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"Woman naturally seeks to embrace that which is living, personal, and whole. To cherish, guard, protect, nourish and advance growth is her natural, maternal yearning.”~Edith Stein

Each Female character that we meet in Mary Poppins “mothers” in her own way; nourishing through food, and good advice, like Mrs. Correy, through tough love, education and high expectations, like Mary Poppins, through keeping house (though crabbily) like Mrs. Brill. Interestingly, instead of a suffragette, as in the movie, Mrs. Banks, in the Broadway Production struggles between trying to be what elite society expects for her and her family, and what she really wants-to be a good mom, a good wife, to protect and cherish her children, support her husband and build a happy and whole family. The destruction of the Banks family is societal pressure and the expectations of the memory and the person of Mrs. Andrew. The strength of the Banks family comes from the women who want to keep it intact. 

Thank you, women who are mothers! You have sheltered human beings within yourselves in a unique experience of joy and travail. This experience makes you become God's own smile upon the newborn child, the one who guides your child's first steps, who helps it to grow, and who is the anchor as the child makes its way along the journey of life.

Thank you, women who are wives! You irrevocably join your future to that of your husbands, in a relationship of mutual giving, at the service of love and life.

Thank you, women who are daughters and women who are sisters! Into the heart of the family, and then of all society, you bring the richness of your sensitivity, your intuitiveness, your generosity and fidelity.

Thank you, women who work! You are present and active in every area of life-social, economic, cultural, artistic and political. In this way you make an indispensable contribution to the growth of a culture which unites reason and feeling, to a model of life ever open to the sense of "mystery", to the establishment of economic and political structures ever more worthy of humanity.

Thank you, consecrated women! Following the example of the greatest of women, the Mother of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word, you open yourselves with obedience and fidelity to the gift of God's love. You help the Church and all mankind to experience a "spousal" relationship to God, one which magnificently expresses the fellowship which God wishes to establish with his creatures.

Thank you, every woman, for the simple fact of being a woman! Through the insight which is so much a part of your womanhood you enrich the world's understanding and help to make human relations more honest and authentic.

-John Paul II (Letter to Women)