On the Side of the Dance: Feminist Theology, 4

“An extra year of school for girls increases their lifetime income by 15%. Children of women who have completed primary school are less likely to die before age 5 than children of mothers with no schooling. Women invest more of their income in their families than men do. . . . When girls are educated, healthy and informed, they pull themselves, their children and their communities out of poverty. The most vulnerable are potentially the most powerful.” (becauseiamagirl.ca)

In developed countries like the US, the more progress we make toward equality, the more unjustified and unnatural the gender inequalities in the rest of the world will seem.

Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined notes that empowerment of women correlates powerfully with reductions in violence in a society. Correlation doesn't tell us which is cause and which is effect. Does women’s empowerment cause violence to decline, or does declining violence cause (create the conditions that allow) women’s empowerment? Plausibly, each contributes to the other, in a virtuous cycle.

Whatever the causal details may be, working either for reduced violence or for women's empowerment would seem to go hand-in-hand with working for the other. Conditions of equally-shared power not only change the overall decision-making body, but produce changes in the men within that body. Men in an all-male context act more from their aggressive, Y-chromosome side. Men in a mixed-gender context think in a more balanced way.

For instance, studies of judge's rulings and rationales discern no difference between the legal reasoning patterns of women judges and men judges. What studies have discovered, however, is that, at the appellate level, where judges sit on 3-, 5-, 7-, or 9-judge panels, the men's decisions measurably shift when at least at least one woman is on the panel compared to being on an all-male panel. The men, become, roughly, more sympathetic to women's points of view.

I don’t suppose there is any grand unified theory. My life, so far, with feminism continues to be a mish-mash of not entirely coherent yearnings – rather like the stacks of magazines on my parents’ coffee table. That there is no grand unified theory is also a point feminist writers have made. Once we have a theory, it tends to function like a Procrustean bed, and we force experience into the the terms of the theory. Instead, let us approach each situation with an openness to possibilities our pet theory might not expect. Our theories For all that, it’s a story, I hope, of slowly learning how to be, moment by moment, on the side of mothers and daughters, fathers and sons -- on the side of the forces that create and uphold life -- on the side of the ongoing dance for peace and justice.

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This is part 4 of 4 of "Feminist Theology"
Previous: Part 3: Never Liberated, Always Liberating
Beginning: Part 1: I Was a Teenage Feminist

Photo by Meredith Garmon

Never Liberated, Always Liberating: Feminist Theology, 3

Feminist theologians have made it a key point that words do fail us. The Western religious traditions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – are religions “of the book.” That is, they are based on particular texts. In these traditions, authority derives from certain words, and ultimately from two underlying ideas:

1. There is a fixed canon. Certain texts have the authority of scripture, and all other writings are permanently excluded.
2. There are correct and incorrect interpretations of these authoritative texts.

A crucial point of feminist theology has been that the very expectation that words will stay put in their meaning, and that words won’t fail us, has been a problem for us. Authority must be de-centered, they say. No finite text can save us. Liberation of both women and men depends upon opening up creative possibilities of meaning.

We must make the sources of authority open ended. Let us bring in new texts from other world traditions, write new stories, and make new interpretations of the old ones. Let the language which speaks to us, which has power for us, which is our scripture, be infinite and not closed off. For the same words that once liberated can come to oppress.

What matters is context, intent, purpose – and tone of voice. There is no grand narrative that will always give everyone her due. Any story becomes oppressive if it becomes fixed and canonical.

The feminist project, then, is not to replace one “master narrative” with another, but to encourage the proliferation of diverse stories undermining the possibility of any “master narrative.” Any canonized set of words will always fail us, so feminist theologians remind us to look beyond the words to the context.

In the pattern of the 12-steppers who say, “never recovered, always recovering,” we might say, “never liberated, always liberating” – meaning that liberation is not a particular state of being, but an ongoing process that always requires going the next step. Every story has its particular and limited point of view, so all we can do is keep telling more stories, compensating the limited perspective of one with diverse other, albeit also in their own way limited, perspectives. The instant that process stops, the instant we canonize a finite text, in that moment we give up on further liberation – and liberation ceases.

The Unitarian Universalist approach to religion is a feminist theology in this most basic way: it avoids any closed canon. As James Luther Adams said:

“Liberal religion depends first upon the principle that revelation is continuous. Meaning has not been finally captured. Nothing is complete and thus nothing is exempt from criticism.”

We say religion isn’t about what we believe – and therefore it is not about the words that we might feel like asserting. Religion is about experience, and about how we live, and about relationship. In this way, Unitarian Universalist theology is feminist theology.

Perhaps, then, my embrace of the label “Unitarian Universalist” has, over the years, slowly made it seem less urgent for me to also proclaim myself “feminist.” I’m as feminist as ever, even if I don’t say so as often – because, for me, saying I’m Unitarian Universalist is saying I’m feminist.

We want, ultimately, a world of peace, prosperity, and justice. And how do we get there?

• Pay equity for women,
• Gender balance in positions of power,
• Reducing domestic battering of girlfriends and wives, and
• Ensuring reproductive choice

These, I think, are requirements of justice in their own right -- and also would be particularly instrumental toward realizing a world of peace overall.

The “Because I Am a Girl” website reports that:

“70% of the one billion people living in extreme poverty are women and girls. Girls are 3 times more likely to be malnourished than boys. Globally, 65 million girls do not attend primary or secondary school. Girls and women in the world's poorest countries are the most vulnerable members of society, denied the same rights and opportunities as their brothers."

Former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, observed,

"research is also clear that when girls reach their full potential, through improved status, better health care, and education, it is the most effective development tool for society as a whole. As a country's primary enrolment rate for girls increases, so too does its gross domestic product per capita."

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This is part 3 of 4 of "Feminist Theology"
Next: Part 4: On the Side of the Dance
Previous: Part 2: Words Fail Us
Beginning: Part 1: I Was a Teenage Feminist

Photo courtesy of "Because I Am a Girl", becauseiamagirl.ca

Words Fail Us: Feminist Theology, 2

Feminism has been a large and meaningful part of my life. Lately, though, it doesn't seem as central to my identity as it once did.

The issues are still there, of course. We still haven’t passed an equal rights amendment. Discrimination and pay inequity and sexual harassment in the workplace are still going on. The ranks of the most powerful – the CEOs and our Congressional representatives – continue to be overwhelmingly male.

• Women currently hold 98 of the 535 seats in the US Congress. That’s 18 percent. It’s an incremental improvement over the last congress (16.6 percent), and certainly a very big difference from 1972 (2.8 percent).
• In state legislatures, women are up to 24 percent. Progress, yes, but still a long way from 50-50.
• Only 4.8 percent of Fortune 500 companies are headed by women.

Rights to reproductive choice are under assault and rolling back. Last year, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Roe v Wade, a Time magazine cover noted:

“Forty years ago, abortion-rights activists won an epic victory with Roe v. Wade. They’ve been losing ever since.” (2013 Jan 14)

Violence against women continues: two to four million women are battered by intimates every year in this country. Every day, four times a day, 1,400 times a year, a woman dies in this country as a result of domestic violence.

It’s still more the rule than the exception that girls in our culture grow up learning to measure their worth from their sexual attractiveness to males – while boys grow up learning to measure their worth from what they do.

Yet I find, looking at myself, that the label “feminist” has gradually come to seem less important. It seems less clear than it did 20 or 40 years ago what this label ‘feminist’ means. So many claims and practices have gone under the name of feminism, that it is hard to say just what it is all about.

Words fail us. And this itself is a point some feminists have made: we have to stay attentive to experience, we can't rely on words, on an articulation of moral principles alone. The same words that help and empower might also disempower.

Perhaps this is a case of, as many wives have said to many husbands – probably for centuries -- “It’s not what you said, but how you said it.” This has -- probably for centuries -- baffled husbands who can't quite grasp that the same words that disempower might, in a different context with a different tone, empower.

Consider, for example, that in that same year of Ms. Magazine’s inauguration, 1972, Pope Paul VI said:

“true women’s liberation” does not lie in “formalistic or materialistic equality with the other sex, but in the recognition of that specific thing in the feminine personality – the vocation of a woman to become a mother.”

“Boo, hiss to the Pope,” my 13-year-old self said.

Feminism as I understood it in the 70s was indeed precisely about formalistic and materialistic equality and the rejection of the idea that there was any such “specific thing in the feminine personality” or “vocation of a woman to become a mother.” Then, in the 80s and 90s, I began noticing women writers who sought to value the feminine by recognizing a special connection to creation through motherhood – through an innate psychology, they said, that comes with the capacity for pregnancy and childbirth, even if they aren’t actual mothers. The ecofeminists, for instance, connected patriarchy with environmental degradation, and called upon a woman-centered view, because of its connection to nurturing and motherhood, to save the planet.

I was confused. I so wanted to be on the side of assertive and articulate women, but I was confused. What exactly was the difference between what these feminists were now saying and what the deplorable Pope was saying back in ’72? Aren’t they both calling for recognition of the special qualities of the feminine personality, especially mothering?

The words fail us – because the same words that the Pope was using to undermine women’s empowerment were being used by these feminists to advance women’s empowerment. Words that glorify the feminine might be nostalgic for imposed limitations, hearkening back to times when women were kept in the background, out of positions of leadership. Or those words might be part of making the case that women’s experience, or even women's biology, do offer a grounding for a particular wisdom -- a wisdom needed not just within a circumscribed role for women, but in the public sphere.

Words fail us because the same words that help and empower can also be used to disempower. Feminist theologians have, in fact, made it a key point that words -- without attention to context and tone -- do fail us.

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This is part 2 of 4 of "Feminist Theology"
Next: Part 3: Never Liberated, Always Liberating
Previous: Part 1: I Was a Teenage Feminist

Cover Credit: Photograph by Jamie Chung for TIME

I Was a Teenage Feminist: Feminist Theology, 1

“Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”

-First source of the living tradition Unitarian Universalists share

When I was 13-years-old, there was for me no more transcendent mystery or wonder than females. Frankly, males were a mystery, too, for that matter. Two mysteries, in fact. I was a mystery to myself, and other males were a completely different mystery. These mysteries, however, lacked the transcendence of the holy wholly other: girls and women.

It was 1972, the year I was 13, and the first issue of Ms. Magazine was published. My mother was a charter subscriber, and the issues arrived monthly, and there they were, lying on the living room coffee table, along with the Time magazine, and Atlantic, and Scientific American, and . . . Playboy, which, interestingly, also arrived in our mailbox with my mother’s name on the address sticker on the plain brown wrapper. To the best of my ability to tell, she liked the articles.

That year, 1972, my parents gave me a booklet about how reproduction works, and then left me alone to wrestle with the transcending mystery and wonder. Moved as I was to “an openness to the forces that create...life,” I was an regular reader of both Ms. and Playboy.

The magazines offered clues -- as well as a number of red herrings. Still, by the time I was 15, I was reasonably well-informed for my age about women. Of course, I hadn’t the foggiest notion how to actually talk to one. Such expertise as I had was purely theoretical. And the product of a mish-mash of incoherent yearnings.

I have identified myself as feminist since I was 13. I wore often my “Yes ERA” t-shirt – a gift from my mother -- until, after some years, it fell apart (along with the amendment it supported, alas). I was raised to believe in justice and equality. That really is a key part of the story. I imbibed and took to heart the views of writers like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, Susan Brownmiller, Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, Mary Daly. I read their articles in Ms. Magazine and later read their books. All those words!

At the same time, I was a teenage boy with a teenage boy’s hormones, and as I reflect back I think also a part of the story was a desperate hope that if I could only sufficiently display that I was on women’s side, then one of them might be willing to be on my side.

My quest was for a grand unified theory that would make sense of my own burgeoning sexuality while also aligning me with high ideals of justice.

My teen-age feminism set the stage for my young adult feminism. When I was in graduate school and my own kids were in elementary school, I was not only a checkbook supporter of the National Organization for Women, but an active member of the local University of Virginia chapter, going to meetings and marches in between my classes and studies.

Then, as an assistant professor of philosophy at Fisk University, I chaired the task force that designed and brought to implementation that University’s first women’s studies program. Feminism has been a large and meaningful part of my life.

Where has it taken me? Where does it take us?

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This is part 1 of 4 of "Feminist Theology"
Next: Part 2: Words Fail Us

Covers: Ms. Magazine, Jan 1972; Playboy, May 1972.