Relationships: Complementing and Complimenting

Dear Kim,

It was wonderful to see you at the EEWC-Christian Feminism Today Gathering in Indianapolis a few weeks ago and to continue these intergenerational conversations before a live audience!

I know that we were both disappointed that Erin Lane Beam, the advertised third member of our panel, was unable to be with us (due to her grandmother’s death), but I was glad that you and I could talk about some of the topics the three of us had discussed in our planning session via a three-way phone call a few weeks before.

Looking Ahead

I hope over the months ahead, you and I can share some thoughts about these subjects right here on our 72-27 blog — topics such as relationships, gender inequities in pay, time pressures, balancing work with personal and family life, sexuality,  body image and fashion, social activism, the intersection between gender discrimination and other forms of discrimination, inequities in the church, different expectations for each gender from childhood forward, and some ideas about what second and third wave feminists would like to give to and receive from each other.  Those are some of the topics that come to mind at the moment. Maybe you remember some additional ones.

The Ginsburg Marriage

A couple of weeks after the conference, I was reminded again of our discussion of male-female relationships in dating and marriage when I heard an NPR piece about the long marriage of Martin Ginsburg and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Did you happen to hear it?   It’s available online in both audio and transcript form.

Martin Ginsburg, a Georgetown University tax law professor and one of the top tax lawyers in the U.S., died of cancer on June 27, at the age of 78 — just four days after the couple had celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary. Shortly before his death, he told a friend, “I think that the most important thing I have done is to enable Ruth to do what she has done.”

The couple had met on a blind date at Cornell University when he was 18 and she was 17. They married after her college graduation (a year after his), and were both accepted at Harvard Law School.  In addition to a difference in personality (he was outgoing, she more quiet and introverted) “the Ginsburgs complemented each other in ways too numerous to list,” said National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg in her report.

According to the obituary written by T. Rees Shapiro for the Washington Post, “the foundation of their relationship, they both said, was mutual respect and equality — and a willingness to share domestic duties.” (Martin, in fact, became an outstanding cook and prepared most of the family’s meals. It was a standing joke in the family that Justice Ginsburg couldn’t cook and that even while their children were quite young, they voted for her to be banished from the kitchen.)

Shapiro quoted Ruth Bader Ginsburg as having said that Martin Ginsburg was “the only man I dated who cared that I had a brain.”  The article went on to report Mr. Ginsburg’s having said that “he was proud of his wife’s accomplishments and had no regrets about the compromises they made for each other.”

Contrasting the “Ginsburg Way” and the “Complementarian” Way

I was especially struck by Nina Totenberg’s sentence: “The Ginsburgs complemented each other in ways too numerous to list.” I think it struck me so powerfully because its point about complementing was such a stark contrast from what has come to be called complementarianism, a teaching that’s being heavily promoted in many conservative Christian circles today. I know you’re well aware of it, Kimberly, since you’ve often run up against it in your own experience.  Anne Eggebroten has an excellent critique of the philosophy behind this movement in the July, 2010 issue of Sojourners.

Complementarianism

“Complementarianism” is just another name for patriarchy, although the newer term sounds less harsh. Complementarian spokespersons take care to emphasize equality in the spiritual worth of women and men while at the same time emphasizing differences in the roles they are assigned to fulfill, especially in the home and church.  Men are said to be created to be the leaders, and women to be their complements, helping and supporting them in their work and never forgetting that the men are in charge.  The model is hierarchical.

But conscious of the times in which we live, many of those who espouse this theological ideology try to soften the teaching by saying complementarianism doesn’t limit anyone but just recognizes God-designed distinctions.  Jonathan Leeman, who promotes complementarianism, claims that egalitarianism (the contrasting idea that men and women are to be regarded equally in all aspects of life)  leads to the “homogenization of men and women.” He believes that the notion of gender equality is popular because it’s a way of avoiding the risk of offending anyone since everyone is treated the same. “But what if God created men and women differently?” he asks. “What if it’s not a question of limitations but a matter of distinct purposes for different parts of the body? I guess you could say that the eye is limited because it cannot hear. Or that the ear is limited because it cannot see. But that would be missing the point, wouldn’t it?”

Of course, Kimberly, the point is the same as what you and I have discussed so often. It harks back to the ideology of “separate spheres” that was so prominent in previous centuries to keep women from access to higher education, property ownership, voting rights, career achievements, and so much more.  Not that complementarianism (as usually presented today) calls for a retrogression in those particular areas. But it’s a repackaging of an old idea nevertheless.

Owen Strachan says that complementarianism is a biblical truth rooted in the first three chapters of Genesis and claims that “gender is front and center in creation, the fall, and the curse.”  Here’s his explanation:

“In the wise and gracious design of God, women are ‘helpers.’ They are to be wives and mothers, the bearers of children. While men lead, protect, and provide, women come alongside and support them. Sadly, after the fall the two vie for each other’s roles, men either becoming abusive or seeking to divest themselves of leadership, while women elbow for the primary role and threaten dissension.”  Owen Strachan, “The Genesis of Ecclesial Womanhood.”

Complementing and Complimenting in the Ginsburg marriage

What we saw in the descriptions of Martin and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s marriage was a totally different kind of complementarity because it was not gender-based.  Rather it was based on the respective talents, interests, and personalities of two unique individuals. Neither spouse expected or demanded certain actions of the other just because “he’s a man,” or “she’s a woman.”

In the case of the Ginsburgs and how they complemented each other, news reports spoke about one person’s extroversion and the other’s introversion and how each individual’s personality was enhanced by the other’s.  Both partners saw their marriage as being built upon “mutual respect and equality — and a willingness to share domestic duties.”  They shared in parenting and they shared in each other’s career interests.  They each compromised for the other as necessary, never expecting that one or the other was required by gender to always be the one to yield or to act a certain way. They were there for each other through their respective dealings with cancer.  (Justice Ginsburg herself had surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2009 and colon cancer ten years earlier. And when Martin Ginsburg had undergone treatment for testicular cancer during their student years at Harvard law school, his young wife was by his side, helping him keep up with his studies and taking notes in his classes.)

Not only did they complement one another, but they complimented each other to the very end.  In so doing, they fulfilled what marriage researcher John Gottman lists as number 2 of the “seven principles for making marriage work.” They nurtured the fondness and admiration each had for the other. They were generous with compliments.

Justice Ginsburg called her husband “her biggest supporter” and her best friend. She praised him for his help throughout her career.  He spoke of having admired and loved her ever since they had first met. He voiced his pride in her achievements. Among the memories and condolences listed on the Georgetown Law Center’s website was a comment by one of his colleagues, Professor Emma Coleman Jordan, whose office was next to his. She wrote:

“As a next door neighbor, I saw most of the postings on his office door. They invariably included some reference to Ruth, like the news clipping from many years before that announced Ruth’s selection as the first tenured woman on the Columbia Law faculty, or the misaddressed invitation to ‘Justice and Mrs. Marty Ginsburg.’ I will always remember Marty as the most adoring husband I have had the privilege to observe. He was more than a feminist, he embodied the ideal of marital equality and we are all the better for it.” Prof. Emma Coleman Jordan, posted on “In Memory of Martin Ginsburg,” Georgetown University Law Center’s website, June, 2010

In the comment of another colleague, Professor Mitt Regan, was this observance:

“Especially remarkable, [Martin Ginsburg] was a man secure enough to support and help nurture his wife’s accomplishments, at a time when he easily could have treated his career as the more important one. In this respect he set the bar so high that more than a half-century later few of us are able to meet it.” Prof. Mitt Regan, posted on “In Memory of Martin Ginsburg,” Georgetown University Law Center’s website, June, 2010

According to Gardiner Harris’s report in the New York Times, Martin Ginsburg had said at the time of Justice Ginsburg’s Supreme Court nomination, “I have been supportive of my wife since the beginning of time, and she has been supportive of me.  It’s not sacrifice; it’s family.”

Competition and Conflict

In contrast to the view of marriage just described is the view in which male-female relationships are considered to be competitive.  Remember the comment of the complementarian theologian quoted earlier who said that part of the curse in Genesis was that women would “elbow for the primary role and threaten dissension”?

Of course, the complementarian would say that if women would just accept their place, this wouldn’t occur.  The problem is, it does occur any time there is concern about the protection of a man’s ego in a way that limits a woman’s living up to her full potential.

You probably remember my spring edition of Web Explorations in which I included  a paragraph about the media’s coverage of the recent Pew Study that found an increase in the percentage of men married to women who earned more than they (the husbands) did.  Some of the reactions to the findings raised questions in my mind about competition in marriage.  I’ll repeat that paragraph here for our readers who may have missed it:

Pew Study on wives out-earning husbands
How is marriage affected when a wife out-earns her husband?  These comments from various scholars center around a Pew report released in 2010.  This report on husband-wife income comparisons is interesting to read and contrast with some traditionalist views voiced by conservative Christian author Elisabeth Elliot during the 1990s as she cautioned wives about competitiveness in marriage. Or with this negative assessment from an anti-feminist Christian blog more recently.  It makes me wonder why a husband and wife must be seen as competitors.  Why must a marriage relationship be seen as a contest for power and superiority?   Why can’t the income that each spouse brings into the relationship (regardless of the amount) be seen as contributing to the whole and as an asset to their marriage and family, rather than being part of a race in which the individual spouses aspire to one-upmanship?  (Excerpted from Letha Dawson Scanzoni, “Web Explorations for Christian Feminists,” Spring, 2010.)

In phone conversations, you and I have already discussed the reference to complementarian writer Elisabeth Elliot’s archived radio program in which she admonished wives to be careful not to let their career achievements overshadow those of their husbands. Widowed twice, she said that the man who was to become her first husband had found it difficult to see her outpace him in Spanish language studies in their preparation for missionary work — that at one point he had actually cried because he found it so difficult to master what came so easily to her. She explained this was just a matter of different gifts.

She said in her second marriage she made sure her husband’s work and schedule always came first but that one day she was surprised to learn that her husband was counting up the royalties he made from his writings and comparing them to the royalties she made. She said she feared this could get out of hand but, in her words: “Well, the Lord took care of all that in a way that I certainly would never have imagined or asked for. And my husband got cancer and very soon became unable to do either the speaking or the writing, and died when he and I had been married just a little over four years.”  (Since this was an extemporaneous remark made as part of an unscripted radio talk, I don’t think she meant it to come across to her audience in quite the way it probably did, and she didn’t mention whether she had asked her husband why he was making those calculations. It could have been for a reason as benign as tax purposes.)

Elliot went on to say that her third husband had no problems with the greater attention given to her and her work and that “he is a big enough man to realize that God gives different gifts to different people.”  She said her main point in this radio talk was that a wife should be sensitive to the feelings of her husband.

But of course, we should all be sensitive to the feelings of others.  The problem is that in trying to stay true to the complementarian ideology that she has emphasized in her books, she was putting gender as the foremost consideration and building on her belief that it is the wife’s duty to be subordinate to the husband. Thus, wives are urged to be sensitive to husbands’ feelings about wives’ work and achievements, but nothing is mentioned about the reverse. (At the same time, her recognition of individual gifts seems to indicate an underlying struggle in her reasoning).

The other blog post I mentioned in my Web Explorations excerpt linked to the story of an executive director of a nonprofit organization who was offered a significant pay raise for her outstanding work.  But she kept refusing the additional money. The board was puzzled until she finally explained that because of having made a commitment to Christ, she never again wanted to earn more than her husband.  She said, in her resolve to obey God, she wanted nothing to stand in the way of her submissiveness to her husband.  So therefore she could not accept a salary increase.

I couldn’t help but wonder why both she and her husband could not have viewed such a pay increase as an asset to the family unit, rather than something that would exalt her and diminish him.  But the underlying reasoning illustrates the difference between complementarian theology and the egalitarian ideology exemplified in the Ginsburg marriage.

(As an aside, the writers of this second blog apparently noticed my link to them and added a new prologue to the particular post to which I had made reference with the story just cited.  They hastened to warn readers that I was somehow dangerous and accused me of having “betrayed biblical Christian faith” in order to “promote sexual immorality,” citing as proof a talk I had given to an inter-faith group on how the principles of justice, compassion, and humility from Micah 6:8 could be applied to religious discussions of same-sex marriage.  What troubles me about such tactics is that rather than discussing and disagreeing with a writer’s ideas or even sticking to the topic at hand, such religious leaders attack the person’s integrity and question her or his Christian commitment, citing as proof of supposed apostasy something that doesn’t fit with their litmus test of acceptable views on some social issue or biblical interpretation. I think such unloving tactics must grieve the heart of God.)

Your Pedagogy Post

I know I have changed the subject from our prior discussions, Kimberly, and introduced an entirely new topic. I felt we had covered the previous topic quite well for the time being. But I want you to know I thoroughly enjoyed reading your last letter (June 14 post on this blog) as you added some really excellent thoughts to our discussion about pedagogy and creative approaches to lifelong learning.

I also appreciated your related essay on “Re-Dreaming Education” on your new personal website.  Have you noticed how frequently you and I talk about dreaming and re-dreaming, Kim?  It’s not that we are unrealistic visionaries, but we both like to dream about what could be and what we can do to help turn the “could be” into an “is” or a “will be.”  I know you are still wrestling with career choices, but I’m sure you’ll make a difference in the world regardless of the path you take — whether it’s through a teaching career in academia (with all the accompanying pressures you’ve worried about) or whether you do your teaching through your writing.  Most likely it will be both.

In all of your reflections on pedagogy, you’ve been emphasizing self-knowledge as well as subject-knowledge, and an openness to the human experience, including the questions, skills, and personal knowledge that students bring to the classroom, thereby assuring that the process of teaching and learning is interactive and occurs in relationship.  I like that.  And I think that you and I practice such an exchange right here in these letters, continually learning with and from each other, rotating which of us is the teacher or the learner at any given time, in any particular paragraph, without even being aware of it. There’s an ongoing reciprocal giving and receiving, as there should be in any rich relationship.  “Just as iron sharpens iron, friends sharpen the minds of each other” (Proverbs 27:17, CEV).

All for this time.

Your friend,
Letha

Dear Letha,

Thanks so much for engaging my thoughts and struggles regarding the process of learning. Your articulations about what it means to be a lifelong learner, which you raised so well in your last letter, beautifully describe what I have always admired about you. You keep learning every day—every hour, really—of your life journey, and it shows in the way you approach topics with creativity, flexibility, and a vast array of knowledge. You have well thought out positions, but you are not rigid—you always seem so willing to engage another’s unique thought process. You embody your own excellent advice to “think critically, question constantly, learn continuously, and see connections.”

You’ve been such a support all year as I have transitioned into my experience at Yale, being there every step of the way as I have immersed myself in the academic life while simultaneously questioning the academic life. As you know, at one level, I’ve found the production of knowledge inside the academy to be simply gorgeous; but at another level, it often comes freighted with serious problems: namely, a mind/body split that effects self-care, and an elitism enmeshed with racist/classist/sexist structures.

As I build on your thoughts in your last letter, and contribute my own thoughts on ways to improve higher education, first, I want to reiterate how much of a blessing it has been to be in school this past year. My critiques of higher education are not so much about Yale, but rather about deeply ingrained western values that are part of the air we breath in the academy. I’ve been incredibly blessed by my classes and my professors here—I just think that in all that I am learning, especially some of the principles within feminist theory, I am being invited to think in news ways about how education could look different as we press into a new century.

A New School

In terms of thinking through pedagogy, you had asked if I have read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Yes! I love this book. My copy is well-worn. He’s the one that first stimulated me to think pedagogically when I read his book several years ago. I just reread him this semester as I’ve wrestled through feminist theology and Letty Russell’s use of his ideas. Through Freire and other writers, I have come to believe (rather passionately!) that there are Copernican-sized revolutions that we are on the verge of as a society that will require different approaches to learning.

I’ve also been fortunate this year to have dialogued at length with my good friend Nick Vu about the meaning of education. Nick is a longtime friend from Seattle and a former full-time teacher. Now, his main job is working for Intellectual Ventures, a company in Seattle with funding from Bill Gates that attempts to invent all kinds of amazing things, like lasers that kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes (click here to see their Ted talk on malaria). Check out their website to see more about their range of projects.

Nick and I both care a great deal about learning, and we have had a series of stimulating conversations about a hypothetical school we would like to start one day. Imagining creating a school has been a good exercise of the imagination for me. As my phone conversations with Nick have intersected my classroom learning, I have come up with the following working principles that seem important to me about the process of learning. They seem to connect with ideas you raised in your last letter.

Recognize that Intersectionality Requires Interdisciplinarity

As your link about Bolivian activists and coal mining showed so well, the pressing issues that need to be solved in our world are intersectional issues. (I recently blogged on this idea for Sojourners.) Complex issues will require people  who are not just trained in one specialty, but also people who can draw connections across various disciplines. There are problems waiting to be solved that need the combined skill sets of a historian, a poet, a theologian, and an environmental scientist.

Of course, there will always be something invaluable to being highly specialized in one subject matter, but often specialists are not trained in the art of collaboration. We need people who are trained in collaboration—who can connect the dots among various ideas. But connecting the dots is difficult, especially because each discipline has such different—and ingrained— ideas of what constitutes knowledge in the first place.

For example, while taking classes in feminist philosophy of religion, African American poetry, and U.S. religious history this semester, I realized how each field has its own assumed values system and epistemology. The ways of knowing utilized in each discipline are not necessarily named up front, but they are part of the machinery running the methodology. Because of the different approaches to knowledge I was experiencing, I felt a kind of culture shock as I went to classes everyday. I had to give myself little reminders as I walked into each class. For instance, if I was in a class that used a lot of feminist theory, I knew I could talk about my own social location in my work. If I was in a class that was all about being “objective,” I knew I would have to push knowledge of subjectivity to the margins and draw on other ways of looking at data.

Being amongst various departments, I experienced why it could potentially be so difficult for specialists in different disciplines to work alongside one another. First, one has to be multilingual among the epistemologies, terms, assumptions, and archives. Therefore, someone trained in connecting the dots might not be “the” expert in quite the same way as another specialist. Instead, expertise would be found more in one’s ability to ask questions, collaborate, and synthesize subsets of knowledge.

Regain the Practice of Being a Beginner

Which leads me to one of the most important aspects of interdisciplinary work: it fosters the practice of being a beginner. If I were to hypothetically devise curriculum for an experimental school, I would place a great deal of value on the art of practicing  being a beginner.

In my friend Nick Vu’s lab, he works with a diversity of leading experts in their field who are working together on major projects; the experts love teaching one another about their respective lines of work. It is assumed that they have to ask questions all the time. This lab seems to be a good example of specialists who are not afraid to be beginners everyday.

Within the academy, though, I suspect that it is harder to ask questions and reveal oneself as a beginner. It is easier to stay in the comfort of our own field, so that we don’t have to admit what we don’t know. Specializing grants the feeling of security and confidence. Working between disciplines means we must be brave enough to ask questions and patient enough to embrace interdependency and collaboration.

View Relationality as Being as Important as Rationality

Collaborating well across the disciplines thus also requires a kind interpersonal agility, a skill which is connected to self-knowledge. If we don’t know ourselves well, we won’t have an awareness of our patterns of relating to the other. Knowledge of interpersonal styles of relating, though, does not seem to be a primary point of concern in many forms of higher education. The emphasis on rationality in the western, intellectual traditional often leaves behind the skills of relationality.

Before my current program, I came from a small school in Seattle that trained students to be therapists, and thus it placed primary value on inter-personal and intra-personal knowledge. My professors were psychoanalysts and therapists, and they asked their students to delve into the unconscious self and figure out what was there and why it was there. We did intense work understanding our own families of origin and personal narratives, and we received a great deal of feedback on how other people experienced us while in relationship with us. While the program lacked academic rigor in the traditional sense, it demanded a kind of inter-personal and intra-personal rigor that was invaluable.

While I love the rigor that is applied to critical thinking at Yale, I am left envisioning what Yale would be like if that same kind of rigor were applied to self- and inter-personal knowledge. For instance, in my U.S. religious history class, one of my professors shared with us that it took him quite a while in his career to realize that he hadn’t picked his research “objectively.” His research came out of deeply rooted questions based on very personal life experience. Yet, in his graduate training, he had not been encouraged to see the connections between his “objective” research and his own  life story. This discussion in class came at the very end of the semester, and it was a relief to me. I had often felt as if historians maintained a pretense of objectivity. It was nice to finally hear that we can actually do better research if we are self-reflective in the process. Knowing ourselves better will also translate to being better collaborators.

Place Value on Self-Reflection, Self-care, and Play

Finally, I see it as a significant problem that the schedule of a typical academic life leaves little space for self-reflection, simply because students and professors are usually rushing from one deadline to the next. I can count on one hand the Friday nights this year that I’ve spent not in my books. There is always more reading and writing to do. It is so difficult to take a Sabbath—to spend a day journaling, or an afternoon having a tea-party, or a lingering Saturday with no agenda.

I remember your telling me once, Letha, that maybe I should take a break from my writing and go to one of my favorite vintage stores and just try on hats for fun. (I love hats!) You suggested that in giving myself time to play, I would be fostering space in my life to reflect creatively and potentially synthesize ideas in new ways. I think that in giving ourselves spaces to rest and play, we also allow time for self-reflection that is actually critical to our academic work.

Letha, these are all just beginning thoughts on the principles that I want to inform both my learning and my pedagogical approaches. These ideas are nascent, and seem always to be growing and changing in my mind. But your previous letter stimulated my thinking and encouraged me to share.

I can’t believe I get to see you this week at the EEWC conference! I look forward to continuing these conversations in person. I also look forward to participating with you and Erin Lane in our intergenerational feminist panel on Friday night.

Your friend,

Kimberly

Dear Kimberly,

I was moved by your March 30 post as you continued our discussion of empathy and othering.  Our conversation seems especially timely in view of  a number of events that have occurred since you wrote that letter: the death of civil rights leader Dorothy Height, the passing of the harsh immigration law in Arizona, the convening of the World People’s Summit on Climate Change in Bolivia, to mention just a few.

All of these events relate in some way to what you were talking about in your letter.  I could hear and feel your frustration and irritation—even stomach-churning reactions—in response to certain book lists, syllabi, or discussions in your classes. On the other hand, from our various phone conversations, I know that other courses and classes did not disappoint you but rather stimulated new research ideas, introduced you to greater diversity, and enabled you to see connections between race, gender, and sexuality. Your thoughts after reading Jonathan Freedman’s Klezmer America make that clear.  You seem to be in a new stage of awakening, Kim.

But what I want to talk about here is this paragraph from your letter.  You wrote:

“Letha, perhaps you might have some advice on this for me? I feel as though I am in a rich stage of learning, but everything feels disrupted. I don’t know so many of my new reference points. I do know that gender must be studied within the complexity of so many other things—racism, heterosexism, classism, colonialism—and yet the task can feel overwhelming to me. There are ever so many moments of feeling like a beginner all over again.”

My advice is summed up in the title I’ve given to this post: Think critically, question constantly, learn continuously, and see connections.    Let me explain.

Think Critically

You’re already thinking critically, because you are mentally analyzing, arguing with, debating, and questioning many of your reading materials. You’ve been examining your course syllabi and looking over your assignments with a critical eye. And you’ve been bringing to them certain expectations based on what you’ve already been thinking about over the past several years, along with trying to figure out how all the pieces fit together and where you go from there.

What’s exciting is this: If some of your expectations and hopes are dashed and you’re concerned that certain perspectives may be missing in the course assignments, don’t despair. You can be the one to supply what’s missing—not necessarily to challenge your professors but rather to contribute to and enhance the materials already on the list. You can be the maker of your own expanded list. You can be the supplier of your own learning resources.

One way would be to think about what you would be doing and what materials you’d be recommending if you were teaching a particular class.  It’s possible you will be teaching such a class someday.  Or if you don’t go on to a classroom career, you’ll be teaching others through your writing, as you’re already doing!

You said you feel “like a beginner all over again.”  But that’s OK.  We’re all beginners over and over again as we come into contact with new information, face new challenges, ask new questions, and look for our own answers.

Question Constantly

Constantly asking new questions is crucial.  Think about the curiosity of a small child.  Kids are always asking “Why?”  When we read or hear new ideas we, too, need to be asking why questions.  “If this is true, why is it true? How can I know this is true?  What is the evidence?  How does this fit with my own experience and the experience of others that I know?  How might it fit with the experience of others that I don’t know? And how can I learn about their experiences so that I can practice true empathy?  And what does all this mean in the total picture?”

You and I are writing these letters from the standpoint of our Christian feminism. Feminism has questioning at its very roots. Seeking gender equality has always involved the questioning of tradition, the questioning of the status quo, the questioning of the limitations that have been placed on girls and women historically—even though we who are female are persons who make up half of humankind and who have brains and desires to learn and grow and achieve no less than is true of men (who have also been affected in different ways by cultural and religious expectations).

My first articles on Christian feminism, published in 1966 and 1968 sprang from my own questions. In fact, the first of those two articles was written in a way that consisted mainly of questions—questions that I was raising to challenge conventional thinking on the roles of women in the church, particularly within the evangelicalism with which I identified.  I didn’t feel the questions were being asked at the time so thought I’d raise them myself. Maybe that was presumptuous of me, but I wanted to get the discussion started at least!

We both know, however, that questioning is not always welcome in Christian circles.  From what you’ve told me, I know you were aware of that even as a teenager.  Often the assumption is that all the answers are already in and that questions should be discouraged—that walking by faith somehow disallows questioning.  Questioning is often viewed as doubting God.  After all, someone may argue, the first recorded question in the biblical story is the tempter’s “Yea, hath God said?”   But the Bible contains lots of question marks. Questions are how we learn.

Jesus asked a lot of questions as a way of teaching his followers, and he also answered a lot of questions that his listeners posed to him.  True, some questions were trick questions by certain religious leaders who wanted to trap him (which he handled in ways that always amazed them), but there were also many questions that were asked out of a sincere desire to learn from Jesus.  Jesus never discouraged that but encouraged his followers to find new ways to read, understand, and apply the truths of Scripture. “So he told them, ‘Every student of the Scriptures who becomes a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like someone who brings out new and old treasures from the storeroom” (Matthew 13:51, CEV).

Some of your questions may be leading you to discover “new treasures,” Kimberly —new insights and new ways of interpreting Scripture and applying it to our times with all their challenges.

So never despair when you think that too many questions are being left unanswered or may not even be raised in some of your classes in the way you’d like them to be.  It just means that you have the exciting task of finding your own answers!  You have the task of filling in the gaps. And better yet, you can then communicate your answers to others.  As I mentioned earlier, most of my own writing originated in seeking answers to my own questions and then sharing my discoveries and thought processes (and sometimes further questions) through the articles and books I wrote.

I think you’re already finding this to be true in your own life and writing.  Don’t ever, ever let your questioning stop, Kimberly!  Embrace the questioning, and think of life as an ongoing adventure of finding answers.

Learn Continuously

You might wonder why I chose the word continuously rather than continually. But I mean it in the sense of never stopping.  Unceasing learning is like unceasing prayer (1 Thessalonians 5:17).  To “pray without ceasing” means being aware that we are constantly in communion with God, constantly in God’s presence, constantly in a conversation with God (Psalm 139).

Learning is like that. It means keeping our eyes, ears, hearts, and minds open constantly so that we are in some sense interacting with every new piece of knowledge that comes into our lives—whether through what we read, hear, or see through various media, or whether it’s through direct interactions with people who enter our lives or even just cross our paths.  Everything can contribute to our experience of learning.

But as you’ve been realizing, learning is incomplete if we don’t listen to the voices of those whose background and experiences are different from our own. And I know you want to hear those voices, which is why you were so disappointed when you looked at that one syllabus and didn’t find books from women whose racial and ethnic backgrounds are different from your own (although you did find some of their articles, if not books, on the list). And as you said, the male authors of the books listed were not from the dominant culture but provided voices of minorities.  (Of course, even that kind of inclusion in school curricula was way too long in coming!)

But here is where your own task of filling in the gaps comes into play.  Look for works from such missing authors on library shelves and in bookstores. And the Internet is such a wonderful way to hear such voices (even their actual voices) through audio and video resources.  (I have thanked God— and I mean that literally—that I have lived long enough to experience all the rich resources available online.  It’s like having a world library right at my fingertips every day!)

Take, for example, the three news items that I mentioned at the outset of this letter: the death of Dorothy Height, the Arizona law on immigration, and the World People’s Summit on Climate Change. We can learn so much about them just from what’s available on the Internet outside of the classroom, including excellent primary sources.

Dorothy Height was an important leader in the civil rights movement and in the women’s movement.  Yet, she was lesser known than many others.  But we can learn so much by becoming aware of her accomplishments, her struggles, and her overcoming of obstacles as she faced both the gender and racial inequities in our society.  We can listen to her tell about all this in her own words!  Take some time to click on this link and listen to these video clips of Dorothy Height as presented by the National Visionary Leadership Project, which makes available primary source material by recording and preserving the wisdom of African American elders so that their experiences and wisdom can be passed on to younger generations.  The brilliance and resilience of Dorothy Height comes through, for example in her stories of the sexism and racism she had to deal with, even as a teenager.  And they can inspire all of us.

Or take the recent immigration issues in the news.  How do we relate these attitudes and actions to our efforts to see the interconnections between race, gender, classism, and all the other concerns you mentioned?  In all of these matters, we always need to keep before us the human face of all those involved as we try to sort things through. Some materials and links provided by Sojourners can be very helpful in that regard.

Or to take still another example, Kimberly, when you talked about economic classism and colonialism (which is really about systems of privileged “haves” with the power and wealth to dominate over the “have nots,”), I couldn’t help but think of the brilliant pedagogical theories of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Have you read his Pedagogy of the Oppressed? He said that “the oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. . . everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal. . . .To the oppressor consciousness, the humanization of the ‘others,’ of the people, appears not as the pursuit of full humanity, but as subversion” (pp. 44-45 in the 1986 edition).

I’ve been thinking again about some of his ideas recently since learning about the World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.  I chanced upon a public radio broadcast about it in April. (You can watch it as well as hear it and read it on the link above. As a feminist, you may especially want to listen to the answer given when a woman was asked how women in particular have been affected by soil and water contamination.) It is crucial to hear from indigenous people themselves as they tell in their own words how they are directly affected when powerful interests, driven by greed and a sense of entitlement, disregard what their actions are doing to human beings and the planet on which we live.  It’s painful to hear ordinary people tell how exploitative mining and deforestation have impacted their lives and livelihoods.

Part of our learning continuously through life is opening our minds and hearts to those who propose a different way to regard and treat Mother Earth (or “Pachamama” to use their term), the home God has given all of us to share together.

See Connections

Kim, I know it’s not difficult at all for you to see how all of these news items fit together as part of our discussion on empathy as an antidote to othering.   I’m sure you can see the connections immediately because you’ve so often told me that intersectionality is one of your biggest concerns as a feminist of faith.

And that brings me to my final point. If, in a sense, we’re going to be our own educators throughout life by thinking critically, questioning constantly, and learning continuously, we also need to always be on the lookout to see connections–associations.  How does everything we read, or hear, or experience fit together?

We will find ourselves constantly thinking, What is this teaching me?  What are some ways that “this” might relate to “that”?  How does what I am seeing, hearing, observing, reading, watching relate to a particular teaching of Scripture?  How does this illuminate some aspect of feminism?  How can I keep from compartmentalizing and instead make sure that all that I experience in my daily life and learning is not separated from my faith and my feminism and to other aspects of social justice?

As we live consciously in an “always looking for connections” way,  we are likely to find that something we hear or see that might seem to someone else to be totally unrelated suddenly provides us with a new insight, a new way of understanding, a fresh illustration of a particular concept or theory.  Seeing connections is a main component of creativity.

Speak Out and Share

But we can’t stop with only seeing connections with and between ideas.  Both you and I also care deeply about another kind of connection– connections with people.  Our various writings are one way we can speak out and share with others what we have learned. This blog not only provides a way to communicate with each other as friends across the generations but also connects us to readers scattered in various places.  At the close of your last letter, you spoke of your gratitude for our readers’ comments and assured them we read every one.  I echo what you said.

And incidentally, if any of our readers are able to attend the EEWC-Christian Feminism Today Gathering in Indianapolis in June, we would love to meet you in person, as we present an “Intergenerational Christian Feminist Dialogue,” along with Erin Lane (Beam), on Friday afternoon, June 18, 2010. You can find full information through this link.

Kim, I’m so glad that your schedule has worked out so that you can be there, and I’m really looking forward to seeing you again and working with you there!  I think many of our readers may be surprised to know that even though we’ve been in touch constantly through email and through occasional phone calls, you and I have only ever met once in person.  That meeting, too, was at an EEWC conference in Indianapolis, as our “About 72-27” page explains.  Maybe we can have another milkshake at the sidewalk cafe again this time!

As always, I look forward to your response to this post and to your thoughts about what I guess amounts to my personal philosophy of lifelong learning!  See what happens when you ask for my advice about something?

Your friend,
Letha

Letha,

Your last post, in which you illustrated so well the harm of “othering,” named a topic that is more and more becoming a core theme in my studies at Yale. As you know, I’ve been studying U.S. history quite a bit (as I am considering going into American Studies for PhD work). It seems that the more I learn about U.S. history, the more I see how “othering” has always been used in order to buffer certain powerful groups. It’s as though “in-groups” are defined more by how they exclude and misrepresent others than by their own actual identity. Their identity is not being one of “them.”

For instance, this week I have been reading Jonathan Freedman’s Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity. (It’s not exactly a quick or easy text, so I wouldn’t recommend it for a leisurely Saturday read!) While I won’t summarize all of his arguments here, one idea he developed quite well was showing how “whiteness” was often policed by casting aspersions on the supposed “sexual transgressions” of the non-white “other.” For instance, stereotypes of Jewish men have often cast them as either effeminate or hyper-sexual—and therefore outside the bounds of proper “whiteness.” It seems quite significant to me that attacking Jewish men’s masculinity and sexuality was part of racializing them as “other” to white. Freedman helped me see, once again, that race, gender, and sexuality are always inscribed on one another.

In fact, I am growing more and more convinced that within U.S. culture, gender and sexuality can’t even begin to be parsed out without also incorporating a thorough race analysis. But, because my education has been so lacking in studying race relations, I’ve needed to be intentional about doing that work while here at Yale. To be honest, much of my self-taught feminist studies up until a few years ago rarely incorporated a good understanding of race and gender. Now that I am in school studying feminism, I’ve experienced writers who are much more diverse. Yet, even here, too often the syllabi are still heavily weighted with white voices or male voices.

A Look Into the Classroom

For instance, at the beginning of the semester, I had signed up for a class on the U.S. Civil Rights Movement because, in particular, I was really desiring to hear the voices of black women writers talk about history. When I got to my first day of class, I saw that on the syllabus all the required textbooks were written by men. To be fair, there were important scholarly articles written by women, but not one book. When we buy books, we are supporting the authors, and we are encouraging publishing houses to publish these authors. I actually felt sick to my stomach looking at my syllabus. How many times have I looked down at a syllabus that is not supporting women writers?

I mustered up the courage to ask my professor, in as respectful a tone as I could manage, why we weren’t required to buy any texts by black women writers? He said, a bit annoyed, that if I read my syllabus more carefully, I would see that there were “moments” of women writers on it. He was right—there were moments—but my question went deeper than that. It is painful enough to me that black women are too often marginalized in my feminist theory class, but then to step into a class on the Civil Rights Movement and find the same thing happening was almost too much to bear.

I’ve always thought that looking at an academic syllabus is a good case study for recognizing whose voices get heard and whose voices are not given space to speak on their own, but must be represented by the more powerful group. I recently reviewed some of my syllabi from college and gasped out loud—it seemed I had majored in the thoughts of dead white men! Most of my classes were loaded with patriarchal, Euro-centric writers. This is how “othering” happens—select powerful groups get to define history, religion, science, etc., while other groups must be defined by the words of the more powerful group.

In the end, I decided not to take the Civil Rights class for this semester, and I signed up instead for a class in contemporary African American poetry. Needless to say, I am utterly in over my head. It is definitely the most challenging class I have taken at Yale, because I know so little of the history, the struggles, and the reference points these poets are writing about. In retrospect, I realize it was probably a sign of my white privilege that I thought I could step into a graduate level seminar on African American poetry! Every week when I sit in this class, I feel disoriented, anxious, and confused. I am experiencing what it is like not be in the “in crowd”—what it feels like to be a beginner. Perhaps most importantly, the class has helped me come face-to-face with how much of my education has “othered” the history, the theory, the experiences, and the art of African Americans.

The class has been particularly challenging because not only is the poetry itself difficult to understand, but also what I am learning from the poetry seems to “disrupt” quite profoundly the material in my other classes. For instance, when I am reading Gyn/Ecology by Mary Daly in my Feminist Philosophy of Religion class, what feels loudest in the text is her marginalization of non-white voices (and I realize that even using that category “non-white” is problematic language in itself). I really struggled to hear and understand Daly in that book, because my attention was drawn to how often she used “women” as a group and failed to articulate the differences among women. I kept thinking of all of Audre Lorde’s critiques of her! (See, for example, Lorde’s “An Open Letter to Mary Daly” in Sister Outsider.)

Letha, perhaps you might have some advice on this for me? I feel as though I am in a rich stage of learning, but everything feels disrupted. I don’t know so many of my new reference points. I do know that gender must be studied within the complexity of so many other things—racism, heterosexism, classism, colonialism—and yet the task can feel overwhelming to me. There are ever so many moments of feeling like a beginner all over again.

More Thoughts on Empathy

To close this post, Letha, I wanted to re-visit your ideas in your last letter on empathy, particularly as they applied to the man who wrote a letter to you asking for you to understand his struggles. If there is something else I am learning from this poetry class, it’s that I want to be the type of person who can make space for others who feel like beginners or who I might perceive (fairly or unfairly) as beginners.

For instance, I will often encounter men and women who seem to be in the earlier stages of a feminist journey, and who might not feel understood by those who have been thinking about these issues for longer. (Not that the man who wrote to you was necessarily a “beginner” at feminism—your reception to his letter just reminded me that people are coming to this topic from very different places and need kindness.) I felt like his letter carved out a courageous space for him to share exactly where he was at, and that process itself seems so important to genuine growth. I admire him for writing you that letter and sharing so vulnerably his own struggles; and, of course, I have always respected how willing you are to meet people just as they are. I think that it is in the midst of that mutuality that we learn from each other.

Perhaps in the last few years, I wasn’t quite sure how to show empathy to men who were struggling with egalitarian ideas. I am realizing in retrospect that too often my attempts at empathy were more often a subtle coddling, if that makes sense. I didn’t want to offend them or make things uncomfortable. I was afraid of speaking honestly and directly. I was also wanting to avoid conflict because I was needing to protect myself a great deal. My feminist ideas were still tender, and I was still quite tentative in being able to see and name the harm that comes within systems of male entitlement.

For instance, in my last graduate program, I had many moments with one particular male professor who I knew at the time was dismissing my voice, but I didn’t know how to negotiate the moment. I admired and respected him, and it was hard for me to believe that a man who had been such a blessing in my life could also be living out such harm in a patriarchal system. But, the truth was, he was living out harm! And while I know that he is a good man and a brilliant teacher, over and over again he lives out patterns of male entitlement by marginalizing feminist perspectives. His interpretations of the Bible, in particular, seem to not have engaged any feminist scholarship in the last 20 years!

My point is that I want to learn how to have a strong voice, while simultaneously showing genuine empathy and grace, in order that people might feel comfortable being who they are around me at the same time that I would feel comfortable being who I am—with all my feminist convictions!

Final Words

I better finish up this letter. It’s a lovely rainy day in New Haven, and I need to get going on my study of poetry for the day, as well as write several papers whose deadlines loom. Before I close, though, I wanted to thank our readers for their comments on the last post. I really wish I had time to offer individual responses here, but even though I can’t do that right now, I want our readers to know that you and I read their words carefully and always appreciate all of the insight and diverse perspectives.

Your friend,

Kim

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