Most Christians are taught to view Mary with awe and admiration. The serene face. The flowing robe. The adoring eyes of a mother who knows her child is annointed by God. The content, mother of Jesus, who said yes to God without hesitation.

But many who are diving deeper into how patriarchy shapes faith see her in a different light. While there’s nothing wrong with Mary holding a sacred place in many of our traditions, her story has been twisted by Christian patriarchy to create an impossible ideal. This distorted view of ideal womanhood, motherhood, and submission to God has been used to control women for centuries.

Mother Mary is presented as pure, submissive, and perfect. We are taught that she gave everything, her body, her future, her comfort,  because that’s what “good women” do. And whether we grew up Catholic, evangelical, or somewhere in between, that version of Mary defines how we’re taught to live: quietly, selflessly, and without complaint.

We’re praised when we’re humble and punished when we’re confident or honest, especially when challenging power.

We’re labeled selfish if we want more, and “too much” if we dare to ask for what we need.

And all the while, we’re told that Mary is the gold standard. That she suffered silently, and so should we.

But what if we’ve only been told a version of her story designed to inhibit women and maintain unjust power structures?

La Pietà by Michelangelo

Who Told Mary’s Story?

It’s important to remember that the story of Mary, like the majority of Scripture and Christian tradition, was shaped by church leaders centuries after she lived. These elders, almost entirely wealthy male(and later European), weren’t just recording history. They were constructing doctrinewhich means every detail about Mary’s obedience, her virginity, her silence, and her suffering was filtered through a patriarchal lens.

Mary’s story became a way to hold women to a standard of holiness that centers purity, motherhood, and endless self-sacrifice.

We’re told:

• she was “chosen” because she was the most worthy.
• she submitted her body to God’s will without question.
• her value came through her motherhood, specifically, her willingness to become a vessel for someone else’s purpose.

This narrative doesn’t just shape theology or church business; it also influences how we perceive ourselves and how women are valued in everyday life.

What many of us have learned the hard way is that this caricature of Mary is unattainable because it leaves very little room for autonomy, complexity, or imperfection.

Madoonna of the Meadow. Raphael

Mary in Art: The Quiet Perfection We’re Meant to Emulate

Throughout history, Christian art has reinforced the same impossible standard placed on women by theology. When we see Mary in paintings and sculpture, she’s rarely depicted as complex, emotional, or human. Instead, she’s shown as passive, pure, and quietly beautiful—an image that invites reverence, but also silence.

Consider Raphael’s Madonna of the Meadow: Mary is young, serene, and gazing lovingly at the Christ child. She’s outdoors, yet untouched by the natural chaos of the world around her. She is fully attentive to Jesus and John the Baptist,. Her posture is poised. There’s no sign of fatigue, doubt, or pain.

Or Michelangelo’s Pietà: Mary holds the broken body of her son in her lap, grief-stricken, but again, she appears calm, dignified, composed.  While I strongloy believe that there is no wrong way to grieve, and all emotions are welcome, Mary’s expression falls flat for me. She is holding the abused, broken, limp body of her child who has been publicly tortured, mocked, and executed. Even in the face of this unimaginable loss, she doesn’t weep or wail. She bears the weight of suffering with stillness, reinforcing the idea that holy women maintain some level of calm and composure, even in tragedy.

Even in Madonna of the Yarnwinder, Mary is depicted not in active maternal care or spiritual agency, but in gentle domesticity. She watches Jesus from a distance while he plays with a symbolic cross, perhaps foreshadowing his death and her passive role in that narrative.Her clothes seem regal and untouched by the grit and grime of ancient life. A single bare foot peaks out from under her gown showing delicate white skin. Again, clean and unscarred by life.

These pieces are beautiful, but they also reflect what patriarchal religion wants women to see in ourselves: calmness, quiet obedience, and reverence in the midst of hard things.

When art only shows us the idealized version of a woman, we lose touch with the full truth of her story and of our own.

Three versions of Madonna of the Yarnwinder, credited (at least partly) to Da Vinci.

The Cost of Chasing Perfection

When perfection becomes the expectation, we learn to measure our worth by how much we can endure rather than our value as human beings.

We push ourselves to be all things to all people. We show up polished and put-together while hiding the parts of us that are tired, angry, or breaking.

And this doesn’t just live in church pews-it follows us to work, home, and beyond.

According to the 2021 Women in the Workplace report, 40% of women managing teams have considered leaving or downshifting their careers due to chronic stress and burnout. Women disproportionately carry the “second shift,” performing more domestic labor and caregiving even after a full day of paid work. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this invisible load intensified, leading to what experts called a “shecession” that reversed years of progress toward workplace equity.

Burnout isn’t just physical, emotional, spiritual and deeply impacts our relationship with ourselves and others. Trying to live up to the Holy Mother leads straight to the exhaustion of always being “good enough”, but never quite getting there.

The mental health impacts are real. Studies have shown that systemic patriarchy contributes to anxiety, depression, and chronic stress in women. These effects don’t happen in a vacuum. They’re the result of centuries of patriarchal cultural and religious messaging that tells women our value lies in obedience to what we produce, rather than just existing. 

We’re told we’re made in God’s image, but treated like we need to prove we deserve it.

The Lie of “Not Enough”

This story of Mary as the perfect, passive woman fuels the lie that we are not enough as we are.

It tells us that speaking up is rebellion.

That rest is laziness.

That saying “no” is selfish.

But none of that is true.

You were never meant to contort yourself into someone else’s idea of worthy.

Your needs are not a problem. Your emotions are not too much. Your voice is not a threat to your holiness.

Reclaiming What Was Taken

Mary’s story has power, but not because she was perfect or without emotion.

What if Mary’s legacy could be viewed in it’s entirety, What if we view her life (metaphorically or literally, depending on your theology) as an example of a young women who said yes to something sacred without knowing how it would turn out. What can we learn from a resilient woman who was present through trials, persecution, and tremdenous grief? What changes when we see her as a woman who safely carried and delivered a child at a vey young age, survived harsh conditions as a refugee, and was a stabilizing force during Jesus’ volatile life? 

Mary was not a living saint. She was human with a body. She had ancestral memory, lived experiences, memories, feelings, and opinions. She must have grieved deeply during and after the crucifixtion.

When we paint a realistic picture of Mary as the archtypical mother, gritty, resilient, and flawed, her legacy becomes a powerful reminder that holiness and humanity can (and do) coexist.

By shifting her legacy, it makes it obvious that we honor her by reclaiming what patriarchy tried to take: our voice, our wisdom, our worth.

Embracing Mary’s God-given humanity instead of her man-given sainthood allows us to stop trying to earn our holiness by giving to the point of burnout.

Patriarchy Christian societies relentlessly pressures us to seek (unobtainable) perfection because they run on free labor.  Empowerment and equity will always threaten unjust systems and the pressure to be perfect is an external pressure we can learn to seperate ourselves from.

Take the first steps by acknowledging your need for equitable relationships and identifying places where you’re being exploited. Then, start setting boundaries and clawing back the space you want, need, and deserve.

Like Mother Mary, begin rewriting your legacy by embracing your imperfect, embodied, messy, radiant, and real self.