Empathy: An Antidote to “Othering”

Dear Kimberly,

I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy lately, and it ties in with something you referred to in your December 1 letter — the concept of “othering.” I guess I’ve been thinking about empathy (or the lack of it) for many  reasons. On the one hand, I think of the tremendous outpouring of compassion for the suffering people of Haiti after the earthquake; and on the other hand, I think about the callous attitudes of many powerful leaders of large financial institutions and corporations who seem unable or unwilling to mentally put themselves in the shoes of millions of people who have had to deal with job loss, mortgage foreclosures, and  lack of health care in the midst of the current economic crisis.

The Importance of Empathy

A couple of movies I saw recently also deepened my thoughts about how we need empathy in so many areas of life. One film was Amreeka, the story of a Palestinian divorced mother and her teenage son who moved from the West Bank to America in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. You can view the trailer here. Their story is so warmly told that I couldn’t help but feel with them and identify with them (what empathizing really means) as they negotiated the struggles that immigrants experience—particularly those from the Middle East in these times of so much fear and suspicion.

The other movie that made me think about the need for empathy was A Single Man, based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel about a single day in the life of a gay college professor eight months after the sudden death of his life partner.  As the professor continues to grieve his loss and reminisces about the deep love the two men had for each other in their 16 years together, he ponders how life can go on.

In one of the flashbacks, he is shown receiving the phone call from a relative of his partner who breaks the news of the fatal car crash.  The relative says he is making the call secretly, away from other other family members who had no intention of letting the professor know of the tragedy. In the midst of the shock,  the professor is also notified that he is not welcome at the “family only” funeral which will be arranged by the partner’s disapproving parents.

Watching the pain on the professor’s face, I remembered other similar stories that have been told to me over the 35 years since I first began writing on this topic in a college textbook chapter, articles, the book Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? and more recent writings. In one case that I heard about, a Christian lesbian committed suicide after constant castigation by her religious fundamentalist parents, who, after her death, made clear to her grieving partner and all the gay friends of the couple that they would not be permitted to attend the funeral.  (They had their own memorial service later.)

As I watched that scene in A Single Man, I wondered where is empathy?  How could the partner’s parents be so cruel?  Couldn’t anyone who has ever lost a loved one try to at least imagine the pain of the grieving partner left behind, someone who had been as close as any heterosexual husband or wife?

Australian folksinger Judy Small once recorded a song called, “No Tears for the Widow.” (It’s on Judy’s 1990 album, “Snapshots,” and although no longer available in earlier formats, it can be digitally downloaded through ITunes.)  The song starts out with the story of a woman who loses her husband after a 30-year marriage and receives loving condolences in cards, visits, gifts, and the kind words of people who come to pay their respects and weep with her at the well-attended funeral. Her grief is understood by everyone, and there are “tears for the widow who has lost her love and must carry on alone.”  As painful as it is, she is aware of her marital status before the world and sadly begins writing the word widow when she fills in forms.

Then, in the song’s second stanza, Judy sings about another woman who loses her longtime partner after an extended battle with cancer.  This time, because the partner is a woman, the grief and anguish of the one left behind are ignored, except for a small circle of close friends.  At the funeral, the woman who died is described as a wonderful single woman taken before her time.

But in this second story, there are “no tears for the widow.” She  leaves the funeral parlor, goes to the home the two women had shared, and sobs alone into the night.  Like the heterosexual woman who lost her husband, she, too, has “lost her love and must carry on alone,” but her grief is not acknowledged. She continues to write “single” in forms asking marital status, while inwardly raging at society’s failure to recognize that she has lost her next of kin.  (The song goes on to point out that women in her situation may even lose their home to the claims of the deceased partner’s relatives. Vanessa Redgrave won an Emmy award a few years ago when she played an aging widowed lesbian to whom this happens in one of the short stories on the HBO presentation, “If These Walls Could Talk 2.”)

Why does all this happen? Because, says Judy Small’s song, “marriage is a special word and only meant for some.”  As I listen, I wonder again, where is the empathy?  Why can’t people understand what the word family really means?  As you know, we recently published in Christian Feminism Today the story of a couple whose 35-year marriage was made void by a legal decision about same-sex marriages.  And yet those who work so hard to prevent the legal recognition of these marriages (and are upset because some states have decided differently) just don’t seem to get it.

Othering

Your December 1st letter was so creative, Kimberly, in linking together the internalized gender restrictions of the Victorian era with the often unrecognized sexist elements in the Twilight books and films today. So I don’t think there’s much I can add to what you wrote there; you’ve already said it so well!

But I want to pick up on something else you wrote in that post because it shows how the empathy I’m discussing here is so often blocked by “othering”—the categorizing of people into “those like us” and “those other people”– people with whom we can contrast ourselves.

You wrote:

For instance, in mid 19^th century America, the constricting “ideal” of Victorian, “pure,” white, upper-class womanhood was built upon not being the woman who was “othered”—the lower class working woman, or the African American woman whose body had historically been represented as all-sexual by the power lusts of white slave-owners. (December 1, 2009 post by “27”)

As you indicated, people that we humans place in the category of “other” (“them” or “those people”) may be perceived as different because of race, ethnic background, religion, class, sexual orientation or identity, ableness, body size, age, or anything else that causes us to consider them different from us and therefore perhaps less important, less worthy, less deserving of power and privilege. In other words, differences are easily viewed in terms of hierarchy — “better than,” “ less than.”

Jesus once told a parable about two men who went into the temple to pray. One was a self-righteous religious leader whose prayers consisted of boasting about all the wonderful religious deeds he had done and how different he was from other people.  He named the categories of people he was thankful he wasn’t like. Then, glancing toward the other man, who belonged to one of the most intensely despised categories of that society, he added a p.s to his prayer to notify God of his gratitude that he wasn’t like that man over there (“the other” personified).

The man from the despised group, for his part, felt unworthy even to look toward heaven as he prayed, but simply pounded his chest and prayed that God would have mercy on him because he was a sinner. Jesus said it was this second man, not the self-righteous one, who had pleased God.  Jesus concluded that “if you put yourself above others, you will be put down, but if you humble yourself, you will be honored.” The Scripture says that Jesus told that story “to some people who thought they were better than others and who looked down on everyone else.”  (See Luke 18:9-14. I quoted from the Contemporary English Version [CEV].)

I think it’s a good idea to keep that parable in mind any time we find ourselves tempted to engage in thoughts words, or actions that indicate we are “othering.”

Othering can block empathy by convincing us that another person or group is so different from us that they couldn’t possibly be feeling the way we would feel if we were in the same circumstances.  They are therefore perceived as undeserving of our kind thoughts, actions, and identification with them.  Somehow our common humanity is forgotten when we engage in othering.

Othering, Empathy, and Gender Issues

The way persons think about each other because of gender differences can also create a negative “us” over against “them” attitude, as you and I have been discussing in this blog from the beginning, Kimberly.

There is no denying some obvious biological differences between women and men. But as we’ve both written so often, those biological differences are too often dragged out as justification for hierarchical arrangements and inflexible role assignments in the home, church, and society. This is done by ignoring how much the sexes have in common as human beings with the needs that all humans have in both the work-and-activities side of life (what sociologists speak of as the “instrumental” aspects) and the love-and-relationships side of life (what sociologists call the “expressive” aspects). I wrote about this in a post on “Human Being, Being Human,” during our first year of this blog, so won’t say a lot more about it right now.

But I started thinking about that again recently as I have seen the recent media attention to a new Pew study that underscored some changes in the economics side of marriage.  Data analysis showed that the percentage of husbands whose wives earn more than they do and whose education is higher than theirs increased significantly between 1970 and 2007. And the percentage of women who are married to men whose earnings and education are lower than theirs has likewise grown during that time period. What this means, according to the Pew analysis is this:

From an economic perspective, these trends have contributed to a gender role reversal in the gains from marriage. In the past, when relatively few wives worked, marriage enhanced the economic status of women more than that of men. In recent decades, however, the economic gains associated with marriage have been greater for men than for women. (From the executive summary, by Richard Fry and D’Vera Cohn, Pew Research Center, January 19, 2010.)

Some headlines in the popular press have given the impression that it’s all about men seeking rich wives, with “sugar daddies” being replaced by “sugar mammas.” But the trend really just indicates that increasingly the conventional marriage agreement is changing. It used to be that (pardon the old cliché) husbands brought home the bacon and wives cooked it. Now more and more couples, whether by choice or economic necessity, are finding they have entered a new marital bargain in which both spouses bring home the bacon (maybe a vegetarian version or turkey bacon to avoid raising cholesterol!) and both symbolically share in the cooking, as well as parenting, and other  household responsibilities.  As long as it is their mutually-decided arrangement, it doesn’t really matter who earns the higher income — or even which of the two spouses, at any particular time, might have to be the only income earner. What is really tricky is that there still needs to be an equitable bargain or exchange so that one person doesn’t end up being both the primary earner and the primary person taking care of the household.

Even though vast societal changes are taking place in that regard, many of the issues that you and I have so often discussed here on 72-27 continue to be very hot topics — especially when it comes to ideas about gender-based division of labor, conflicts between career demands and household tasks, and traditional expectations from church and society. For an extreme case that illustrates the problem, check out this letter from a young wife and the accompanying comments that were posted just this month on “The F Bomb” (“F” for feminist) — a feminist blog started by a teenager for and by young feminists.

Facing Changes in Our Lives with Empathy

Change can be scary and unsettling, and changes in gender roles seem especially so.  And once again, this is where empathy comes in.  Years ago, I wrote an article for Christianity Today magazine titled, “How to Live with a Liberated Wife (June 4, 1976 issue). (I recently discovered that portions of it have been included in The American Women’s Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History in Documents, by Nancy MacLean, Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2009.)  I was writing in the heyday of the women’s movement (then often called “women’s liberation movement”), which later came to be referred to as “second wave feminism.”

As a literary device, I wrote the article in the form of a letter to a young husband whose wife’s feminist ideas were frightening and confusing to him.  I called the husband “Doug” and his wife “Jan.”  The couple were a composite of many Christian men and women who had expressed these anxieties to me during my speaking engagements.  In the article, I was trying to help men to understand what their wives were going through as they said they wanted to go to college, or finish an interrupted degree program, or take a job, or simply expressed their feelings that they couldn’t feel fulfilled unless they could look forward to something more than a lifelong career as a housewife.  It wasn’t that they didn’t value caring for a home and family, but they wanted something more than that identity alone, and they wanted the chance to live up to their full human potential just as their husbands wanted to live up to theirs. These were big issues back then and considered revolutionary.

My article was basically encouraging husbands to engage in empathy and put themselves in their wives’ shoes, and I based my article on various Scripture passages.  If we are to practice the Golden Rule of doing unto others as we would have them do unto us, we need to try to understand how we would feel if we were dealing with what they are dealing with and then think about how we would want others to respond to us.

Empathy as a Two-Way Street in Close Relationships

Soon after the article was published I received several letters, but one handwritten letter struck me especially. It was from a real life “Doug,” though of course that wasn’t his name. “When I identify with Doug,” he wrote, “I feel fear, uneasiness, anxiety, and I feel alone: ‘Will Jan pull away?’  ‘Doesn’t she need me anymore?’ I cry out to be understood. The situation is changing. Our lives are changing.”  He went on to describe his feelings of frustration:

You didn’t speak to my needs and fears but to Jan’s; you didn’t attempt to explain my bondage, but how women have been bound. . . . I believe there is no essential difference in the dynamics of male and female personality and potential. I do have the same feelings as a female has, but our society labels me ‘unmanly’ when I express them. . . .Letha, I, a man, need love, understanding, and someone to speak to my conflicts and fears. I, also, need help in becoming all I am meant to be.

My heart went out to him in his emotional pain, Kimberly, and of course I sent him a personal reply with further thoughts and some books he might want to read.  But his uneasiness demonstrates that empathy needs to work both ways in a close relationship.  That isn’t always easy, but it can go a long way toward closing the gap between the perceived “otherness” of women and men, because rigidly prescribed roles and expectations imposed from the outside hurt both.

Well, it’s time for me to sign off, but before I do, I want to apologize to both you and our readers for not keeping up my end of the conversation by writing this post earlier.  As you know, in the time since my last post here, not only have you and I both had holiday travel and additional professional and academic writing responsibilities and deadlines to attend to, but I have also had two cataract surgeries as well as publishing the latest issue of Christian Feminism Today, writing a new edition of “Web Explorations for Christian Feminists,” and updating the EEWC-CFT website, which I hope our readers will visit – especially to see your thoughtful review, Kim, of Where Am I Wearing?

I’ll be looking forward to your next letter and any thoughts you have about what I’ve written here.  I hope your studies at Yale are continuing to go well and that you’re finding a little time to relax amidst the pressures.

Your friend,
Letha

Dear Letha,

I appreciated how in your last letter you nuanced the different patterns through which cultures control women. In this letter, I’d like to continue discussing the normative restrictions that come from internalized belief patterns specifically. And while we often discuss these kinds of limitations on women as being dictated by religious dogma, I want to focus on the kinds of gender limitations that are preached not in churches but via the pulpits of pop culture.

It struck me when reading your last letter that secular culture has a gender fundamentalism as ingrained as the religious kind. The rules about masculinity and femininity that have too often been assumed within American history (or that are currently being dictated from popular movies and books!) seem to me as damaging as any dogma coming from churches.

The Root Problems of Gender Stereotypes

This semester, in part because I have been studying writers like Judith Butler, Catharine MacKinnon, and Sharon Marcus, I have been examining the different ways in which culture articulates these controlling scripts about gender, which most of us end up internalizing and unconsciously performing. From the moment we are born “boy” or “girl,” receive our pink or blue balloons and start watching Disney, we are imbibing cultural assumptions, learning the gender script. (And, of course, not all babies are born clearly as a boy or a girl—there is rising awareness concerning understanding and supporting intersex children. Elizabeth Reis and Anna Fausto-Sterling are among the leading researchers.)

The problem is not only that these gender roles are limiting to a person’s full expression of who they authentically are, but the internalized stereotypes of masculinity and femininity are also at their root founded upon a historic, constructed hierarchy between men and women.  Furthermore, the gender stereotypes in American culture have always been deeply entwined with systems of racism, classism, and heterosexism.

One Example: The “Ideals” of Victorian Womanhood

For instance, in mid 19^th century America, the constricting “ideal” of Victorian, “pure,” white, upper-class womanhood was built upon not being the woman who was “othered”—the lower class working woman, or the African American woman whose body had historically been represented as all-sexual by the power lusts of white slave-owners. If “ideal” white women’s bodies had to be asexual to have value in the marriage market, African American female slaves were oppressed in a far more atrocious way—their bodies were the outlets for the sexual violence of their master.

The “purity” of the white, upper-class woman was measured by the extent to which she did not resemble other women in society — women who had been violently placed in chattel slavery, or who might have had to endure sexual violence or harrassment to keep their jobs, or who otherwise did not have the social status necessary to secure middle-class Victorian morality. While all women under white-male-patriarchy were in varying ways stripped of agency over their own bodies and sexuality, gendered oppression looked very different depending on social locations of race and class.

Thus, what were “normative restrictions” for some women—like the upper class, white women who internalized beliefs and values that assigned their femininity to chastity and domesticity —translated into far more physical or violent restrictions for other women within the intersecting oppressions of gender, sexuality, race, and class.

Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, has been a key text for me this semester as I struggle to understand how gender systems and their normative restrictions are always tied into racial and classist oppression. I recommend Playing in the Dark: it’s beautifully written and accessible, and while it is predominately literary criticism, it’s packed with implications for feminist theory.

What Twilight Has to Teach: Today’s Normative Gender Restrictions and the Marriage of Sex and Violence

As we talk about normative gender restrictions, I think it’s important to highlight one extremely popular script currently in vogue, particularly for teenagers: the bestselling Twilight books and movies. The second book in the series, New Moon, just came out this fall as a movie. The gender stereotypes in these stories are as damaging as any of the religious beliefs around gender we have so often analyzed on our blog. Here, I will restrict my comments to the original book in the series, Twilight, which is the only one I have read, but reading summaries of the others in the series has assured me the problematic gender scripts only get worse.

The drama of this original, bestseller revolves around the awkward Bella and the “god-like” Edward falling tragically in love. She is the new girl in town who wins the attention of the aloof, mysterious sex symbol. He is a 108-year-old vampire in teenage form who is disturbingly volatile and controlling, but only because he “loves her” and is trying to “protect” her. Our vampire-hero is so intensely moody—the reader late finds out— because he is edgy from fighting his vintage patriarchal battle: Bella’s so darn attractive to him, that he is in immediate danger of losing all control, dominating her, and leaving her dead. And so we read on—never quite sure if Bella will end up being a bloody mess should the teenagers decide to consummate their relationship. The intimacy in this book is like heroin—thrilling, dangerous, and flirting with death—and the drama of it makes Twilight a page-turner.

I am horrified, to say the least, by the 498-pages of dysfunction that passes as romantic entertainment in Twilight. Just when did “sadomasochistic teenage erotica” (as my colleague Kj Swanson terms it over at her brilliant blog) become so overwhelmingly popular? Twilight is unabashed in its reflection of some of the worst elements of our culture’s patriarchal dysfunctions: domestic violence patterns, eroticized violence deemed “romance,” and harmful power differentials between men and women that are either not noticed or are mindlessly condoned. In fact, the power differentials in this book are the very foundation of its plot. Bella is constantly being saved and infantilized by Edward; his moods continually switch from angry to intimate like a typical perpetrator; and the reader awaits whether the sexual tension between the characters will lead to Edward enacting violence toward Bella. It is her sexual attractiveness that arouses his desire to suck her blood and kill her. Because of how attractive she is to him, she is forbidden to initiate any physical relationship. It all must be led by him, and she must risk her life during any moment of intimacy.

And this is what teenagers (and many adults) are imbibing?

What is at Stake?

I am discussing these books and movies within the context of analysizing normative restrictions, because widespread cultural stories as Twilight perpetuate internalized notions of love and gender that are oppressive in so many insidious ways.

What is most frightening to me about the current cultural-historical gender moment in America is that violence and sex—whether in pornography, TV shows, or Twilight—are so enmeshed. The normative restrictions—that women are passive sexual objects for male lust and domination—are getting internalized within the very arousal patterns of young girls and boys. Both learn to be aroused by scripts of female vulnerability, physical danger, and sexual passivity, as well as masculine control, heroics, and domination. Such scripts are the most violent ways patriarchy gets into our very beings and bodies, because they produce not only gender, but desire itself within a culture.

Our capacity as a culture to not see the harm of a book like Twilight is linked to our capacity to dissociate from the harm in our culture that Twilight reflects—namely, the disturbing prevalence of male sexual violence against women, which is rooted in cultural messages about male, sexualized dominance and female passivity. I wish more Christians were speaking out. But, I have to tell you that at one point Christianity Today  actually published an article praising Twilight! Yikes.

It is really time for Christian leaders and writers to stop being complicit in the harm of gender stereotypes, but actually start to expose them for the violence they perpetuate. Gender equality and mutual respect is so much more sexy —not to mention so much more Christlike!— than these patriarchal narratives about love, gender, and sexuality.

Your friend,

Kimberly

Dear Kimberly,

Last weekend, the film discussion group that I attend regularly viewed an advance screening of Amelia, the story of aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, who was the first woman (and first person after Charles Lindbergh) to fly solo across the Atlantic.  Amelia Earhart helped form and was the first president of the Ninety-Nines, the international organization of women pilots.

(I know how much you enjoyed seeing Hillary Swank portray Alice Paul in Iron-Jawed Angels, so I know you’ll enjoy seeing her play another strong woman here.  She actually seems to become Amelia Earhart in this portrayal.)

At the end of the film, after her attempt to fly around the world had ended in tragedy, the screen is filled with clouds as though we in the audience are soaring high above them, and we hear a voiceover in which Amelia says, “What do dreams know of boundaries?”

I remember hearing my parents talk about Amelia Earhart during my childhood, even though I was not quite two years old when her plane disappeared over the Pacific.  When I heard stories about her from time to time during my growing up years, I remember admiring her determination not to let discriminatory attitudes toward girls and women block her dreams.  Not that I ever wanted to fly (my brother became the pilot in the family), but I knew I didn’t ever want to be confined by traditional roles or told that “girls can’t do that.”  Like her, I didn’t want to believe my dreams had boundaries.

After seeing the movie, I looked at the Amelia Earhart official website and found this quote from her:

…now and then women should do for themselves what men have already done — occasionally what men have not done — thereby establishing themselves as persons, and perhaps encouraging other women toward greater independence of thought and action. Some such consideration was a contributing reason for my wanting to do what I so much wanted to do.

Ways Religious Teachings Can Put Boundaries on Women’s Dreams

From the very beginning of this blog, Kimberly, you and I have talked about the importance of society’s recognition of  women as persons in their own right, without gender-based limitations imposed from the outside. I’ve been thinking a great deal about our most recent discussions about how certain religious teachings have hindered the full potential of women. As you emphasized in your Sept. 20 post, no feminist who wants to bring about changes in attitudes toward women can afford to dismiss religious questions and issues as irrelevant.  Religion is too much a part of most societies.  And it can be either a positive or negative influence in attitudes toward women.

In analyzing how religion operates (not any one religion in particular, but religion in general), I thought we might find it useful to look at some specific ways it has operated to put boundaries on the dreams of girls and women.

Greer Litton Fox’s Categories of Control Strategies

In one of the earliest issues of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, sociologist Greer Litton Fox  wrote that while acknowledging the existence of cross-cultural variations, “there are three basic strategies used to regulate the freedom of women and to exert control over their behavior in the world.” The strategies she outlined were confinement, protection, and normative restriction. (See “‘Nice Girl,’”: Social Control of Women through a Value Construct.” Signs, summer, 1977, Vol. 2, no 4, pp. 805-817).

The confinement strategy requires that a woman be restricted to her home and forbidden access to the world outside her home except on rare occasions in which she may leave the home accompanied by a male relative — an extreme example being the Taliban’s treatment of women where it has been in power. You may recall my April 20 post where I quoted from the documentary in which a young man studying at a Taliban school told the filmmaker, “Women are meant for domestic care, and that’s what they should do. The government should forbid women from wandering about outside.”  That is the confinement strategy for keeping women in their appointed place.

Professor Fox’s second category, protection, is a cultural control strategy that allows women some limited access to the world, but their movement within that world is strictly regulated and circumscribed by rules. They are under a type of guardianship.   An example would be the laws and customs of Saudi Arabia which forbid women to drive cars or to interact with men except for close male relatives. Shopping is done in females-only malls. According to the Human Rights Watch, “the impact of the ‘guardianship’ system, which requires Saudi women to obtain permission from male guardians before they can carry out a host of day-to-day activities, such as education, employment, travel, opening a bank account, or receiving medical care,”  can have negative consequences, such as when male guardians will not permit women to have surgery.  A 50-page 2008 Human Rights Watch report pointed out that women in such a system are considered “perpetual minors.” (In the United States, a type of protection control strategy also once lay behind the denial of a woman’s right to vote, own property, keep her own wages if employed and married, obtain a college education, and other grievances that were listed at the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention.)

The third control strategy that Greer Litton Fox lists is normative restriction. “This form of control over the social behavior of women is embodied in such value constructs as ‘good girl,’ ‘lady,’ or ‘nice girl.’ As a value construct the latter term connotes chaste, gentle, gracious, ingenuous, good, clean, kind virtuous, noncontroversial, and above suspicion or reproach” (p. 805).

She writes that the three strategies are distinguished by the degree of interaction with the world that  is permitted and whether the control is imposed externally (the first two categories) or internally (normative restriction).

In other words, social control of women can be exercised through a society’s insistence on seclusion, or through segregation and protection, or through a system designed in such a way that women will internalize certain societal norms about how they should act even apart from external coercion.  The one idea behind all of these strategies, however, is that persons born female should be limited in ways that males are not.

Religious Control and its Effects on Women

In her Signs article, Greer Litton Fox was not talking about religion specifically but about cultural differences in the social control of women.  However, the system of beliefs, values, laws, and customs that constitute culture certainly includes religion and in many cases is based in large part on religious beliefs and practices.

Since you and I are writing as committed Christian feminists whose faith is very important to us, Kimberly, I think it’s important to acknowledge honestly that certain teachings and biblical interpretations in our particular tradition have had detrimental effects on girls and women.  Since both of us have had some background in the subculture of conservative Christianity specifically, we’ve both  had the experience of hearing sermons or reading books that teach women’s subordination (if not actual inferiority), no matter how much the words are couched in theological terms like gender complementarity (equal in worth but divinely ordained to be separate in roles).

For example, Litton-Fox’s first two categories of confinement or protection might not be required by actual laws or taken literally in the sense of forbidding Christian women to leave their homes, but we’ve both heard sermons that sound very much like what I found in a very old commentary on 1 Timothy 2:12 (“But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence”). Here are the comments on that verse:  “St. Paul shows what is the only proper sphere in which woman should work, and in which she should exercise her influence and power: while men’s work and duties lay in the busy world without, women’s work was exclusively confined to the quiet stillness of home.”

Litton-Fox’s construct of the “nice girl” inner-control mechanism (normative restriction) comes into play, too.  The commentary refers to the admonition in verse 15 that tells women to “continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.” The commentator writes that this shows “the beautiful Pauline conception of a true woman, who wins her sweet and weighty power in the world by self-effacement”  (Ellicott’s Commentary on the Whole Bible, Zondervan, 1940, Vol 8., p. 188).

Now of course, the qualities of modesty and humility (if that’s what the writer means here by the term self-effacement) in contrast to an overbearing spirit of arrogance are certainly good qualities for anybody, but to separate them out as being uniquely required of women is where the problem comes in.  You wrote about this in your discussion of pride in your March 31 post.

There is no denying the effect such teachings continue to have on girls and women today.  Imagine a bright, gifted, ambitious young girl being told she has no right to teach in church if men or present, no right to be an ordained pastor, no right to aspire to any career beyond homemaking and caring for children and a husband (to whom she must submit).

Actually, you don’t have to imagine it, Kimberly!  You heard those teachings and questioned them yourself as a teenager.  I remember one of your earliest letters to me (a few months before we started this blog) in which you said that growing up, you had been taught to be a “Titus 2 woman, which meant the older women taught the girls in the church about proper ‘Christian womanhood.’” You went on to say, “We learned women only taught women (and they taught them to be submissive homemakers!).”

(For our readers who may not have a Bible handy, the Titus 2:3-5 passage under discussion says this in the NIV translation:

³Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. ⁴Then they can train the younger women to love their husbands and children, ⁵to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God. )

I loved the part of that letter where you said (after having read some Christian feminist writings), “I have to tell you I sort of smiled today when I thought about the value of older women guiding younger women in feminism” (italics added).

Again, it’s important to stress that there is nothing wrong and everything right about loving one’s spouse and children, practicing self-control, kindness, and purity of heart, thoughts, and motives. But to disregard the historical and cultural context in which the passage was written and to use it to insist on segregated gender roles and a wife’s subjection to her husband is what causes the problem (which has been compounded by the King James translation that instructed older women to teach younger women that they were to be “keepers at home.”)  Teaching women of all times and in all places that God intends them to be restricted to the gender roles and rules of a patriarchal culture “so that no one will malign the word of God” might well have the opposite effect today.  You and I have both met women (and some men) who have been “turned off” by Christianity because of what they have heard it teaches about women and the limits it places on them.  Highly educated, capable young women in our day are not likely to respond well to mentors who instruct them to forget any aspirations beyond homemaking (which would be totally unrealistic anyway, if for no other reason than the constraints imposed on families by today’s economic situation).

Internalized Control through “Normative Restriction”

I hope in our future letters we can discuss more fully how normative restrictions – the built-in, internalized beliefs based on teachings some of us have heard — continue to affect women, even after they have tried to disregard them or have come to look at them in different ways.  Sometimes I hear women say they still find lingering doubts popping up and find themselves thinking, “What if they (conservative Christian interpretations) are right and I’m disobeying God and sinning by disregarding what I was taught?”

Of course, internalized control affects those of other faiths, too.  Do you remember the “Shattered Dreams” section of my April letter about the Muslim school teacher and his 11-year-old daughter in the Swat Valley in Pakistan as they prepared for their last day of school before the Taliban closed it?  The young girl highly valued her education and said she wanted to be a doctor.  Recently, the interviewer, Adam Ellick, did a follow-up story for the New York Times with a video about the family’s experience as refugees after being forced out of their home.  During all the time that Ellick was filming the two videos, the wife was never seen because of the religious custom of a wife’s not being permitted to be seen by men outside the family.  She was not allowed to be filmed and remained in another room throughout the interviews.  “Not even my lifetime friends have seen her,” the teacher told Ellick.  Then to Ellick’s surprise, one day the teacher asked the interviewer to drive the entire family to a relative’s home.  The wife/mother got into the car, never said a word, and was fully covered in a burqa.

Ellick wrote: “For Mr. Yousafzai [the teacher], the situation highlighted one of the prevailing conflicts in his life: he’s undeniably attracted to the personal freedoms in the West, but also loyal to his own religious traditions.” This is an excellent example of how “normative restrictions” — internalized religious norms in this case — can govern our lives and cause struggles within.

Later during Ellick’s interview and second video filming, Mr. Yousafzai brought his wife out briefly — but just for an instant, and only her back could be seen, never her face.  Yet it was a first step and took great courage on the husband’s part, Ellick wrote.  (Incidentally, Malala, the young girl, has given up her dream of becoming a doctor.  Now she says she is determined to be a politician and bring change to her country.)

More to Discuss

I hope we can continue discussing the inner struggles we and other women have had because of the normative restrictions we’ve incorporated into our very being, Kim, often without even realizing it.  How have internalized ideas from what we’ve been taught is “God’s will for women” affected our aspirations, our self-esteem, our decisions, our relationships, our feelings of self-efficacy?  And equally important, what are some ways we as Christian women can draw upon our faith, our feminism, and our theological and biblical scholarship (not isolated proof texts) to help other women learn that questioning and seeing other ways to understand their faith does not mean they are turning their back on God?

As women, we all need to learn that we can indeed live out our dreams.  As Amelia Earhart said, “What do dreams know of boundaries?”  And since I started this letter with some quotes from her, let me end with another one.

On the Wednesday, October 21 NPR program On Point, host Tom Ashbrook interviewed Susan Butler, author of “East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart” one of the two biographies on which the movie was based. During the program, Tom Ashbrook played a clip of Amelia Earhart speaking her own words (from a PBS documentary).  “I’ve had practical experience to know the discrimination against women in various forms of industry,” she said.  “A pilot’s a pilot.  I hope that such equality could be carried out in other fields so that men and women may achieve equally in any endeavor they set out.”

That’s a good note on which to end.  But there’s so  much more to talk about, Kim!  As always, I’ll look forward to your thoughts about all this.

Your friend,
Letha

Dear Letha,

In your last letter, you discussed the sad reality that the oppression of women has been intimately interwoven with religious dogma. I would like to continue that discussion, because I have been recently trying to parse out what ought to be the role of religious feminists within this larger conversation of women’s/human rights.

Because religion and women’s oppression are so linked, it seems that feminist movements desperately need the voices of religious feminists—those who can speak into religion on its own terms. I would go so far as to say that secular feminists movements will fail if they don’t partner with religious feminists, because at least in an American context, the religious ethos infuses the political and social ethos of our country. That was, of course, a point you also made in your August 19 letter, as you spoke about the awareness of this among many of the 19^th century feminists. They realized they needed to address oppressive religious teachings directly. I’m becoming increasingly aware of that need in our day, too.

Reading the Words of the Pioneers

As you know, I started my classes at Yale a few weeks back, and one of the classes I am taking is called “History of U.S. Feminist Thought.” For that class, we’ve been reading a book called Feminism: The Essential Writings of History, edited by Miriam Schneir. (When the title says “history,” it actually means Western history; the scope of the book is mainly limited to feminist thought in the U.S. and England.) What is apparent in my reading is that when feminist pioneers in the U.S. were busy advocating for basic political rights, using the terms of Enlightened democracy, it was equally important that they could articulate gender equality using the terms of religious teachings and traditions.

These early women’s rights advocates could not dismiss religion as irrelevant or hopelessly impervious to change, as so many modern day secular feminists are tempted to do. Faith, particularly Christian faith, was a powerful force in this country in the 19th century, as it still is today, so any progress on women’s rights had to be done by gaining ground on the religious front. And while I know I have written about this topic in previous letters, I continue to be amazed by how articulate these writers were in arguing for women’s rights from a spiritual perspective. In fact, many of them were strong believers themselves, so the principles they were arguing sprung authentically from deep faith-filled lives.

From my vantage point as a divinity school student, I am interested in learning about the arguments historically used by religious leaders to silence such women and how these women then responded. My hunch is that history is really quite cyclical, and therefore studying the strategies of these early feminists will help us today.

The Case of the the Congregationalist Clergy

For instance, just to offer one historical example I’ve been reading about, when Sarah Grimke and her sister, Angelina, spoke publicly as abolitionists, the Congregationalist Clergy of Massachusetts sent out a “Pastoral Letter” to be read in all the Congregationalist churches throughout the state (Schneir 35). The letter did not specifically mention the Grimkes, but it did speak out against their actions. And what were the Grimke sisters doing wrong, according to the Congregationalist Church? They were abandoning their “natural” place as women, of course, by speaking in public and being involved in a political cause. (What is assumed to be “natural” has always had important weight in this debate on women’s proper spheres.) The religious authorities decreed there was danger of “permanent injury” being done to the female character if women like the Grimkes continued such scandalous, ungodly, and unnatural behavior of speaking in public—especially to “mixed assemblies” in which men were present. (36).

What can sometimes be difficult to imagine from our place in history is that just the act of a woman speaking in public—no matter what she was speaking on—was offensive. Most religious leaders felt that only men could have a public voice. (This idea, I am afraid, hasn’t changed in many of our churches.)  From my vantage point, the condemnation from the churches against these women was not only rooted in sexism and ignorance, but was also a red herring for ignoring the real horrors these women were trying to hold them accountable for: How could a “Christian” nation continue to choose to enslave human beings for the economic gain of other human beings? How could Christian male slave owners think they had the right to rape their female slaves whenever they wanted to, inflicting profound physical and psychological harm? (When Sarah Grimke raised this question, she doesn’t use the word “rape” in her discussion—her language is not so explicit—but her point is nonetheless clear.)

Many religious authorities did not want to face the weight of these questions coming from women like the Grimkes, so instead they viciously attacked the character of the women who dared to raise the questions, claiming the very act of a woman speaking in public was a shame on her sex and a disgrace before God. (But, of course, it was not just from religion that women were condemned for speaking in public. Society-at-large had very strict ideas about the “natural” place of women. In fact, it was because so many abolitionist women suffered such widespread prejudice that a specific movement for women’s rights was first born in our country.)

Noticing Specific Strategies

So, because I want to learn from these women, I want to ask just how did women who were fighting for abolition and suffrage engage religion on its own terms?  How did they dismantle patriarchal norms in religion in order to advance their political goals?

Sarah Grimke, in responding to the condemnation of the Congregationalist Clergy, repeatedly focused on the principle that women have a moral responsibility before God, just as men do, to use their gifts and act for the good of humanity. She wrote:

The motto of woman, when she is engaged on the great work of public reformation should be,—“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid.” She must feel, if she feels rightly, that she is fulfilling one of the important duties laid upon her as an accountable being, and that her character, far from being ‘unnatural,’ is in exact accordance with the will of Him to whom, and to no other, she is responsible for the talents and gifts confided to her. (Schneir 42, italics are mine)

Furthermore, she explained that the duties of following Christ, as laid down in the Sermon on the Mount, make no distinction based on sex. Both men and women were called by God to “let their light shine.” But, men have distorted Scripture and kept women from being able to live as moral agents with the freedom to use their gifts.  Why have they done this? Because, Sarah Grimke claimed, the ”lust of dominion was probably the first effect of the fall; and as there was no other intelligent being over whom to exercise it, woman was the first victim of his unhallowed passion” (38). Thus she is using the Christian doctrine of sin to open up a conversation on women’s rights. In unforgettable language, she wrote that she was asking “no favors for my sex” but only that her Christian brothers would “take their feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy” (38).

Sarah Grimke didn’t mince words. No wonder the powerful male leaders of her day wanted her sit down and shut up—the stakes were high if such a strong, articulate woman as Grimke was allowed to keep speaking. She was boldly threatening an entire system of white, male privilege on whose ideology our country was founded. For as much as we like to think of our country today as rooted in democratic ideals, this country was not actually a democracy until the 20th century. It was a patriarchy until 1920 and a ”slaveocracy” (I am using Toni Morrison’s term from her book Playing in the Dark) until 1865, and we need to face that heritage. We are still recovering from slaveocracy and patriarchy; we are still giving birth to the truest expression of democracy in America. Sarah Grimke was part of that birthing process.

Encouragement for Today’s Moment

Women, like Sarah Grimke, are my “clouds of witnesses,” as the Bible says in the Book of Hebrews. They remind me that in some ways many things have not changed in the cultural landscape of America: Christian authorities are still spouting falsehoods, upholding injustice, and creating red herrings to avoid real political and social issues. Meanwhile, the roots of the Gospel—a Gospel of truth, righteousness, and freedom for the oppressed—continues to hold tremendous power to unbound the chains of injustice. But, what feels crucial to me is that there are yet feminists who know how to engage religion on its own terms. This country is still highly religious, and the work of women’s rights will still need to articulate itself well on religion grounds.

That, of course, is the reason why I am at Yale Divinity—because I want to be part of that work. But, as you know Letha, I struggle at times in using the label “Christian feminist,” because I don’t see my calling as being limited to just religious spheres. At the same time, I know that in my historical moment—just as in 19th century America— there is a pressing need to dismantle patriarchy, misogyny, and homophobia from within faith communities. In your last letter you talked so well about the significance of a “born-again” believer like Jimmy Carter standing up for women’s rights. To advance the cause of justice, women and men who understand and can speak from within their faith traditions, will need to continue to stand up.

I deeply believe that this century holds tremendous potential for dismantling this entire matrix of oppression—our intersecting systems of oppressions based on gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. But, I don’t think that this dismantling can be done if faith traditions sit on the sidelines of justice. Like it or not, religion is not only knit into the fabric of our matrix of oppression, but also paradoxically has the tools, power, and passionate followers who are capable of being part of creating a more just world.

Final Thoughts: Partnering Together Across Differences

As you know, Letha, last weekend I attended the Women and Power conference at the Omega Institute in New York. The conference was designed to help promote feminist dialogue across the generations. One thing I realized while participating in the conference was the tremendous diversity of people wanting to work on behalf of women’s rights. One speaker I want to highlight is Sakena Yacoobi, who gave me holy chills when I listened to her speak. She is a devout Muslim woman who is the president and executive director of the Afghan Institute of Learning. She has risked her life under the Taliban to bring health education to women and children, schools to boys and girls, and guidance for young women in how to navigate being positioned in a patriarchal context.  As part of her work, she believes that if people had access to education, they could reclaim the message of peace which she believes is written into a true practice of Islam. She has also in seasons of her life worked beside Christian activists, who similarly believed in the underlying message of justice and peace within Christianity.

When I hear about the work of women like Yacoobi, I realize that today is no time to jettison religion from the feminist platform. If progressive thinkers dismiss religion, we are only leaving it the hands of fundamentalists who will then control dogma to oppress people. It is crucial that thoughtful, articulate people of many different faith traditions do the work of reclaiming religion for its messages of justice and peace.

As a 3rd wave feminist, I long for a movement large enough to embrace the gifts of diversity—whether we are religious or not— but always focused enough to partner together to alleviate human suffering and advance justice. I think that such a partnership is critical to making key advancements in the human rights issues of our century.

Your friend,

Kimberly

Dear Kimberly,

As you pointed out so well in your last letter, girls and women have had access to education for a relatively short time in the span of history.  And in some places, they’re still denied such access.  So I can see why you’re thinking about this a lot as you begin your studies at Yale Divinity School this fall.  What an exciting time this is for you!

Jimmy Carter, Religious Teachings, and Discrimination against Women

I wonder if you’ve been following the various commentaries and blog discussions about former U.S. president Jimmy Carter’s op-ed piece in the Observer (July 12, 2009) explaining the decision he had made in 2000 to sever his lifelong ties with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).  Among other denominational positions he disagreed with at that time, he was rejecting the SBC’s official pronouncements that opposed female pastors and instructed wives to submit to their husbands.

But last month, as Carter reiterated his reasons for having left the denomination, he was writing as one of The Elders. The Elders, as described on their website, are “an independent group of eminent global leaders, brought together by Nelson Mandela, who offer their collective influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity.”

One of the Elders’ most recent projects is promoting women’s equality around the world; and as part of that effort, they are pointing out that gender inequality is often rooted in religious teachings.  Not everyone likes to face up to that fact.

While acknowledging that religious teachings and values have often been a force for good, the Elders point out another side of the story:

Sadly, [religious and traditional values and teachings] have also been used throughout the centuries to justify and entrench inequality and discrimination against women and girls. These teachings and practices have been abused by men to give them power over the female members of their families and women across their communities. As a result, women have lost control of their bodies and their lives.  (From Equality for Women and Girls)

Carter’s work with the Elders and his Observer article have been much discussed recently, both negatively (by those who refuse to acknowledge religion-based gender discrimination) and positively (by those who have observed or personally experienced such discrimination).  In his article, he made clear he was not singling out a particular religion for criticism.  He wrote:

This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. It is widespread. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths.

Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women’s equal rights across the world for centuries.

Jimmy Carter is by no means anti-religious but has spoken out as a man of strong faith and convictions. Even during his presidency, he did not hesitate to apply to himself the label born-again Christian. He has faithfully taught Sunday school, and his religious values continue to inspire him to work for  peace and justice in the world.  But his article decries the abuse of religion and the damage it does when it is commandeered by those who use it for keeping groups (any groups) down rather than lifting them up.

Awareness of Religion’s Role in Gender Inequality Is Not New

Over many years, others from diverse backgrounds have made the same point that Jimmy Carter and the Elders are making.  In her preface to Religion and Sexism (Simon & Schuster, 1974 edition), Roman Catholic feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether said that a failure to pay attention to how religion has had an impact on women in society “leaves a serious gap in the understanding of the dilemma of women’s liberation, for religion has been not only a contributing factor, it is undoubtedly the single most important shaper and enforcer of the image and role of women in culture and society” (p. 9).

I also remember watching some time ago an episode of the old CBS television program, Look Up and Live, which was broadcast Sunday mornings during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. On October 20, 1974 the guests were Harvard theologian Harvey Cox and Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Hefner.

According to the notes I took during the broadcast, Harvey Cox commented, “My main objection to the magazine is its view of women.  Women are presented as accoutrements of men rather than seen as full, complete, equal, independent persons in their own right.”

Hugh Hefner then shot right back: “Well, I think you can thank organized religion as much as anything for teaching that attitude toward women.”

I remember thinking, Ouch! Christianity has some bad press to overcome!

The nineteenth century women promoting education for women whom you wrote about in your last letter, Kimberly, were of course well aware of these issues, too.  They believed that neither reason nor religion, rightly understood, taught that women were intended to be the “satellites of men” (as the educator Emma Hart Willard once wrote).

But a lot of people believed that indeed religion taught exactly that, and they were quick to cite Bible verses to prove that women’s lives were expected to revolve around men and men’s wishes, needs, and accomplishments.  Hadn’t Eve been created from Adam and for Adam to be his helper?  And after the fall of humankind into sin, wasn’t Eve told that her husband would rule over her?  Such arguments were often cited in debates about educational, occupational, and voting rights for women.  They weren’t confined to discussions in churches.

Abolitionist William Loyd Garrison, publisher of The Liberator, an anti-slavery newspaper, was present at the fifth National Women’s Rights Convention in 1854 when an antifeminist named Rev. Henry Crew spoke out.  The Revered Mr. Crew stood up and insisted that he felt it was his duty to tell those gathered that it was “clearly the will of God that man should be superior in authority and power to the woman” and that nothing was more plainly taught in Scripture than woman’s subordination.  (You can read more about it in Aileen S. Kraditor, ed., Up from the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968.)

As biblical and theological arguments and counter arguments ensued, William Lloyd Garrison reached a point where he had apparently had enough. He stood up and said that “consulting the Bible for opinions of women’s rights is of little importance to the majority of this Convention,” explaining that few would be interested in arguing “dry doctrinal points.” After all, they had come together to work on political and social issues. Then he added something that continues to be a message for us today.  Garrison said:

But with the American people, the case is different. The masses believe the Bible directly from God; that it decrees the inequality of the sexes; and that settles the question. There is no doubt that there are many persons connected with the Protestant churches who would be with the [women's equality] movement were it not for the supposed Bible difficulty.” (From Volume 1 of the six-volume History of Women’s Suffrage, as quoted in Kraditor, pp. 111-112).

How Did Early Feminists Handle Bible arguments?

I’m writing all this, Kim, because you and I both know that arguments from the Bible are still used to promote inequality in many circles — not only with regard to the roles and relationships of women and men but also with regard to civil rights and marriage equality for gay and lesbian people, to cite another recent example.  (Since, as you know, I’ve already written about that elsewhere, I won’t take the time to elaborate more here, but just mention it as one more example of how the Bible is used in public and political discourse in spite of the separation of church and state.)

In the 20th century, biblical arguments were frequently seized upon to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment.  In earlier centuries, biblical arguments fortified efforts to bar women from equal access to education, or to bolster the right to keep slaves.

Now in the 21st century, “The Bible clearly teaches. . .” or “The Scripture plainly states,” are still common refrains  — usually with little regard for context or interpretation, as proof texts are hurled about like weapons. Whatever the Bible supposedly “clearly” teaches is then repeated again and again by others –even including some who themselves may never open the pages of a Bible. If asked, “Where does the Bible say that?” they often will say, “Well, I don’t know where, but I know it says it.”

What I’m saying here is by no means intended to criticize the Bible or put down those who take it seriously and sincerely want to ascertain and follow the will of God. You and I certainly ourselves take Scripture and our faith seriously, Kimberly, or we wouldn’t be writing this blog as Christian feminists!  But at the same time, we both shudder to see the Bible used in ways that hurt people rather than empowering them.

Many of the early feminists were likewise women and men of faith and were similarly not willing to surrender the Bible to those they believed were interpreting it in ways contrary to its overall message of love, compassion, justice, and peace.

So what did they do?  Some feminists, then as now, of course, thought that ignoring religion and dismissing such arguments as irrelevant was the best way to go.  But others put effort into countering the arguments of those who thought the matter was settled by their own particular interpretation of Scripture.  Instead, these feminists presented alternate interpretations.  They also used logical arguments, sound scholarship, and persuasive rhetoric to make their points, just as many Christian feminists and feminists of other faiths continue to do.

Years ago, as I looked through some of the writings of the early feminists and tried to analyze their overall ways of dealing with Scripture, I came up with at least seven points of emphasis they made. I wrote them up in an article called “The Feminists and the Bible, ” which was published in Christianity Today (February 2, 1973).  If you’re interested in exploring them, I’m sure you can find the article in the Yale Library or any other library that has back issues of Christianity Today. Maybe we can discuss some of these points in some future exchange on this blog.

Many Feminists Care about Integrating Faith and Feminism

Rather than viewing faith and feminism as at war with each other, I think it’s important to give attention to integrating one’s faith and one’s feminism. Neither has to be given up.  Many people are yearning to experience such integration but aren’t always sure whether or not it’s possible and, if so, how to go about it.

This question comes up from time to time even on websites that are not usually devoted to religious issues. On the popular website Feministing, which draws large numbers of young “third wave” feminists, discussions about whether one could be both Christian and feminist came up in their Community Forum in both May and July this year.

And a few years ago on Feminist.com, the “Ask Amy” column featured a question by a reader who wondered how she could be true to her faith tradition and to feminism at the same time.  The columnist, Amy Richards, coauthor of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, provided a thoughtful answer about balancing faith and feminism and added these words:  “I am actually sorry we didn’t address this more in Manifesta — it is something that has come up repeatedly since the book was published –clearly there was/is a need to address these issues more.”

And recently I read Living on the Boundaries: Evangelical Women, Feminism, and the Theological Academy by Nicola Hoggard Creegan and Christine D. Pohl (InterVarsity Press, 2005).   Christine Pohl, who teaches in a conservative Christian theological seminary, wrote that “gender concerns are never really settled” in that setting. After having taught there for sixteen years by the time of her coauthoring the book, she wrote, “I have seen many changes, but each year we also address the same issues again. With a new crop of students annually, with the move of several conservative denominations toward restricting women’s leadership roles and with the impact of the megachurch movement and its generally conservative views of male and female roles, gender issues remain an important topic” (p. 21).

I know you and I have each dealt with these issues at some time in our own lives, Kimberly, and you continue to run into the same questions about Scripture and feminism again and again today as you and your friends hear sermons about gender hierarchy as God’s plan.  We’ve discussed it frequently here on this blog. And I know you’ve helped other young women sort out ways they can explore interpretations of Scripture that take into account the cultural setting, time of writing, and the circumstances in which the books of the Bible were written and the intent of each of the various authors, rather than pulling passages out of context.

Repressive Interpretations of Sacred Writings Hurt Women

I’m eager to hear your thoughts on all this.  And in my next letter, I’d like to pick up where I’m leaving off in this one and address specific ways that certain interpretations of sacred writings have been harmful to women.  Such harm can happen in any faith tradition, as Jimmy Carter and the elders are pointing out; but I’ll confine myself to Christianity, since that is my own faith and the one I’m most familiar with.

Hearing certain sermons and reading certain writings that present women as having been assigned by God to a lesser role than that of men can be excruciatingly painful to girls and women — notwithstanding all the condescending statements about different-roles-but-equality-in-worth that are offered to soothe over the hurt.

M. Carey Thomas, who was president of Bryn Mawr College from 1894 to 1922, told of having internalized in her earliest years the teachings that girls were not as capable as boys and worried that she would not be able to go to college, which she wanted more than anything else in the world.  “I remember often praying about it,” she said, “and begging God that if it were true that because I was a girl I could not successfully master Greek and go to college and understand things to kill me at once, as I could not live in such an unjust world.”  Even as an adult she said, “I can never read many parts of the Pauline epistles without feeling again the sinking of the heart with which I used to hurry over the verses referring to women’s keeping silence in the churches and asking their husbands at home” (quoted in Kraditor, pp.90-91).

Many women today in certain religious settings have similar feelings, and I hope we can talk about that pain more fully and discuss ways we can help women build a sense of self-efficacy so that they are empowered by their faith rather than blocked by it and kept from being all they were meant to be.

Well, I’ve gone on and on and never did comment on everything in your last letter!  I appreciated hearing about your need for  writing retreats to get away from distractions and interruptions and give yourself time, quiet, and space just to write, much as Virginia Woolf pointed out in the book you carried with you, A Room of One’s Own. I notice over at Feministing that Courtney Martin just got back from a writing retreat, too. Hers was at the Bellagio Centre in Italy, and she also wrote about Virginia Woolf’s emphasis on women’s need for unencumbered time and space to write.  I’ve often thought about Tillie Olsen’s Silences in which she showed how women have so often been expected to care for everyone else and give only any leftover time to their writing so as not to be considered “selfish.”

There’s always so much we could talk about!  But I’ll stop before I think of something else.  Have a wonderful first semester at Yale, Kim.  I’m so thrilled for you and looking forward to your sharing your experiences and new insights.

Your friend,
Letha

Hi Letha,

Thanks so much for your last letter about “great and not so great expectations” for women.” Right now, I am thinking about how much I expect of myself, wondering if I am trying to do too much!

The Value of Writing Retreats

As you know, I am now two weeks away from leaving Seattle and venturing on to graduate school in Connecticut; so life is filled to the brim with moving plans and goodbyes and last minute projects. Fortunately, I’ve carved out space this weekend to go away for a writing retreat to work on my book. I get to be on a lovely island off the coast of Washington, tucked away in a cabin and enjoying a more contemplative pace of life. I try to take writing retreats every few months. They are such a privilege, but I’ve also come to see them as a necessity for the writing life. There is something about changing my work space that helps stimulate new ideas and sensations. I tell my friends that my writing retreats help me “stalk my epiphanies”—I get to stay up as late as I want, writing away, until something fires in my synapses and the “aha” moment arrives on the page.

This island I am going to is particularly lovely for creative inspiration. It has a wonderful bakery, dirt roads, friendly locals, and the most brilliant stars that light the night sky. Plus, I’ve been visiting it since I was girl, and it holds many years of inspiring memories that somehow have the effect of encouraging me to stride boldly into the future, too. I am thrilled for the move to attend Yale, though the excitement for my upcoming education is not without the nerves.

A favorite book that I take with me on every writing retreat is the classic collection of essays, A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf. With imagination and wit, Woolf gets us thinking about the cultural expectations that have created a history in western society in which many of the talents of women have gone un-offered to the world. What if Shakespeare had had a sister who would had been equally gifted at writing plays?  She would never have been given the same opportunities as her brother; and her work, like so many women’s, would have been lost to a silent history.

A Beautiful, Locked Country for Men Only

Perhaps because of my nearing move to Yale, one thing I have been spending lots of time researching and thinking about is the tremendous gift of living in a cultural-historical moment in which the doors of higher education are open to women. (I know that the theme of education keeps coming up in our last few letters.) It really has not been that long since the opportunities many of us have come to expect were inconceivable to previous generations. Thanks to pioneering women like Mary Wollstonecraft or Harriet Taylor, women of my generation can now take their education for granted, forgetting there was a time when not only was higher education locked to women, but nearly all formal education.  It is indeed amazing how expectations of women have shifted so dramatically over the last 200 years.

Today, I happened to be listening to a lecture on Abigail Adams (I like to check out lectures on history at the library), and the professor shared some of her life story and read excerpts of her letters. I learned that Abigail Adams lamented that she had no access to formal schooling (though she did receive some education by her father). However, in her 40s when traveling in England during one of her husband John’s diplomatic missions, she had her first opportunity to take classes. She took courses in electricity, magnetism, and optics and was fascinated. She wrote of her late-found education that, ”It was like going into a beautiful country which I never saw before, a country which our American females are not permitted to visit or inspect.”

Isn’t that heart-wrenching?

For Abigail Adams, being in Europe, taking courses, and meeting other women who had also sought out education helped to vindicate her feeling she had had all along—that it was not right to deny women access to education.

However, she was quickly ready to clarify that women need to be educated not in order to usurp male roles, but to be better wives and mothers. She explained that since women were raising the sons who would become the next generation of leaders and statesmen, the mothers ought to be properly educated in order to bring up such great men. In this way, her radical idea could still snugly fit into the lap of patriarchal expectations.

Wollstonecraft and Mill

Mary Wollstonecraft also used a similar approach of upholding patriarchal expectations, even in the context of advancing women’s rights. She explained that women ought to have access to education for the primary purpose of making women more rational, with the end result of their being better wives and mother. And while it is easy to critique her argument now, she was effectively moving the conversation forward in her historical moment. A Vindication of the Rights of Women (written in 1792) was a response to  Rousseau’s Emile, in which the highly influential philosopher adamantly denies women rights to education. Rousseau thought society itself would crash down if women were allowed to do the things that men were traditionally allowed to do! (When I read him, I can’t help but think how remarkably similar his arguments are to those of many conservative pastors I have heard preaching today. Scary!)

Several years later in 1869,  John Stuart Mill—who was the husband of Harriet Taylor, a member of the British parliament, and an advocate for women’s rights— advanced the cause for women’s education in his own strategic (yet ironically patriarchal) way. He explained that women would only be holding their husbands back from progress if they were not allowed to be educated, since men spend so much time with their wives. We mustn’t have women holding men back! So, once again women can only be educated for an end result that benefits others, not themselves. (But as Mill himself carefully notes in his writings, he didn’t necessarily use his best arguments when he wrote. He was a utilitarian and a pragmatist, and he used the arguments that he thought would be most effective for advancing his cause.)

Moria Gatens writes in Feminism and Philosophy that even the best pro-feminist women and men  need to be critiqued, because most of them positioned their progressive ideas within philosophical assumptions that were still deeply rooted within traditional gender expectations. I like how she so articulately deconstructs Western, Enlightenment philosophy and shows how most all the terms (freedom, citizen, labor, education, etc.) silently and effectively exclude women, who generally could not own property, be educated, or have legal ownership of the profits from their  labor—all foundational ideals within democratic, Enlightenment thinking.

Yet, at the same time, these historical characters who pioneered for women’s education were making key advances within their own time. They were using the “currency” available to them within a society that had rigid expectations of women’s and men’s roles. If they hadn’t made their small steps, I would not be going off to graduate school in 2009. Now it is my turn to share in the responsibility of advancing their steps, fulfilling their visions, and opening new, wider pathways for the girls and women of my generation and those who come after me.

Letha, thank you again for this correspondence. I look forward to keeping up these letters while I am at Yale Divinity. In fact, the next time you hear from me I will be all settled into my new home and life. Thanks so much for all your prayers and support.

Your friend,

Kimberly

Dear Kimberly,

While listening to NPR’s Morning Edition earlier this week, I was struck by a phrase that reminded me of some of our discussions on this blog.  The phrase? “Expectations of how a woman judge should act.”

It occurred during a discussion about critics of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor who claim her style is “overly aggressive.”  Senator Lindsey Graham was quoted as saying that he doesn’t like “bully judges,” and implied that the term might apply to the nominee’s temperament.  With this and similar harsh judgments in mind, NPR’s legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg interviewed Sotomayor’s mentor, Judge Guido Calabresi, the former dean of the Yale Law School. Calibresi had been keeping track of how Sotomayer questioned attorneys in cases brought before the Court of Appeals as compared to how male judges questioned them.

“I must say I found no difference at all,” said Calibresi. “So I concluded that all that was going on was that there were some male lawyers who couldn’t stand being questioned toughly by a woman. It was sexism in its most obvious form.”

Nina Totenberg reported that when she asked him how he would explain similar criticism if it came from a female attorney, Calabresi told her that women also can be sexist “in their expectations of how a woman judge should act.”

Gloria Steinem has speculated, in another context, that sexism of this sort among both women and men may be pervasive for this reason:

. . . .[M]ost of us of every race have experienced female authority when we were children, so we think it’s not appropriate to adulthood. Some people feel regressed to childhood when they see a powerful woman — which is another reason why men should plan an equal role in raising children, and why women should be equally in authority outside the home.  (From “Gloria Steinem: Still Committing ‘Outrageous Acts’ at 75,” an interview with Gloria Steinem by Joni Evans for The Women on the Web website–wowOwow.com)

I wonder if such (possibly unconscious) fears of being regarded as children may explain the anxieties some male church leaders have as they keep sounding alarms about what they term the “feminization of the church.”  It would help explain their fondness for emphasizing 1 Timothy 2:11-12 and applying it to the church today without regard to its historical and cultural context.  (”Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent,” NRSV).  You and I are both aware of how often this passage continues to be quoted in many conservative Christian circles, where it is generalized as being intended for all times and places, not a local situation.

But I don’t want to get sidetracked here; I want to move on to talk about expectations in general and how that theme fits with our most recent discussions about the seemingly disconnected topics of Susan Boyle, the Taliban’s denial of education for girls, and your last letter about the commodification of women’s sexuality in advertising.

Revisiting the Susan Boyle phenomenon as a case study in expectations

When Scottish singer Susan Boyle auditioned for Britain’s Got Talent, the judges and the audience expected little of her because she looked so ordinary. And when she said she was 47 years old, talent judge Simon Cowell raised his eyebrows and scowled, possibly shocked at her audacity in thinking she had a right to be on the stage at that age.  (Cowell himself was 49 at the time — I looked up his birthdate.  I’m reminded of Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s observation in Beyond the Double Bind that one of the double binds women find themselves in is the prevalent idea that “when men age, they gain wisdom and power; as women age, they wrinkle and become superfluous.”)

So it wasn’t hard to see that Susan Boyle, a woman who wanted to achieve her dream, was up against both ageism and lookism.  Most people seemed to expect her to fail and be quickly pushed aside to make way for the next contestant. But instead, she wowed the audience onto their feet and became an immediate worldwide sensation through YouTube.

But then a whole new set of expectations emerged. Now it was assumed that she would happily yield to an image others wanted to dictate to her and be “made over.”  If she could perform,  she must also conform.   She was expected to change her appearance, appreciate the unrelenting media pressure, and play the celebrity game.  Having been thrust upon her so suddenly in just a few weeks, that game didn’t seem to fit her.  I believe she simply wanted to share the gift of her voice with the world and not have to deal with all the trappings that the entertainment industry expects to go with it.  She had difficulty coping and was hospitalized with exhaustion. The media criticized her harshly and spread many rumors that (according to one of the show’s judges ) were both unfair and untrue, not to mention lacking compassion.

But totally apart from the Susan Boyle story, I see a pattern in this trajectory that in a somewhat different way can illustrate and represent what often happens to all of us as women.  It’s all about expectations.

Low expectations

Women have not been expected to achieve to the extent that men are expected to achieve and so women have often been blocked from having a chance to prove they can.

I know you love history, Kim, and we’ve often discussed the foolish ideas that were promulgated to keep women from having access to education, voting, and career aspirations.  Women’s minds were said to be weaker, their brains smaller, their bodies more fragile. And exposure to too much education was thought to harm women’s abilities to bear and rear children.  Governor John Winthrop of the 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony  wrote about a woman who had been afflicted by an infirmity in which she “lost her understanding and reason” over a period of years because, he said, she had “given herself wholly to reading and writing and had written many books.”  He went on to say that her loving husband realized too late that he was in error by not insisting she devote her time solely to household duties “and had not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger.”

(Winthrop’s statement in 1645 is reminiscent of  something we discussed in our two most recent blog posts, the assertion of the Taliban that girls and women existed for domesticity alone and have no business getting an education or being out and about in public.)

Now fast forward to the 20th century. When Steven Goldberg’s controversial book, The Inevitability of Patriarchy was published in the 1970s, he argued for the existence of a “biologically-based male superiority” that equips the male sex for dominance and achievements. He claimed that “there is not a single woman whose genius has approached that of any number of men in philosophy, mathematics, composing, theorizing of any kind, or even painting.”  Goldberg conveniently ignored all the roadblocks placed in women’s way or the fact that women did accomplish such things but had to publish, paint, or compose under a male name to even get their works into public viewing (and then usually without acknowledgment of their contributions).

Fast forward again to the 21st century, where the debate continues about the degree to which women in comparison to men are likely to excel in such fields as mathematics, science, and engineering, and observe the disagreements about whether differences in scientific achievements are due to nature or nurture.

In an article for Women’s E-News (June 17, 2009), Caryl Rivers tells of numerous studies (all too often ignored by the media) that are showing that girls can perform as well as boys in science and math.  And yet parents, teachers, and guidance counselors continue to have low expectations for girls’ abilities, steering them away from career paths in these fields. “If we want our daughters to thrive in math and science,” writes Rivers, “We have to peel away the layers of myth, misinformation and conditioning about women’s lack of ability.”

New expectations emerge after low expectations are overturned by success

When a woman demonstrates that the low expectations others may have held for her were wrong, she is then confronted with a new set of expectations.

Although she may desire to put her energies into her accomplishments and furthering her abilities, societal pressures may dictate that she owes the world not only her talents but her conformity to a certain definition of “femininity,” dressing certain ways, speaking certain ways, deferring to men or risk being called assertive, strident, tough, or bullying (as in the opening story on this post), making sure her abilities and aspirations do not intimidate men, and taking care to conform to a mold society expects her to fit.

Furthermore, she is now encumbered with even higher expectations than those her male counterpart is expected to fulfill. You’ve probably heard it said that a woman has to do a job much better than a man in order to be considered equal to him.  Women who succeed are expected to be almost super human in responding to the pressures put on them to excel not only in careers, but in relationships and/or parenthood, active social lives, civic responsibilities, and so much more.  Women are expected to have it all and do it all, without succumbing to the pressure!

In Beyond the Double Bind: Women in Leadership, Kathleen Hall Jamieson says that “unrealizable expectations are also designed to undercut women’s exercise of power.”

By requiring both femininity and competence in the public sphere, and then defining femininity in a way that excludes competence, the bind creates unrealizable expectations. By this standard women are bound to fail. The power of the bind is rooted in a woman’s willingness to grant someone else the right both to define and impose the requirement of femininity. . . .Denying others the power to define appropriate behavior breaks the bind. Being feminine as femininity was traditionally defined may be incompatible with being competent, but being a woman is not. (p. 18)

Your May 23 blog post

I realize I have been rambling on and on, sharing what I’ve been thinking about recently, and I’ve neglected to tell you how much I appreciated your last letter.  I liked your analysis of how women are presented in the mass media and especially in advertising.  It’s another example of others believing they have the right to determine how women should be perceived — the expectations of a certain body image and ad agencies’ assumptions of how men want to see women. I especially liked what you said about certain images being “disturbing not just because they create culture and influence our minds, but more because they reflect what is already in the culture — a conscious and unconscious toleration of de-humanizing women and objectifying female sexuality for male use.”  I was glad you also pointed out that along with “these images of women-as-objects are the images of masculinity that are steeped in aggression and dominance,” with the result that both genders “miss out on healthy images of human sexuality that promote mutuality and equality.”  Well said, Kimberly.

I also wanted to tell you how happy I am that you were invited by a church to present a four-part lecture and discussion series on “Women, Faith, and Justice” and had an opportunity to talk about these topics with many people who were probably new to the ideas of Christian feminism. I’m especially glad your talks were recorded and can be listened to online, Kim, because it gave me a chance not only to hear you but also to hear the very interesting feedback by those attending.  I hope our readers will click on the link, too.

I can only imagine how busy you must be getting ready for graduate study at Yale Divinity School, along with teaching classes and everything else you’re doing in Seattle before your move to the East Coast.  What an exciting time for you!

I’ve been really busy, too, most recently putting together the latest edition of “Web Explorations for Christian Feminists,” which I like to call an almost-quarterly “magazine of links.”  Some of our readers may wish to check that out, too. The previous issue of Web explorations (they’re all archived) might also be of interest. That edition has a lot of movie and DVD recommendations; and along with the description of the movie, Milk, I also tell of meeting Harvey Milk in 1978 (just a few months before he was murdered) when he attended the launching of a book I coauthored.  I’ve included in that post part of a speech our publisher gave at the event.  It was at a time when it took special courage to speak out for the rights of gays and lesbians, and to do so from a Christian point of view was an especially daring thing to do. (Still is in some circles!)  Also, it just occurred to me that some of our readers who work as counselors may especially be interested in the Christian Feminism Today special series on healing from childhood sexual abuse now posted on eewc.com, too.

I guess I should get this sent off before I think of something else to say!  One thing that I did conclude in thinking about all the expectations that our society has for us is this:  We don’t have to allow ourselves to be conformed to someone else’s expectations. We don’t have to play a role to conform to society’s ideas about what femininity is or what a woman should be or do.  We can “break the bind” as Kathleen Hall Jamieson said. And we can enjoy the freedom of being the unique individuals we were created to be.

But as women of faith, I believe we both care about God’s expectations for us. What are they?  I think Micah 6:8 sums it up well.  “And what does God require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”  Those are truly great expectations.

And with that, I really will sign off!

Your friend,
Letha

Dear Letha,

I loved your last letter, especially how you juxtaposed the situation in Swat Valley, Pakistan with the situation of Susan Boyle in the western media. I always like seeing the world through the lens of “inter-text”—putting seemingly non related topics side-by-side and noticing how they illuminate one another. And as we know, feminist study is at its best when it can name the connections between many different systems of power, privilege and marginalization as they play out across diverse cultures. You did that so well in your last letter. I would encourage all of our readers to play through the links you posted in your last letter, from the sensational performance of Susan Boyle in England to the coverage of the situation of girls’ education in Swat Valley, Pakistan.

Continuing the Conversation: “Ideal” Femininity in the Media

I want to start this letter by springboarding off your comments about Susan Boyle. I loved your sentence, “Her few moments on stage that night before Easter, 2009 would change her life incredibly and prompt endless discussions about whether we have had it wrong all along in our botox-injecting, silicone implanting, cosmetic surgery-loving society that has claimed to know what beauty is.”

Just last night I gave a presentation at a church on the images of masculinity and femininity that bombard our lives through the messaging of the media. To prepare for my talk, I have spent weeks researching images of women’s bodies in advertising. My research has made me feel nearly physically ill. Image after image of what is considered ideal feminine beauty—usually white, frighteningly skinny, often child-like and seductive presentations of women. And to be more accurate, the images are not really images of real women at all—they are body parts from many different women merged together through the use of photo editing software.

The cultural psyche is then imprinted with these “perfect” images, so that when we see a real woman like Susan Boyle who does not look like these fabrications of ideal femininity, she gets treated with immediate contempt when she walks on a stage. (I was so angry when I first saw the beginning of the video on Susan’s performance. How dare people be so blatantly rude to her!)

The more I have looked at pictures of women and advertising these past few weeks, the more I have grown gravely concerned about how these images reflect the status of women in our culture. What concerns me is not only that these images unconsciously influence our views of women, but that it is done so intentionally. The marketing teams who design these advertising campaigns do so because they know what their target audience responds to. I have seen some horrifying images in my research. I will link them here (at the risk of giving these companies even more attention), but please be aware that they are truly disturbing pictures. One magazine has a picture of a woman thrown in a garbage can, her legs sticking out. It’s an image that accompanies an article about how the economy is affecting men’s dating lives. (Thanks to feministing.com for drawing my attention to this ad.) Another ad came out last year from the high-end designer Dolce Gibanna, which is clearly depicting gang rape. (This ad eventually got pulled after protests in Europe.) Another high end designer, Duncan Quinn, has this ad, which has a well-dressed man holding his tie around the neck of a nearly naked, apparently dead woman with blood around her head. (FYI: That link takes a moment to load the image.) I could go on and on.

These more extreme images of male violence toward women are not disconnected from the more “normal” images of women’s objectification that we see in most magazines. All around us in the barrage of advertising, a woman has been reduced to a passive “thing,” her humanity stripped, her body pimped in a culture of mass consumerism. And as she has become more and more a “thing” and not a person, there has been a frightening merger of violence and sex in how she is depicted. Some ads are even subtly (or not so subtly) playing off scenes from pornography, which is an industry built on eroticizing violence toward women. If you want to read more thoughts on sexism in advertising, here is a thought-provoking and disturbing article published last year in the Huffington Post.

All that to say, I have been horribly discouraged this week. I fear we have a whole culture that—in the name of freedom of expression—dismisses the harm of these images. And as I noted earlier, these images are disturbing not just because they create culture and influence our minds, but more because they reflect what is already in the culture—a conscious and unconscious toleration of de-humanizing women and objectifying female sexuality for male use. And the counterpoint, of course, to these images of women-as-objects are the images of masculinity that are steeped in aggression and dominance. Both men and women suffer in this system. We both miss out on healthy images of human sexuality that promote mutuality and equality.

Closing Thoughts on Girls’ Education in Pakistan

I will end this letter by transitioning to the other topic in your letter—the destruction of girls’ schools in Swat Valley, Pakistan. The topic was timely for me, because just last week, I was studying and teaching on Mary Wollstonecraft’s book A Vindication of the Rights of Women. As you know, Letha, this important book, published in 1792 in England, presented one of the first written arguments for why girls should be educated. Wollestonecraft was responding to the kind of thinking found in Rosseau’s books. Rousseau wrote in Emilie: “Women’s place was to oblige us, to do us service, to gain our love and esteem, these are the duties of the sex at all times, and what they ought to learn from their infancy. Women is framed particularly for the delight and pleasure of man.”

So, when I saw the clips on Swat Valley, I couldn’t help but realize how the work of Wollestonecraft lives on. We still need to be educating people on why girls should be educated! It’s not an outdated topic. Perhaps you saw the 2001 letter written by the now re-instated Catholic Bishop Williamson who says that “almost no girl should go to university” because she was not created by God to study ideas and reason. (This, of course, is the same bishop who has denied the gas chambers existed in the Holocaust, so we can safely assume he has a level of insanity. But, I am not ready to let the other religious leaders off the hook, who allow a man like this to have such an authoritative position.)

What I liked so much about the clip on Swat Valley is that it showed so well the interplay of gender oppression with other forms of oppression. While the girls’ schools were being blown up, the boys’ schools were essentially recruiting and training grounds for the Taliban. And because many of the schools provided food and shelter, parents struggling economically were forced to send their boys to school, where they were then indoctrinated. The links you posted begin to help us see the interplay of religious fundamentalism with gender fundamentalism, poverty, and violence, especially the violence of the West. (For instance, when America bombs civilians in Afganistan, we are playing perfectly into the strategy of the Taliban. What better recruiting ground for Taliban idealogy?) I realize these political situations have much more complexity than I am going into here, but the tension I am trying to begin to see more is how much the oppression of girls and women relies on others systems of domination, too.

All for Now

Well, Letha, I better sign off now. It’s a beautiful day, and there is a fantastic dance festival happening this weekend in Seattle! I hope to finish my work today a bit early, so that I can enjoy the sun and take time to relax. As we have talked about so much on the phone, it is getting more and more important for me to prioritize self-care in the midst of thinking, writing, and teaching so much on these really difficult issues. So, this weekend I am going to play! I only have 10 weeks left in Seattle before I move to New Haven for graduate school, so I am trying to savor my time here. Thanks for your well wishes on Yale Divinity School. I am thrilled to get to study at such a fantastic place. I have visited twice now, and each time I have gone I am incredibly impressed by how well the school merges reflection and action. I think it will be an excellent place to learn better how to be a practitioner of social justice, while not forgetting the importance of dance and laughter and spontaneous potlucks! I am so grateful for the opportunity to be part of the community there and begin this next adventure.

Your friend,

Kimberly

Dear Kimberly,

Your further thoughts about pride, lookism, racism, and anti-feminist religious teachings were right on the mark! I want to pick up on that discussion by sharing some thoughts I’ve had after viewing some seemingly unrelated television programs this past week. You may have seen them, too, Kim. If not, you can view these videos online. One is the Scottish singer Susan Boyle’s sensational and heartwarming performance on Britain’s Got Talent, which has gone viral on YouTube (more than 25 million viewings and still climbing as I write) and is being much discussed throughout the media.  The other two are the PBS Frontline/World showing of “Pakistan: Children of the Taliban” and the New York Times short video, “Class Dismissed in Swat Valley.” Both are frightening reports about the Taliban’s expanding power in Pakistan and its devastating effects on children, especially girls.

On the surface, these programs seem galaxies apart — an uplifting performance by a middle-aged woman on Britain’s counterpart to American Idol on the one hand, and a heartbreaking look at the Taliban’s destructive forces in a country far from the UK on the other.  But there is a link in some underlying messages each conveys.  And all three films brought tears to my eyes.

Dreaming a Dream That Came True

It seems almost everyone has heard of Susan Boyle by now.  (“The Scot Heard Round the World” was the apt title of Mary Jordan’s April 16 article about her in the Washington Post.) An unassuming 47-year-old woman from a small village in Scotland, Susan now lives alone with her cat in the home where she had cared for her mother until her mother died in 2007.  Never married and currently unemployed, she has been devoting her time to her church and volunteer work.

As she walked onstage for the talent audition, Susan Boyle did not fit society’s show-biz image of someone whose ambition was to be a professional singer.  Her physical features, clothing, and hairstyle were ordinary — considered unglamorous according to the Western world’s ideals of beauty promoted by the lookism culture you and I have been discussing.  Wanting to look her best for her big chance, she had worn the special dress she had bought a few months earlier for her nephew’s wedding.  But an endless supply of media reports used words like “frumpy,” “dowdy,” “plain,” “matronly,” “unfashionable,” and worse to describe her, and both the audience and  judges were skeptical as she walked to the center of the stage, microphone in hand.  When she spoke of her aspirations for a professional singing career, she was met by the audience’s undisguised scoffing, sneers, and smirks and the skeptical facial expressions of the judges.

When asked her age she declared confidently, “I am 47.”  The camera zoomed in on the rolled eyes of one of the judges, prompting Susan to add, “But that’s just one side of me,” underscoring the point that neither age nor any other physical characteristic defines who a person is or what she or he has to offer the world. Ageism, like all the other isms we’ve discussed, is just one more discriminatory attitude that can keep people from living out their dreams.

But Susan Boyle was determined to live out her dream. “I’ve never been given the chance before, but here’s hoping it will change,” she responded when asked why her aspirations to be a professional singer had not worked out. She graciously ignored the cynicism of the judges and crowd.

In spite of the ridicule she had often faced, having been bullied as a child, she told the program’s backstage staff workers before the performance that she was going to “make that audience rock!”

And that she did!  Far beyond anyone’s most fanciful imagination. When she began singing “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables, the audience went wild with admiration after only the first few notes.  Her instantaneous worldwide fame has become a phenomenon that can’t be dismissed lightly. Her few moments on stage that night before Easter, 2009 would change her life incredibly and prompt endless discussions about whether we have had it wrong all along in our botox-injecting, silicone implanting, cosmetic surgery-loving society that has claimed to know what beauty is.

Why the Response?

Countless articles, interviews, blogs, Facebook comments, Twitter tweets, and radio and TV commentaries have speculated about the reason Susan’s performance has had such an impact on so many people who continue to view the YouTube video repeatedly. Almost invariably they say they have cried as they watched and listened. Syndicated columnist Connie Schultz of Cleveland’s Plain Dealer said that in writing about the video, she had at first concentrated on the audience’s initial reaction and how it shows our tendency to judge others before we know anything about them.  And no doubt that was the first lesson many people, including the judges, took from the event.  One of the judges called the turnaround in attitude upon hearing her sing “the biggest wake-up call ever.”

Columnist Schultz said she learned something else in reactions from her readers that she had not grasped at first,  namely,”how many people would see themselves in Susan Boyle.”  She pointed out that we “might expect some middle-aged women to respond with tears, but scores of men told me they cried, too, and they echoed the heart’s universal desire: I wish I had that courage.”  We were rooting for Susan because we saw her as Everywoman or Everyman who somehow garnered the confidence to stand up and be who she is.

Others have called attention to a third lesson to be drawn from the Susan Boyle phenomenon, namely, the realization that many other ordinary-seeming people with extraordinary gifts are no doubt going about their everyday lives with talents, abilities, and personalities unrecognized or unappreciated.  Author Letty Cottin Pogrebin, one of the founding editors of Ms. magazine, said she wept, too, upon viewing the Susan Boyle video. “Partly, I think it’s the age thing” she wrote,  “the fact that a woman closing in on 50 had the courage to compete with the kids — and blew them out of the water.”  She referred to the old saying about “not judging a book by its cover” and suggested that virtually all who had watched Susan “were initially blinded by entrenched stereotypes of age, class, gender, and Western beauty standards, until her book was opened and everyone saw what was inside.” Pogrebin said she thought our tears over Susan’s story were probably not only for joy that her story seemed to be moving toward a happy ending, but that perhaps our tears were also “for all the books whose covers have never been cracked.”

From the time I first watched the video a week ago, it was the idea of those unopened “book covers,” concealing the unrealized dreams of so many throughout time and cultures, that has struck me most. Think of how much the world has lost by not recognizing the talents among whole categories of people who have  been denied opportunities because a dominant group in some cultural or historical setting objected to their race, gender, social class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or some other factor.  Barriers were erected to keep members of these groups from being all they could be and doing all they could do.  Regrettably, as you and I have so often discussed in this blog, Kim, misguided religious teachings have at times provided the major rationale behind such barriers.  And societies and religious institutions are the real losers in both the short run and the long run.

Although the song Susan Boyle sang was actually a sad song about dashed dreams rather than fulfilled dreams, and ended with the line, “Now life has killed the dream I dreamed,” she herself refused to allow life to kill hers.

Shattered Dreams

But then my thoughts move to scenes from the two other videos I’ve watched recently.  These show the growing power of the Taliban in Pakistan. And I hear other voices — voices of young girls whose dreams are being killed, brutally killed.

I hear the voice of one girl, probably 11 or 12 years old, who has covered herself with a full burqa so that her identity won’t be known. She is taking a tremendous risk by giving an impassioned speech as her schoolmates gather around her.

“Why is our future targeted?” she says.  “Our dreams are shattered!  And let me say we are destroyed!”

Her voice is strong and emotional as she reads her speech, beginning with how wonderful her area was before the militant Taliban arrived.

The schoolgirls  live in the Swat Valley of Pakistan,about 100 miles from Islamabad,the capital.  A beautiful area, known for its waterfalls and idyllic loveliness, Swat Valley was a favorite tourist spot until the Taliban gained power there in 2007, drastically changing the lives of its people.  Two hundred of the schools for girls have already been blown up, although schools for boys remain open.

Fighting between the military forces of the Pakastani government and the insurgent Taliban in that area has been fierce, so the government  recently made a truce with the Taliban, hoping to see peace by yielding to the Taliban’s demands for the institution of a strict militant form of Islamic law.

The girl’s “shattered dreams” speech is part of a 15-minute documentary, Class Dismissed: The Death of Female Education by Adam Ellick and Irfan Ashraf.  It is featured online as a New York Times video. The filmmakers were there as the Taliban announced their demands over the radio: “After January 15, girls must not go to school.”  That meant the few remaining schools would have to shut down, and there would be grave consequences for those who disobeyed the order.

The filmmakers did their filming and interviews with the owner of a private girls’ school and his winsome 11-year-old daughter on January 14 as they prepared for the next day, after which the school would have to close down. Already many students and teachers were planning to stay away out of fear.

(As you know, Kimberly, I have an 11-year-old granddaughter, and I couldn’t help but think about her as I watched the beautiful young girl in the video.)  The girl and her father were deeply saddened that the next day would be her last day of school.  The father said that on that day, “50,000 schoolgirls would lose their education.” His family would also lose their livelihood.

The child spoke up with a proud smile: “I want to get my education, and I want to become a doctor.”  She began choking up and was unable to continue.  As she put her hands over her face and started crying, her father spoke tenderly, patting her and telling her to relax.  Her family is taking a tremendous risk in speaking out, but they want the world to know the situation of their people. The father hopes the girl will grow up to be a politician rather than a doctor and work for societal change so that other girls will not have to go through what they are going through.

The next day the child walks to school, bookbag on her back, for her last day of formal schooling. She bravely tells the filmmakers that even before this latest Taliban edict, girls walked along the streets in constant fear of the Taliban, aware that “the Taliban will kill us or throw acid in our faces.”  She arrives at school and joins the few classmates who had braved the danger to attend their final classes. It is no way to live — surviving in a state of constant anxiety in this valley of shattered dreams.

Extinguished Lights

A different metaphor shows up in the other film I watched on this topic — the PBS Frontline/World documentary, Pakistan: Children of the Taliban by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, a courageous female journalist and documentary filmmaker who was born and raised in Pakistan. Early in the video, she stands with two nine-year-old school girls in the ruins of what had been their school building before the Taliban demolished it.  Amidst the crumbled concrete, twisted overturned desks, books, scattered debris, and what is left of what were once educational supplies and equipment, the girls have promised to give the journalist a tour of what remains of their school.

As they talk amidst the rubble, she asks them why they liked going to school.  Without hesitation, one girl replies, “Because education is a ray of light, and I want that light.”  The girls tell her they are unhappy that they will have to wear burqas under the Taliban. One says she has tried one on and trips over it when she walks.  The tour of the bombed-out school building is cut short before it even begins because of a nearby mortar attack, and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and the girls flee to safety.

I shudder to think of the “light of education” being turned off for these young girls, so full of energy and promise, and with so much to give to their country and the world.

Women Compared to Plastic Bags

As Shermeen Obaid-Chinoy travels to another part of Pakistan, she points out that the state education system has virtually collapsed, affecting many boys as well, with the result that considerable numbers of boys (especially from poor families) go to religious schools set up by the Taliban. There they are taught militancy and encouraged to seek martyrdom.   She interviews a 14-year-old boy from one of these schools who tells her what he has learned about women under Sharia law. In addition to militancy and the desirability of martyrdom, the boys are taught about “women’s place.”

“Women are meant for domestic care, and that’s what they should do,” he tells her. “The government should forbid women from wandering about outside. Just like the government banned plastic bags. No one uses them anymore. We should do the same with women.”  He tells her that the “only people who keep women in their proper place is the Taliban.”

The boys are taught these things under the guise of religion, and they are expected to consider their teachers’ directives and interpretations of sacred writings to be the will of God.  (As we know, this can happen within the framework of any religion.  We’ve seen the same thing in the way some Christian teachings have been presented and how the Bible has been interpreted and applied.  Just recently, I heard a preacher insist that women are not permitted to be ministers on the basis of 1 Timothy 2:11-15, arguing that the instruction that women be silent and not teach or lead men is not cultural but was intended for all women in all times and places. Why?  Because the passage claims women were last to be created and first to sin, and their salvation lies in childbearing.  You’ve told me of many similar sermons you’ve heard, too. And we both know the damage such teachings have done to girls and women who really believed that was God’s message to them.)

Lighting Lights and Restoring Dreams

I know this has been a long letter, Kimberly, and I hope you’re not suffering from eye fatigue by now!  But I just wanted to share some of the things I’ve been thinking about over this past week after watching these various videos.  I hope you’ll watch them, too.  I know you’ll see that many of my thoughts here underscore a point we’ve both talked about before and that you reminded us about again in your most recent post, namely, that we must view all of these issues in a global context and not in any ethnocentric way.

Those who think we are in a post-feminist time when gender equality has been achieved are not seeing the total picture. (That’s true of racial equality, too.)  We need to find ways we can help all people everywhere to achieve their dreams.  We need to find ways to help all girls and women to enjoy that ray of light the little Pakistani girl talked about in describing the education she yearned for but was denied.  We need to support women such as those in Afghanistan who dared to protest against their government’s caving in to the hardline Shia clerics who pushed for the enactment of Shia Family Law which strips away women’s rights and gives husbands greater power over wives, even permitting marital rape.

Why the Title of This Post?

My title for this blog post might seem strange.  Dreaming a dream is clear enough, but how does one “light”a light.  Isn’t light by its very name and nature already present without having to be “lit”?

True, but sometimes the shades are drawn, keeping the light that already exists from flooding the room and chasing away the darkness.  By making known what is happening to our sisters around the world, we may be doing our little part to pull up the shades, let in the light, and increase awareness of how much work we have yet to do to help girls and women dream their dreams and experience the light of education and empowerment. And we need men to help, too. Women can’t do it alone, because we’re all in this together. Jesus told us not to hide our light under a bushel, so we need to spread the light we’ve been given.

Speaking of Dreams

And since I’ve been speaking about dreams, Kimberly, before I sign off I want to publicly congratulate you on so actively pursuing your dream of further graduate study and earning a full merit scholarship to Yale Divinity School!  Wow!  You are amazing. I am so happy for you and so very proud of you.

And I want to hear more about your visit out to the East Coast.  I was also thrilled to hear that in your travels, you met one of our blog readers — Anna, the trombonist who added a January 17 comment to my October 25 post where I talked about my trombone studies and the way even musical instruments tend to be associated with gender.  I remember her saying that she will receive her master’s degree in trombone performance next month, and I want to congratulate her.  (Anna, if you’re still reading our blog, please contact me through my personal website.)

I’d better sign off now.  It’s your turn next.   Keep dreaming dreams and lighting lights!

Your friend,

Letha

Dear Letha,

Now it is my turn to apologize for my slow reply to your last letter! As you know, this past month has been eventful for me. I moved to a new apartment in Seattle, and I also have been traveling a bit to look at different graduate school programs. The verdict is in: this fall, I will be going to Yale Divinity School to study for a Master of Arts in Religion with a concentration in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. I am so thrilled by my acceptance and the merit scholarship I was offered. And I want to thank you—and EEWC—for being such a great community to me the past year as I have journeyed in all things feminist. I would not be able to achieve my dreams without the love of the people who support me and work alongside me toward similar hopes for our world. I am so grateful.

And I also want to celebrate your health, too, as you passed the one-year marker as a cancer survivor. I am so glad that you are conscious not to “burn the midnight oil” too much; taking care of our bodies is so important. I know you are balancing so many tasks—from editing Christian Feminism Today to updating the EEWC website to providing support and encouragement to many people! I am glad that in the midst of your work load that you prioritize yourself and take care of your health—you are setting a good example for me and others. I am already thinking about school next fall and how I will balance intense studies with rest, play, and good self-care. I know that balance is so important, so that we can sustain our work long-term. And, as you know, I am not always good at self-care! But, I feel encouraged that I am learning its importance.

Women, Men, and Pride

I wanted to begin this letter by letting you know that I have been thinking a great deal about that first article you linked in your last post (the BBC article that talked about women reportedly confessing the sin of pride more than men). It so happened that when I got your letter I was reading Feminist Theory and Christian Theology by Serene Jones. (Dr. Jones used to be a professor at Yale Divinity School, and now she is at Union Theological Seminary.) Her book gave me a news lens for seeing some of the important issues in Reformed theology, particularly the weighty idea of “pride equals sin” within that tradition.

Jones explains that Calvin, similar to many preachers today, focused on pride as being one of the most damaging aspects of the human condition. Pride was a brazen, over-inflation of self that offended God, or so Calvin and others have said. It was the essence of sin and to be avoided at all cost for a healthy spiritual life.  

Dr. Jones questions where women—and other marginalized people—fit in this tradition. It is one thing for the most powerful people in society to promote these ideas around pride: perhaps Calvin’s deepest struggle really was this grandiosity of self that he describes. Certainly, many of the preachers I have listened to seem to struggle with pride a great deal, so it makes sense to me that they would define sin in terms of over-inflation of self. 

And yet these preachers and theologians are often white heterosexual men with tremendous spiritual authority who are at the top of the power structures in society. Of course they struggle with pride. They are simply reading the Bible and writing their theology out of their lived experience. They are being honest with what they know— they just are not seeing from the vantage points of those not sharing their pedestal. Perhaps they have no idea of the “view from below” or have no sense of what it means to hold the kind of power that they have. (Indeed, they might even deny that a power structure exists, so far are they from understanding marginalization)

So, what happens when all those messages about the sin of “pride” are communicated from a position of power to those who are disempowered and marginalized? What happens when the promoters of this theology are in an entirely different position of status and voice than those “below” them?

Remembering When I First Questioned Pride as Sin

Jones’ writing on this topic helped me make sense of an experience I had years ago. During this time of my life, I was helping at a transition home for abused women, and during one particular Bible study, something became abundantly clear to me: the Christian message I had so often heard about pride being the essence of sin was an irrelevant and harmful message for these women. Their sin was not pride or thinking of themselves too highly. Their sin—if we want to use that language—was not recognizing their own glory. 

If human beings are both dust and the image of God, then perhaps we all fall on different sides of the spectrum of not being able to hold these simultaneous truths. Those of us who enjoy a great deal of power might struggle with the traditional Calvinist sense of pride—thinking of ourselves as too godlike. Therefore, we need to be reminded of our dustiness. But others of us actually need to “repent” of having too low an opinion of ourselves and failing to claim our beauty, worth, glory and selfhood. We need to repent of living lives of deference or dismissing our own talents. We need to learn to “take up space” (as my friend Dr. Susan Hall says) and be more bold about who we are.

So, I agree that the article you mentioned about men and women supposedly sinning differently is actually and absolutely about gendered social construction in our churches. I know that as a young woman, when I am driven to lead or make money or be successful or follow my ambitions, I quickly question myself and my “pride.” Just who do I think I am to believe I am capable of such things?  I have been socialized differently than men. My gender still makes 76 cents on the dollar; I still struggle with devaluing myself more than I struggle with an over-inflated sense of self. 

It is not that I never struggle with pride in the Calvinist sense of the term—certainly I am not immune from grandiosity or selfish ambition. It’s just that what I often am quick to call “pride” or “selfish ambition” is really nothing more than living fully into who I am and using the gifts God has given me.

And so I am not at all surprised that women confess the sin of “pride” more than men. We have been socialized to be suspicious of our desires for success in a way that men have not been socialized. And the tragedy is that because of these suspicions and anxieties, we so often hold back from living out our limitless potential to bless the world (and ourselves) with the fullness of who we are as daughters of God. 

More on Lookism and Racism

For the last part of my letter, I want to return to the other important topic of your letter—the harm of lookism, and how that “ism” intersects with other “isms” like sexism and racism.

Wow, those images you linked of the models falling over their stilettos is chilling on so many levels. Their shoes look like they weigh more than their bodies! The short video by Mary Pipher also had some highly disturbing images. More and more, I find myself consciously cringing as I look at the beauty norms for women that are blaring from nearly every magazine, movie, and advertisement. The image is so thin, so white, so cut-off from the reality of women’s beauty and diversity.

Because I tutor many students who are visiting the United States from their home countries, I have heard first-hand the effect of lookism and racism on young teenage girls who cannot fit the  prized Western European version of beauty. I once told one of my Korean, 16-year-old students that my sisters had dark eyes and hair like hers and she could not believe it! She wanted me to bring pictures of them. “Before I came here,” she said, “I thought all Americans looked like Britney Spears.” My heart sank with her words.

I listened to her continue to talk about the sexism and racism she experienced that made her doubt her own beauty. One day she even shared with me about the painful plastic surgery that women go through in South Korea to try to look like Caucasian women (giving them rounder eyes or longer legs). I was shocked at how colonialism is still alive and well. Not only does the U.S. fashion and cosmetic industry brainwash American women (and men) to terrible ideas about what is beautiful, but those images are being exported around the world and doing profound harm.

Today I have been reading some powerful essays by African American women who are further articulating the harm of the racist, sexist image of beauty that is pervasive in the culture. Patricia L. Hunter writes the following insightful words in her essay, “Women’s Power-Women’s Passion” (which is a piece in the book A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. by Emilie Townes):

It is critically important for women of color to believe we are created in the image of God and that we are wonderfully made. We do not have to spend our energies trying to be something we are not or someone else. Women of African descent are beautiful with our larger sizes, intricately curly hair, adequate hips, broad noses, and other distinct features. To try to conform to a European image of beauty is to deny ourselves as being created in the image of God….The billion dollar makeup/make-over/weight loss industry flourishes because most women, including myself, have received messages since we were little girls that something about our physical appearance is not adequate. (page 194)

Layers of Harm

The more I research the fashion and cosmetic industry, the more I see its layers of harm—how it is not only racist, but also often complicit in harming the earth and harming women’s bodies. Just recently, I have been reading the labels on my shampoo,  lotion, and makeup and have been shocked to learn of the amount of dangerous chemicals (like parabens and sodium lauryl sulfate) loaded up in these products! I am now on a quest to learn more and find earth friendly, body friendly, fair-trade products. (I am also curious if any of our readers have already done some research on the this topic and know where to buy such products? I would love to hear from you!) I am just starting to realize that not only is the beauty industry trying to exploit me (by selling me such an inhumane image of female beauty), but by buying many of these products, I am also harming myself and exploiting the earth.

It seems that, once again, our conversation around feminism lands us at a vantage point where we can see the matrix of oppressive systems—and hopefully see the muti-faceted nature of hope, too. I have been learning that racism, sexism, and other injustices like the exploitation of the earth are all deeply connected.  And healing them is, too.

I appreciate having these conversations, Letha. I have learned so much in our correspondence.

Your friend,

Kimberly