Back on the subject of Mary, Sara Miles has made a similar point to my earlier one about the virgin birth:
It is, of course, profoundly unsettling news: Mary doesn’t need a man to have a baby. She isn’t going to follow worldly social norms. In fact, she prophesies the overturning of the whole social order, proclaiming that the lowly will be lifted up, the rich turned away empty. She doesn’t ask permission of kings or family to step off the precipice into unprecedented experience. Her proclamation that God is at work in her body shows us, even before Jesus does, what it means to truly submit––not to the world but to God.
I find it interesting that relative "outsider" women to the church -- adult converts like Sara Miles and Kathleen Norris, are the ones reminding American Christians that "submission" need not be a dirty word. I suppose it's partly a matter of experience; if you've spent your life in the secular culture of self-fulfillment and self-expression, submission to God sounds like a relief. If, on the other hand, you've been raised to equate submission to men with submission to God, the word would make an emerging feminist break out in hives. Either way, the point is to make a distinction between our ways and God's ways, as the Magnificat profoundly does.
