail in a second baptism.”
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When stripped in the arena the crowd shudders “seeing one a tender girl, the other her breasts yet dropping from late childbearing.” The 2 young women, formerly mistress and servant, now sisters in Christ, turn to one another before the jeering crowd and exchange a kiss.
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The Feast of Sts Perpetua and Felicity is a memorial to all women who have claimed their identity, spoken their truth, refused to stay in their place, endured scorn for being “nasty,” mean, and unlikeable. They were warned; it was explained to them; nevertheless, they persisted.
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