More about"Lookism," also Are Sins "Gender-specific"?

Dear Kimberly,

So many things in the news have recently reminded me of your last letter about how women are judged by their appearance, causing some women to believe they must be slaves to fashion.  And I also want to comment on something else I read in the news last week, namely, the news that a Roman Catholic survey has indicated that the sins people confess differ according to gender. That observational study led some news headline writers to imply that men and women actually sin in different ways. But do they?  Or do they just confess certain attitudes as sins according to the different socialization they’ve experienced as women or men?  Let’s discuss that, too, at some point.  I’ll just briefly introduce the topic toward the end of this letter and maybe we can discuss it later.

A message to our readers

But first, I want to apologize for the long delay in responding to your January 10 post.  And I want to say a word to our readers.  I know some loyal readers of our blog posts have expressed concern that our posts have been less frequent.  On the other hand, other readers have remarked that they found it hard to keep up with our essays when we were posting sometimes twice a week.  So we’ve started slowing it down a bit, because we’re trying to make our posts solid informational articles, which take time to read and ponder and also take quite a bit of time, thought, and research on our part. Recently, we’ve both found that a number of our other responsibilities have prevented more than once-a-month or once-every-two-or-three-weeks posts.  We thank our readers for hanging in there and not thinking we’ve abandoned them!

I know how busy you’ve been, Kimberly, with moving, traveling, and graduate school applications; and I’ve been devoting countless hours to editing and publishing the Winter edition of Christian Feminism Today and providing new website content for eewc.com.  I tend to be somewhat of a night owl, as you know from times I’ve often answered your emails in the wee hours of the night (or more accurately, wee hours of the morning!), but I’m trying to be more sensible about burning the after-midnight oil.  I want to do everything in my power to keep my immune system strong and healthy so that it can do its best in fighting off any recurrence of cancer.  I know you are rejoicing with me and joining in praise to God that this month, February 2009, I  celebrated the milestone of being a one-year breast cancer survivor.  I have so much for which to be thankful.

Cultural conformity and women’s appearance

If you’re wondering what has recently steered my mind toward some of the things you said in your January 10 post, here are just a few items that come to mind. Last week was Fashion Week in New York City, and an emphasis on appearance was center stage as designers presented their latest creations.  During that week, in two separate incidents, the models fell to the floor as they were walking across the runway in their multi-strapped platform high heels. These tumbles reminded me once again of how women’s feet and shoes have been a major area of conformity to societal beauty ideals. The extremes of this phenomenon can be seen in the ancient Chinese custom of footbinding, which survived into the 20th century; and, now in the 21st century, can be seen in the decisions of some women to have cosmetic foot surgery, including shortening or otherwise altering toes to fit pointed shoes as well as special procedures for wearing stiletto heels.  And speaking of extremes in cosmetic surgery, I also saw an article in the past couple of weeks about a woman who is determined to have her breast size increased until she has the world’s largest breasts by having multiple surgeries and silicone implants. She was already a size triple-K and said she planned even further enhancement.  (It makes me wonder about her surgeons!)

Other media items that have kept me reflecting on your letter are some that I included in my Winter-Early Spring, 2009 edition of Web Explorations for Christian Feminists.  For example, I mention a program I heard recently about the 50th anniversary of Barbie dolls. I also provided a  link to a movie about weight issues in which a woman, feeling judged because of her plus size, asks an anorexic woman for lessons on becoming anorexic.   The characters in that movie didn’t realize at the time that they were actually attempting to deal with feelings about their personal self-worth rather than the numbers on a scale or their reflection in a mirror.  In addition to all these reminders about women and physical appearance, I read some advance reviews of Susie Orbach’s new book, Bodies, which again deals with issues of “body shame” and today’s emphasis on “fixing” any physical characteristic that is considered even the tiniest bit imperfect.  Men are affected by this attitude, too.  Susie Orbach herself has explained why she wrote the book.

I appreciated your reminding me of Mary Pipher’s term “lookism” (from her book Reviving Ophelia, which she also talks about in a short video). Lookism hurts people just as  other “isms” do –  “isms” like sexism, racism, heterosexism, ageism, able-ism, ethnocentrism, classism, and so on.  Lookism not only causes women to feel they are never quite attractive enough but also convinces them that physical attractiveness and sex appeal are what counts more than the unique qualities they can offer the world through their talents and intellect. Susan Campbell had a blog post recently about how the news media often seem to think they must talk about details of an accomplished woman’s appearance in a way they do not talk or write about men. (The day after President Obama’s February 24 speech to Congress, The New York Times had a commentary pointing out that Michelle Obama had worn a sleeveless dress to the event. The writer said, “Already, a debate is brewing about just what the First Arms signify”–self-discipline,  achievement,  attention to physical exercise in the gym, the pride women can take in athletic bodies after Title IX?  The attention was still on appearance, but in this case the spin seemed to be an attempt to see it as more of a personal positive statement than as conformity to a certain prescribed image.)

Young girls get the message about physical appearance early in life.  Remember the ceremonies at the 2008 Olympics in China in which a seven-year-old girl with an angelic voice sang but was not visible because her teeth were not perfect?  Instead, another girl was considered “cuter” and was chosen to stand in front of the audience and lip-synch the other girl’s voice. “The main consideration was the national interest,” the music director of the opening ceremonies later explained, adding that the Chinese politburo insisted that “the child on screen should be flawless in image,”  even though the voice that was heard was the recorded voice of the other little girl who had won the national singing competition.

When my granddaughter Morgan was 3 years old, I wanted to immunize her early against the forces that she’d run up against that would emphasize physical appearance over intellect and achievement for girls, so I gave her Robert Munsch’s The Paper Bag Princess and Shana Corey’s You Forgot Your Skirt, Amelia Bloomer! Morgan’s parents appreciated the books, too. (I’m providing links to Amazon.com because of that site’s excellent editorial reviews of these two books, in case you’re unfamiliar with them.  Both books relate to the topic we’re discussing in this blog.)  In brief, The Paper Bag Princess is a very different kind of fairy tale. It tells the story of an elegantly dressed princess who was engaged to to be married to a prince. One day, a fiery dragon invaded the castle and kidnapped the prince. The dragon’s fiery breath had burned the princess’s clothes, so the princess dressed in a large paper bag, went after the dragon and, through a series of clever tricks, defeated the dragon and rescued the prince.  Was the prince grateful?  No. Instead of thanking her, he immediately criticized  her appearance.  He complained that she smelled smoky and looked dirty and had messy hair and wasn’t dressed in the beautiful attire a princess should wear.  Seeing him in his true colors, the princess called off the wedding. She was wise enough to know there are other ways to live happily ever after than to be married to someone like him!

The other book, You Forgot Your Skirt, Amelia Bloomer, starts out by humorously stating that Amelia Bloomer “was not a proper woman” and that her behavior was considered shocking. Why was she judged that way?  Because she dared to believe that women should use their minds and develop their skills and not be limited to housekeeping and child-care but should contribute to the world in many other ways as well.  And she believed women should be allowed to vote!  Furthermore, she saw that the clothing of her time was restrictive and uncomfortable, the designs preventing girls and women from being active in the way men could be, so she dared to join with a few other women in challenging women’s dress by wearing a new style that was originally adapted from a Turkish outfit and consisted of baggy trousers under a shorter dress.  Some of the early feminists called this outfit by what it signified to them, “freedom dress,” but the name that stuck was “bloomers,” after Amelia.  The children’s book introduces the topic to a young audience, but if you really want to see an in-depth account of the outrage this new clothing style stirred up, read Galye Fischer’s scholarly but entertaining book, Pantaloons and Power (Kent State University Press).

The intertwining of clothing reform and the politics of gender-based power issues showed up in public reactions to women who wanted to be free of their tightly laced corsets, long billowing skirts, and 14 pounds of layered petticoats and other underwear, which the Rational Dress Society argued should be reduced to no more than seven pounds.  (See the Fashion.era website for more information, including fascinating pictures, about all this.)

Restrictive clothing, as well as social conventions about what was proper for women, kept women from exercising and participating in sports.  I recently heard sportswriter David Zirin on NPR, reading from his new book, A People’s History of Sports in the United States.  He quotes from a 19th century Christian magazine which predicted the moral downfall of women who played croquet!   Women were expected to be frail, delicate ornaments.

Of course, such attitudes applied only to women of means and privilege.  Poor women were expected to do society’s drudge work and to somehow find the strength to do it because they had no other choice.  Society’s definitions of womanhood and the limitations imposed on women were conveniently ignored when it came to poor women — a point former slave Sojourner Truth made so powerfully in her 1851 “Ain’t I a Woman” speech.

As you’ve said so often, Kim, reading women’s history is ever so enlightening!  One more article you might like to check out is this one from the University of Virginia’s American Studies department.  It’s a fascinating essay about the part the bicycle played in providing women with new freedom.  Susan B. Anthony claimed that the bicycle had done “more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”  It not only provided good arguments for more comfortable and practical dress styles;  it gave women mobility and a new sense of freedom and empowerment.  Women could now, on their own, pedal their way far beyond the home. And they did.

Well, we could go on with this topic, and I hope we will in future posts. It’s hard for me to stop. But I also want to introduce briefly the other topic I mentioned that struck me in recent news reports: the Catholic survey about the differences in what sins Catholic women were found to confess to priests as compared to those that men confessed. I suggest that we may want to have some future discussions about some questions it has raised in my mind. And I’d love to hear what you think.

Do Men and Women Sin Differently?

The Bible does not provide a specific list of “seven deadly sins,” but such a list was formulated by the church between the fourth and sixth centuries.  On this list were pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth.  In the recent news reports of a Jesuit priest’s survey of confessions in which penitents sought absolution in the confessional, the top three of the sins reported by women were pride, envy, and anger.  For men, the top three were lust, gluttony, and sloth.  The Pope’s personal theologian, as quoted in the Vatican newspaper, said there is “no sexual equality” when it comes to sin.

But here are some questions the survey raised for me (aside from the fact that this was not a scientific study of Catholics in general but only those who go to confession, and 30 percent said they don’t). And so I found myself wondering:

1. If women are confessing pride as their major sin, could it be because they have been traditionally encouraged to put themselves last, curtail ambitions, and defer to others’ wants and needs disproportionately to what is expected of men, causing a woman to believe that when she does aspire to achieve or meet her own needs, she should view such aspirations and any delight in her successes as sinful pride?

2.  If women yearn for opportunities, privileges, and earnings equal to those granted to men, might they mistake that desire as a sign of sinful envy — that they are coveting what men have and should instead be content with their subordinate role, viewed as having been assigned by God?  (Of course, I realize there are many other kinds of envy which may indeed choke off our closeness to God.)

3.  Could it be that women confess anger as one of their top three sins because women have been traditionally taught that they must never be angry, that any indication of anger is not “ladylike,” and that they must not allow themselves to experience such feelings and certainly not express them — even when anger is perfectly justified as a response to unfair treatment?   Could it be that many women have never been encouraged to recognize the difference between exploding over petty annoyances or frustration and what is truly righteous anger over social injustice?

Just wondering.

(I’m not going to go into the list of sins men confess, topped off by lust at the top and pride as down at number 5 on the list.  Maybe we could talk about the concept of sin in general sometime).

But I must stop. This letter has gone on much too long.  I have a feeling I’m leaving us both with more than enough to think about, Kimberly, and I  hope we can revisit some of these issues in future discussions.  I already have more ideas.  And I’ll bet you do, too!

Your friend,
Letha

Dear Letha,

Now it’s my turn to apologize for a late response to your last letter! As you know, my life has been rather busy the past month with my applications for graduate school. However, I did want to take the time to get back with you and let you know that I was quite impacted by what you shared.

Two specific issues were raised for me that I want to respond to: the general lack of knowledge about women’s history and the oppressiveness of beauty ideals.

The Importance of Women’s History

Every time I learn more about women’s history—and realize how misrepresented and untold it is—I have a strong and mixed reaction of anger and sadness. When I listened to the NPR segment you recommended about the 1968 Miss America pageant, I was reminded that it is the sensational and titillating that gets media attention. So, instead of young women growing up learning about courageous feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s, we get this false image of militant women burning their bras. Instead of understanding why the pageant was a symbol of oppression, we just keep buying into the same belief that a woman’s value lies in how she looks in a swimsuit and high heels. Because history was not told, we’ve completely missed the point of why women needed to protest that event!

In Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s book, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, she writes of the absolute necessity of women knowing the history of their foremothers. She is hopeful that the teaching of women’s history is expanding, and that such knowledge will have a significant impact on our consciousness. Ulrich writes, “If Gerda Lerner is right in claiming that the core of women’s oppression has been an inability to access their own history, then this explosion of resources may presage more lasting change” (226).

I am glad Ulrich is hopeful, but from my own experience, I know that I often felt as if the only way to learn women’s history was to take classes in “women’s studies” because we were still somehow left out of the story of “real” history. In my late twenties, I am only now learning about the details of the suffrage movement and discovering women who should be household names, like Lucy Burns and Alice Paul. Or, just recently, I was reading the book you sent me—The Feminist Papers —and I could not believe how little I knew of Margaret Sanger’s work to make birth control legal! I kept asking why I was just now hearing about such important events in history.

The Continued Cruelty of Beauty Ideals

In discussing the protest and the bra-burning myth surrounding the 1968 Miss America Pageant, you briefly mentioned we should talk more at length about the topic of beauty and fashion, too. I totally agree; it’s an important subject, especially for second-wave and third-wave feminists to be discussing together. I am going to just touch on it here and begin the conversation. There is so much to say on this topic!

Recently, I feel like I have been becoming more and more aware of how toxic it feels to live in a culture that dictates such a narrow and constricted ideal of feminine beauty. I am sure you have seen Jean Kilbourne’s work on the image of women in advertising? (I will link her site here. It is really worth taking the time to look through.) The media’s image of a woman is a version that is not even a human being anymore, but a mismatch of body parts and photoshop. The ads are communicating over and over (Kilbourne says the average person is exposed to 3000 ads a day!) that a woman’s value is placed in an eroticized version of herself.

There is an internalized oppression that plays out for women who have the means to “buy” the look, or who may not have the means but still are sold that image. Women spend so much time, energy, and money trying to sculpt themselves. False beauty standards drive our consumerism. We don’t ask about the effects of these industries on the earth, or where the products come from and what kinds of companies are selling us this image we are desperate to attain.

False beauty standards drive not only consumerism, but also a mess of insecurity and misplaced value. As a culture we lose the beauty of particularity—only certain bodies and faces and skin color become what is defined as beautiful. This obsession with “lookism,” as Mary Pipher calls it in Reviving Ophelia, keeps us from being reflective, acting as agents, and using our voices to address real, pressing issues in our world. It is an insane distraction.

Personally, I enjoy clothes; I like wearing clothes that reflect my personality or how I am feeling that day. I love scarves, earrings, skirts. I think clothes are artistic and expressive. But, obviously what I am arguing against is an obsession with a narrow, mass produced image of beauty. I am arguing against losing the person for an image.

I realize in many ways this particular beauty ideal I am describing is the product of a highly affluent culture with the time and the means to obsess on such things as thinness and the latest fad. I am complaining about the “oppressiveness” of the fashion industry making commodities of the female body while there are girls in the world who literally have to sell their bodies to eat or afford books for school. I just recently read about young girls in Kenya who sell sex just to afford to buy their sanitary napkins so they can stay in school while the are having their periods. (You can read more about that here.) 

Obviously, the commodification of the female body is on a spectrum. As a middle-class, North American, white feminist, I should use a word like “oppression” very carefully. But, I still do believe there is a kind of internalized oppression that comes from living in a culture with such restricted beauty ideals, and that those “ideals” are profoundly harmful, though they affect different women in different ways.

I wish young girls in America would grow up learning about why feminists of the ’60s and ’70s had to do what they did, instead of being fed such false images. The protest of the 1968 Miss America Pageant is a perfect example: the true substance of the historical moment was traded for a media-created fabrication. 

Your friend,

Kimberly

Dear Kimberly,

I apologize for taking so long to respond to your November 22 letter; but as you know, I had some health issues come up and then was swamped with the editing and layout for the latest issue of Christian Feminism Today, which has just come off the press.

I want to pick up right where we left off, however, and comment on your thoughts about feminism’s image problem.  It troubles me that you’re finding so many young women who think feminism falls into the “women against men” category of Yates’s three-part typology (as described in my November 13 post).

Given the fact that any social movement is likely to have some extremists whose words or actions may reflect negatively on the movement, I don’t think that’s the primary explanation for the misperceptions many younger women have about feminism.  I believe there are at least three reasons such misperceptions have originated and persist.

Media Sensationalism and Misinformation about Feminism’s History

First, the mass media have a tendency to look for a good story to sensationalize, and a protest at the 1968 Miss America Pageant provided them with just the sensationalism they relished.  Earlier, the media had taken some note of Betty Friedan’s book and the controversy generated by the publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963, and no doubt there was some awareness that women were gathering with other women in consciousness-raising groups to share experiences and talk about the restrictions of rigid gender roles.

But newspapers, radio, and television reporters showed scant interest in small pockets of women getting together to voice their grievances and their questioning of the status quo. Apparently, it didn’t yet seem to be the birth of a social movement, even when  the National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966 as a civil rights movement, concerned especially with ending discrimination in employment at that time.  NOW’s goal, in the words of Analoyce Clapp, was  “to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, assuming all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.”

But, according to Judith Hole and Ellen Levine (Rebirth of Feminism, Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1971), the media’s interest perked up after a few loosely organized groups, led by one called New York Radical Women, staged a protest at the 1968 Miss America Beauty Pageant in Atlantic City.  It was then, say Hole and Levine, that “the American public learned for the first time that there was a new thing called the women’s liberation movement” (p. 122).

Looking Back

Forty years later, National Public Radio (NPR) decided to take a look back and broadcast a feature on that pageant as part of its series, “Echoes of 1968.” Nineteen-sixty-eight was the tumultuous year in which Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, the Poor People’s Campaign took place in Washington, DC., protests against the Vietnam War were widespread, and riots broke out at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The echoes of that year are still reverberating.

In telling the story of the pageant from the vantage point of 2008, NPR interviewed organizers of the protest.  They were women who had planned to call attention to the women’s liberation movement by employing methods used in other protest movements during the 1960s.  NPR also interviewed the 1968 outgoing reigning Miss America,  Debra Barnes Snodgrass, who had come to the pageant to give her farewell speech and crown the new Miss America. That speech was interrupted, however, by some of the protesters who had purchased tickets for the actual show, so that they could — at the right moment — unfurl a banner saying, “Women’s Liberation,” and shout comments against the beauty pageant, which they believed was oppressive to women.

Debra Snodgrass says she was offended and hurt by their actions, because she had considered the Miss America contest to be a scholarship opportunity and primarily a talent competition open only to women in college, a requirement that she felt showed that the pageant respected what women could do rather than just being about how women looked.  But she now says that she also sees how she has benefited by the gains made because of what the women’s movement fought for.  You can read about NPR’s coverage, listen to it and to related clips, as well as see still photos and videos here and through American Public Media here.

Carol Hanisch, one of the main organizers of the protest, later wrote that she regretted the way certain aspects of the protest gave a wrong impression of what the protesters were trying to convey at the Miss America Pageant. One problem was what she called “egotistical individualism” on the part of some who did not comply with group decisions.  She writes:

Posters which read, “Up Against the Wall, Miss America,” “Miss America Sells It,” and “Miss America is a Big Falsie” hardly raised any woman’s consciousness and really harmed the cause of sisterhood.  Miss America and all beautiful women came off as our enemy instead of as our sisters who suffer with us.  A group decision had been made rejecting these anti-women signs. A few women made them anyway.” (Carol Hanisch, Notes from the Second Year, 1970, as reprinted in Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism, edited by Dawn Keetley and John Pettigrew, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005, p. 170)

Hanisch reports that both positives and negatives came from the protest.  Many women wanted to join the movement and work for women’s equality.  At the same time, Hanisch says she learned from mistakes that had been made in the protest and saw some ways to do things differently in the future. One of the main lessons learned was a recognition that the women needed to communicate more simply and clearly what the women’s movement was all about and to state its goals in language the general public could comprehend and receive.

Some of the mass media understood the message the women wanted to convey and spoke positively about it, although other representatives of the media ridiculed the protest.  (Ridicule is a favorite weapon used against any social movement that dares to challenge the way things have been.  It’s nothing new, as you’re well aware from all the study you’ve been doing on women’s history and especially the efforts of the suffragists to gain the right to vote.)

Bra-burners?

The term “bra-burners,” a derogatory term that continues to be applied to feminists today, was coined in reporting on the pageant protest.  Never mind that no bras were burned by those picketing the Miss America pageant, nor were bras singled out in any way as the main focus in a symbolic gesture in which women were asked to bring items they considered  “instruments of torture” that were part of society’s expectations for girls and women.  A large trash can, the “Freedom can,” was supplied for depositing what various women brought. Among the items tossed into the trash can were high heels, girdles, magazines (especially Playboy with its image of women), mops, cooking pots, and yes, bras — whatever individual women considered a symbol of oppression in their lives as women.

But no one labeled the women magazine-burners, or shoe-burners, or mop-burners.  They became known as bra-burners. (I’ve wondered sometimes, if men had tossed neckties into a trash can as part of a protest against men’s fashions, would they be mocked and ridiculed as tie-burners?  Or would other men have rushed to join them?)

Even if a fire had been lit (and the protesters had considered it but knew they could not get a permit), it would not have been a “bra-burning” ceremony but rather a burning of all the varied items in the trash can!   Different ideas abound about why the “bra-burner” mythology has been perpetuated. Perhaps it was a photo of a woman tossing a bra into the trash can that stuck in people’s minds.  Perhaps male reporters found the bra-discarding imagery titillating.  Perhaps it was a handy term to parallel the draft card burning of Vietnam War protesters.  Whatever the reason, some people who continue to misunderstand or oppose women’s equality still regard “feminist”and “bra-burner” as synonymous.

(By the way, Kimberly, sometime we need to discuss the history of women’s fashions and the way certain styles and clothing expectations have limited women’s activities.  Think of those extremely tightly-laced corsets of the Victorian Era, for example.  But we can save that for a future post.)

Accepting the Opposition’s Definitions of Feminism

A second reason why some people are suspicious of the word feminism is because they have accepted the definitions of feminism put forth by those who oppose full equality for women.  Words like “strident,” “shrill,” “man-hating,” “anti-family,” “unwomanly,” “mannish,” “anti-God,” “feminazi,” “castrating,” and worse are tossed about freely in describing feminists.  It’s no wonder that young women would not want to call themselves feminists if that is what feminists are perceived to be!

One of the most egregious examples of whipping up hatred toward feminists by those who are against women’s full equality was a fund-raising letter sent out by Pat Robertson to Christian Coalition supporters in1992, urging them to help defeat a state Equal Rights Amendment being considered in Iowa.  Robertson claimed the E.R.A. was not about equal rights for women but was an effort to destroy the family.  “It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians,” claimed Robertson.

We need to help women realize that to understand what feminism is all about, it’s important to see what feminists themselves are writing about and working for.  Only by reading actual feminist writings can young women find out what women committed to equality are saying and doing — and why they are pursuing certain goals.

No one will  learn what feminism is by accepting without question what someone else claims feminists are saying — whether it’s said on a radio talk show or from the pulpit.  It takes courage to find out for oneself.  You’ve been doing so much of this investigating yourself, Kim, and I admire you for it.  You’ve spoken honestly about your anxieties as you read the opening pages of The Feminine Mystique, after having heard it and its author demonized by fundamentalist leaders.  Reading articles and books by Christian feminist authors can help young women see how the Bible’s basic teachings are supportive of gender equality and how the message of Christian feminism can be applied to everyday life.

Woman as Agent

The third point that needs to be considered in forming an image of feminism is the realization that at its most basic, feminism is rooted in the idea of women’s agency.  Many people have erroneous ideas because they have no idea that this — women’s agency — is what feminism is really about. The word agency comes from a Latin word for doing, acting, leading, driving, having power.

Patriarchy is built on the idea that women are not agents on their own behalf but are controlled by the agency of men.  Men act; women are acted upon.  Men decide what women may or may not do; women do as they are told.

Feminism’s goal is to change that — not turn it upside down with women over men, but rather to level the playing field so that women and men are equal to each other.  In the community of faith, women and men can view themselves as partners in the realm of God, working together to see that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven, with each person bringing her or his individual gifts and talents to serve God rather than being seen as simply a member of a category, as traditionally has been the case with women.  In the Body of Christ, “there is no longer male and female: for all of you are one in Christ” (Galatians 3:28).

I remember reading a letter to the editor in a news magazine (Newsweek, I believe)  many years ago during debates about whether women could be ordained as pastors, priests, or rabbis.   The letter-writer, a woman who was obviously aware of men’s fears about losing power if women were to be ordained or hold other leadership positions in religious institutions, said something like this:  “We’re not saying that you should move out and let us take over.  We’re just saying move over and let us help.”  That sums up my point nicely.

In your last post, you mentioned that one way that some Christians dismiss feminism as being unworthy of serious consideration is to link it to abortion rights.  Again, this issue must be considered from the standpoint of women’s free agency as being essential to any understanding of what feminism is about. It is about what we discussed in our earliest letters about recognizing women as fully capable human beings with free will and full humanity in the same way that men are considered fully human, which includes the freedom to make choices.  We do not call it selfish for men to want the power to make choices in their lives, and neither should we call it selfish for women to want the power to make choices in matters that concern them.

Incidentally, Kimberly, I thought the paragraph about a much broader definition of support for life issues in your last letter was excellent.  You said some profound things and said them really well.  And you’re also right that feminists are not a monolithic group with only one view on abortion or on anything else.  Pastors are wrong if they insist that feminists are people who are ipso facto “pro-abortion.”  They are pro-choice.  They believe in women’s agency.

Most feminists I know are very much aware of the complexities of abortion decisions, and they are not cavalier about the matter.  Many I’ve talked with have said they could not imagine themselves ever having an abortion.  But at the same time, they realize they would not want to insist that all young girls and women in all circumstances make the decision they think they themselves would make.  And perhaps under certain circumstances (rape, for example) they might make a very different decision for themselves as well.  In any case, the question of abortion, like all other questions related to women’s lives, must always take into account the moral agency of women.  Otherwise, their full humanity is not being recognized.

As you know, Kim, I’ve written at length about reproductive issues in two chapters of the book Nancy Hardesty and I coauthored, All We’re Meant to Be: Biblical Feminism for Today, so I won’t take up more space to talk about these issues here.  But I do want to close with the very simple definition of feminism that Nancy and I provide in that book, namely that feminism is “a belief in and a commitment to the full equality of men and women in home, church, and society” (p. 1, 1992 revised edition). Perhaps some of the women you’ve talked with about feminism may be willing to give some thought to that definition.  On the other hand, maybe they’ll reject it.  As we’ve said in earlier posts, some Christians think women can be equal in society but not in the home or church.

Wow! This has been a long letter.  I guess I’m making up for the several weeks I was absent from this blog.

Have a wonderful and blessed Christmas.

Your friend,
Letha

Letha,

I really appreciated what you touched on in your last letter, especially your explanation of the typology Yates uses to understand second-wave feminism. The “women over against men” category—which describes the more extremist segment of the movement—struck a chord with me. As you know, the perception that feminism is about angry women wanting to dominate men gets a bit of leverage from conservative pulpits! I could share with you some excerpts from sermons I have heard, but we’d probably both experience a rise in blood pressure. So, I think I won’t!

Instead, I want to begin this letter by looking at some thoughts you stirred in me with Yates’ categories—namely, how I feel about my own generation’s perceptions of the term “feminism.”

A Limited View

I have mentioned this to you before in previous posts, but I do feel as if women my age have been socially conditioned to see almost all feminism as the second of Yates’ categories—the “women over against men” way of thinking, and they understandably resist that image of feminism, and often have not been given more positive images. And yet the irony is, I wonder how many of us have actually met that man-hating feminist, though it seems that she must lurk around to keep getting all this attention in people’s minds! All the feminists I know (and I know a lot of them) actually like men—we like them so much we believe in truer, more vibrant partnerships with them, and we believe in working for egalitarian societies in which both women and men can live more freely.

I don’t know what to do with the reality of people’s perceptions towards feminism within my own generation. I find it ironic that most young women take for granted that they can vote, attend universities of their choosing, use the libraries in those universities, have access to birth control, open a checking account as a married woman, own and inherit property, etc., and yet when asked if they are feminists? Oh dear. Not one “of them.” To a certain extent, I understand. The “women over against men” model is too often the popular image—it is that image which is so sensationalized in the media and spoken of from the pulpit.

I get so frustrated that the term “feminism” is often used pejoratively, outside of a historical analysis, and with the assumption that it is somehow one monolithic movement—not many different movements, always shaped by historical and contextual variables. In Christian circles, the use of the term gets even more shallow, perhaps in an attempt to keep out the ambiguities and questions. Not only is feminism often equated with being anti-male and anti-motherhood, but it is also represented as being anti-God. (Eve, of course, is then seen as the first feminist!)

Furthermore, the problems in these perceptions only get worse because some Christians hear feminism spoken of mostly in relationship with abortion, so that in the end, the “f-word” is seen through a very constricted lens. I do understand that many Christians fear the association of feminism and abortion, and might want to write off feminism for its role in Roe v. Wade. However, it is time for Christians across party lines— and those who embrace the word feminism and those who reject it— to come together for more productive conversations on “life” issues. I was appalled at the recent election and how many evangelicals seem to limit the meaning of whether or not one is “pro-life” to how one feels about the legalization of abortion in America, as though there is one “life” issue. Yes, I am “pro” the lives of American children—as I am pro the lives of children in Iraq and Darfur— and pro the lives of the thousands of children dying every day from lack of clean water. I am also pro the lives of frightened women in my own country who honestly feel that they have no options or resources for unplanned pregnancies. Changing a law (and going back to a world of back-alley abortions) is not going to help churches to actually start loving their neighbors in practical ways and offering hospitality, non-judgment, and a place of safety for difficult decisions. Being pro-life requires a great deal more of somebody than being passionately against abortion. But, feminism’s very association with the polarized issue of abortion gets simplistically used within faith communities to write off the complexities of both abortion and feminism.

If the many forms of feminism are going to be understood by more Christians, than these two issues—fears of man-hating feminists, and the notion that abortion is a clear-cut issue or that all feminists think the same way on abortion—need to be looked at with a more nuanced view. But, as you explained so well regarding fundamentalist Christianity, religion is often not the place where ambiguity, paradox, and nuance are allowed to thrive. To quote your last letter, it is prone to “an ironclad construction of reality that does not let other viewpoints in.” Yet, for both the gifts and faults of feminism to be understood well, my generation must invite the complexity of the term, not be lazy in our analysis of it, or let ourselves fall into simplistic “either/or” thinking.

My Own Suspicions

Even in my own journey, I know that the process of wresting with the perception of feminism has not been easy. When I wrote you the letter while reading Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, I was struggling with my own ingrained biases towards second-wave feminists. Before I even opened the first page of her book, I felt suspicious of what I might find there, which I felt was rather odd.

My prejudgment surprised me because I knew I had always harbored questions similar to those of feminists, always sensed within me something was not right about the limitations women internalize about their own beings. I knew women’s voices were missing in the history books, and in my understanding of faith, and that this was a growing problem for me. Yet, something in me wanted to distance myself from “them”—those feminists who seemed so “other.” It wasn’t until I started reading their own words—not what others say about them—that I saw not only their diversity, but also their honest gifts and failings. “They” became humans to me, not a category; and I realized I had far more in common than in division. It was only then that I felt comfortable with the term. It was then that I realized I had been fed a stereotype and had not been exposed to different streams of thought within feminism. After making this discovery, I wanted to reclaim the word.

Some might argue that feminism is yesterday’s word—but I think we need to keep using it until we create tomorrow’s language. It is the word we have now to remind us there has been a ubiquitous, historical, and problematic relationship between power and gender; but in a crazy act of redemption, our world currently is experiencing labor pains, and we wait for the birth of a truer lived equality between men and women. We work as midwives to that equality. Will evangelical Christian churches in America be part of that? Or will they sit on the sidelines of justice? Will they miss this historical moment, convinced that the “agenda” of feminism (as though there is only one) is in essence anti-biblical?

Where to Go From Here

The battle over the meaning of the word feminism points out the importance of being willing to study the details of history, so that our words are not just lost to polarized discussions but are seen in the light of historical realities. This week I came across an interview with Ann Braude, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, who had this to say about a conference she helped put on a few years back that opened communication between feminists of different generations. In an interview with Wendy McDowell, she explained the rationale behind the conference:

“There are two aspects to the experience of younger women that motivated this project. One is that for those in religious contexts that have been very much influenced by the women’s movement, they assume that’s the way it always was and they don’t know that it was a struggle to get things to that point, and they don’t know that these are changes that could be undone, and have been undone in some venues. That was one set of concerns. The other is that they’re reinventing the wheel. This was brought up very graphically by Gerda Lerner, the historian of women who spoke at the conference, and who has written about religion and the rise of feminist consciousness going back to the Renaissance, but particularly focusing in the nineteenth century. She observed, and any historian could observe this, that many religious women today are fighting the same battles over particular biblical texts and church teachings that religious women have been fighting for over 100 years and in some cases 200 years. That’s very sobering to think that our nineteenth-century forebears resolved these issues in their own minds, but because we are not apprised of their stories and those resolutions, we have to reinvent them. We see this across the spectrum in religion and that’s why I believe that the writing and teaching of history is so important.” (Go here for the complete interview.)

Ann Braude and Gerda Lerner are right—we cannot keep reinventing the wheel! The stories of our pioneering foremothers need reception in the new generations. And as much as feminism is just a stereotype of a “woman over against man” paradigm, the positive stories have not been passed down. As one of our readers put it so succinctly, “It bothers me that this kind of fundamentalist thinking gets perpetuated generation after generation, and that women of each generation have to deal with it again and again.” That I myself would open Friedan’s book with more suspicion than gratitude is telling me something. That I am only recently discovering my connection to feminist evangelical women of the 19^th century is telling me something. The stories of women pioneers—in both secular and faith-based spheres—are still not getting told.

And I think that is an issue that third-wave feminists have to face.

Your friend,

Kimberly

Dear Kimberly,

I appreciated your honest sharing in your last letter.  Your struggles during your teenage and college years are struggles that many of us have experienced.  But I wonder how many other bright young women have not chosen the path you  followed and instead have abandoned their faith rather than give up their feminism.  They thought they had no other choice if they were going to be true to themselves. That’s sad and unfortunate.  And oh, so unnecessary.

Your path has been similar to mine in that we both dared to question.  Somehow, we both realized that we had been confronted with a false choice — “Either you are a dedicated follower of Christ and obedient to Scripture OR you are a feminist.”  But each of us, two generations apart, somehow knew there was another way — that our faith and our feminism were not at odds. Instead, we found that our feminism supported our Christian faith and our Christian faith supported our feminism, contributing to an integrated whole.  Of course, it didn’t happen all at once, but a journey never does. We’re always in process, learning and growing.

Fundamentalism and Questioning

However, the strict fundamentalisms around the world — whether religious or political — do not welcome questioning and critical thinking.  They thrive on certainty, on an ironclad construction of reality that does not let other viewpoints in.

You and I were drawn to a form of Christian fundamentalism because of its emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus and our hunger to study the Bible.  And that was good. We have cherished that.  But at the same time, we were also exposed to the patriarchy, legalism, and rigid interpretations of Scripture that are characteristic of this segment of Christianity.  The fundamentalism that we were taught insisted on an imposed order (a place for everything and everything in its place, including women).  We became aware (perhaps unconsciously) of the view that questioning is a threat and that permitting it leads to chaos — the opposite of certainty and order in the fundamentalist mind.

Fundamentalists, like authoritarians in general, have a problem with ambiguity and paradox.  They yearn for the security of knowing everything is settled so that they don’t have to worry about gray areas. Everything must be clear-cut, definite.   As a group, they are characterized by dichotomization — the “either/or” style of thinking that you mentioned.  Persons who think outside that framework are threatening to the system, and yes, they can be labeled as heretics, as you mentioned.  The history of Christianity shows some pretty harsh treatment of so-called heretics!  At least you and I weren’t burned at the stake for our questioning (although years ago, I received a letter from an anti-feminist reader — a woman, incidentally — about a book burning for one of my books).

Being Part of an Ongoing Story

You indicated that when you talked to your kind and empathic college professor, you had thought your questioning of traditional interpretations meant that you were giving up your faith. But now you realize that this questioning was the beginning of a stronger, sturdier, more robust faith than ever.  That’s so wonderful, Kimberly.

I liked what you said about reading Alice Paul’s story and that of other early activists for women’s rights and how you were able to identify with them and feel that you are continuing the story.  You definitely are!  (Upon reading that statement in your letter, I remembered that after Nancy Hardesty’s and my book, All We’re Meant to Be, was published in 1974 and we were invited around the country to speak about it, we used to half jokingly, but half seriously, identify our teamwork — in regard to our respective life circumstances — with that of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the 19th century.  Since I was the married coauthor on our team and was a mother, I identified more with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had married an abolitionist and gave birth to seven children; and Nancy, being single, identified with Susan B. Anthony.)

You are so right, Kimberly, work for equality is ongoing over history with all of us playing a part — not only in working for equality for women but also for social justice for other groups that have been and continue to be discriminated against.

Forms of Feminism (The Work of Gayle Graham Yates)

One reason some Christians (and others) have a problem with feminism is that they don’t understand it and have formed their opinions on the basis of faulty definitions promoted by those who oppose full gender equality and who consider it harmful to families and to the church.  We’ve already discussed that quite a bit in previous posts.

I think it might be helpful to look at a typology suggested by Gayle Graham Yates in her book, What Women Want: The Ideas of the Movement. Her study concentrated on the years from 1959 to 1973, when second-wave feminism was emerging. She said the movement for gender equality showed evidence of three different perspectives:  (a) women equal to men, (b) women over against men, and (c) women and men equal to each other.

“Women equal to men.” Yates calls the women-equal-to-men paradigm the “feminist perspective.”  This is the category that describes the pioneers who have worked to obtain the same rights, privileges, and opportunities for women that have been enjoyed by men — voting rights, property rights, educational and employment opportunities, and so on.  Some of that work has been accomplished, as we know, and some of it continues today in many areas.

“Women over against men.” Yates associates this view with the women’s liberationist paradigm which she defines as a “pro-woman antimasculinist model.”  She is talking about a more extremist segment of the second-wave movement for gender equality. “Theirs is a woman-over-against-men or women-separate-from-men stance,” Yates writes. “These women — and the feminists informed by this model are all women — are sometimes quite angry with men and assert that women should separate from men, either permanently or temporarily, to establish female identity and to support each other psychically as women.  This is the old masculinist concept turned upside down. . .” (p. 19).

Unfortunately, it is this model that some people believe represents all feminism, and an extreme caricature of this idea is spread by anti-feminist radio commentators, as summed up in Rush Limbaugh’s term “feminazis.”

In your letter, you alluded in passing to the comment of one of our regular readers who recently expressed concern about a statement he had read in a professional journal. The quotation was from the director of a rape crisis center that does not permit male volunteers to work there. (I did ask the reader who wrote the comment to send the complete article, as he had offered to do; and I am deeply appreciative of his sending it. See his comments with our Oct. 25 post.)

The research data presented in the article he referred to indicated that the quotation he shared with us was from only one out of the six centers studied.  It alone had a policy against male staff and volunteers.  All the others had male volunteers (or in one case, had had them in the past, even though none were there now), and one of the centers surveyed had male paid staff members. The article also indicated that the issue of rape crisis centers accepting males as staff members, volunteers, and victims is being much discussed at this time, and attitudes seem to be changing. As the article’s author notes: “As society increasingly recognizes that males are rape victims and that services should be made available to male victims, some rape crisis centers and programs may need to come to terms with the idea that they can maintain feminist ideals while serving male victims (Shana L. Maier, “Are Rape Crisis Centers Feminist Organizations?” Feminist Criminology, Vol. 3, No. 2, April, 2008, p. 97).  She goes on to say that an important opportunity is also being missed when rape crisis centers and programs do not include male staff members and volunteers, because they could lead programs that could “educate other men or boys on their responsibility in ending sexual violence against women” (p.97).

Of course, not all cases of set apart “women only” space should be assumed to indicate an anti-male stance promoted by more radical “women-against-men” feminists.  Sometimes, there is a need for women to have safe, healing space and a time with their own in-group because of specific needs, including a need to listen to each other and help each other feel free to express long pent-up feelings that they don’t feel free to express when men are present.  Social movements begin when people become aware that the painful, unjust treatment they have experienced  is not theirs alone and begin to find others with similar grievances. The personal becomes political and they can work together for systemic change.  That is what happened in the consciousness raising groups of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.

Still, it hurts if one is a member of any privileged or dominant group (for example, males in a patriarchal society) and wants to help those who have been treated unjustly (the females in that patriarchal society) but is turned away by that group because group members want to effect change without assistance from persons outside their own group. There have been instances where this has happened in various civil rights movements seeking to correct and overturn social injustices — whether on the basis of race, gender,  sexual orientation, or anything else. But most such groups realize they need allies who join with them in striving for social justice and equality if change is going to happen.

But I have digressed and need to get back to the final category of the Gayle Graham Yates typology.

“Women and men equal to each other.” Yates describes this model as the androgynous paradigm — one in which women and men work together to define the way they want society to be. “It holds that tasks, values, and behavior traditionally assigned to one sex or the other should be shared by them both, except for behavior dictated by purely physiological differences.”

In other words, it’s what you and I have been talking about in this correspondence, Kim.   It’s just letting people be who they are and encouraging them to express their humanness in whatever way it fits their own personalities, talents, interests, and abilities as individuals.  According to this paradigm, neither women nor men have to fit into a particular role imposed by society. Rather, they work to change society together. In the words of Yates, “The focus for identifying the enemy of the women’s movement is on cultural forces, attitudes, and institutions, rather than on men. . . .” (p. 169).

That’s all for now.

Your friend,
Letha

Dear Kimberly,

Thanks for your thoughtful response to my October 11 letter about how gender roles become straitjackets. I’m glad you watched the trailers of the films I mentioned. And I was delighted to hear that you are also familiar with the Dar Williams song, “When I Was a Boy” and even used it as a part of your recent conference workshop!  (The P.S. you added this past week was interesting, too; and it is so good to hear about the special event you and your friends are planning in Seattle to encourage women to exercise their right to vote.)

You made such important points in your October 15  letter, and there’s so much I’d like to reply to; but I’m going to limit myself to two things that especially stood out:  (a) your description of gender fundamentalism and (b) the impact of remembering our childhoods.  Even at that, this will be a long letter since it’s been a couple of weeks since I wrote.

Resurgence of Gender Fundamentalism

First, I was struck by your term, “resurgence of gender fundamentalism,” in describing what some influential pastors are teaching about distinct roles for women and men.  It’s the old “separate spheres’” arguments from earlier times all over again. (Of course, “separate spheres” teachings and customs have never entirely disappeared and are rampant and much more extreme in many other cultures.)

But from what you’ve been hearing from certain pulpits, it seems some 21st century Christian leaders are turning up the volume on such teachings.  They’re loudly insisting that girls and women should not pursue their interests and dreams if they don’t fit with stereotypical notions of femininity (as these pastors define the term).  Otherwise, say these fundamentalist preachers, women are being rebellious against God and subject to God’s judgment.

We need to help people distinguish between femaleness (a biological fact) and femininity (a construct or expected role that societies assign to persons born female and which varies from culture to culture and in different times over history). Because of its link to societal approval, the concept of “femininity” can be used as a weapon to keep strong women from achieving their full potential by calling them “unfeminine” if they refuse to let themselves be fitted into a predefined box (or Procrustean bed, as we discussed in our recent posts).

Kathleen Hall Jamieson says that we women often find ourselves in any one of at least five “double binds” that she lists  in her book, Beyond the Double Bind (Oxford University Press, 1995). One of the double binds is this:  “Women who are considered feminine will be judged incompetent, and women who are competent, unfeminine.” Another double bind suggests that “women who speak out are immodest and will be shamed, while women who are silent will be ignored or dismissed” (p. 16).

A Recent Political Dilemma for Christians Who Take a Patriarchal Approach to Scripture

As we both know so well, conservative Christians who hold strong traditional gender-role views have long insisted that devoted Christian women should be “keepers at home’ and “obedient to their own husbands” (Titus 2: 4-5).  Those who hold these views believe that such instructions are universal principles for all times and cultures and not specific to the situations and cultures at the time they were written.  As a result (as we’ve been discussing in these 72-27 posts), many church leaders continue to tell women their purpose in life is to devote themselves entirely to marriage, housekeeping, and motherhood and to find fulfillment in that alone.  Women who have aspirations for careers in the world beyond the home or who wish to be ordained as clergy for service in the church are told such notions are contrary to their true feminine nature and an indication that they have been influenced by what these pastors like to call “the feminist agenda.”  To such preachers the issue is settled: Men were destined by God to be the leaders, and women to be followers and supporters of the leaders.

Then something unexpected happened during the presidential race of 2008. Along came a socially conservative Christian female vice-presidential candidate who was at the same time a mother with teenagers and young children at home, including a baby with a disability.  Yet, her social and political ideology lined up with those of these pastors and other spokespersons for their viewpoint, and so they were elated to have her on the ticket of their preferred party, even though they had long proclaimed that a woman’s place was in the home.  For some people, that posed a dilemma.

The argument that women may lead a country but may not lead in the home or church

Suddenly, spokespersons for the conservative Christian movement seemed to be scrambling to answer charges of hypocrisy for supporting her candidacy.  The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Albert Mohler, Jr., tried to answer such charges in a Washington Post article (Sept. 5, 2008).  He said a woman could be permitted to lead a country and still be Scriptural, even though at the same time she could not be obedient to Scripture if she were to lead a church congregation or claim equal authority to that of her husband in the home.

On a similar note, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), which teaches that God designed men and women to be equal in worth but complementary in roles (the separate-sphere argument again)  has posted on its website a four-part series to answer the question of whether Sarah Palin’s candidacy poses a dilemma for complementarians.  The author of the series reached a conclusion much like Mohler’s — it’s OK for a woman to lead a country but not OK to lead in a church or home.

It’s fascinating to see these discussions taking place among those who were so quick to judge feminism and to claim that if a woman pursued career aspirations outside the home it meant she was negative toward motherhood and not fulfilling her true calling.   Now Christian social conservatives are trying hard to say something quite different in the case of Sarah Palin and yet not sound inconsistent.

The argument that women should not lead anywhere at all!

However, I have also come across the writings of still another minister who believes the views expressed by CBMW and Mahlor don’t go far enough in limiting a woman’s right to hold leadership positions.  Representing an ultra-restrictive approach to the question, this minister said that not only is a woman not permitted to exercise spiritual leadership in the church or home; she is not permitted to lead a city, state, or country either. And  to support his argument, this author even dragged out a quotation from the 16th century reformer John Knox who said,  “To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature; contumely [insulting or contemptible] to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance; and finally, it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice. ”

I immediately recognized the quotation as being from Knox’s angry tract, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, which he composed out of the intense loathing he felt toward England’s Mary (”Bloody” Mary)  and Scotland’s Marie de Guise (Mary of Guise), the mother of Mary Queen of Scots, whom Knox later had to deal with as well.

Knox’s loud blast was part of intense political and religious conflict. It was basically not a tract about gender roles per se, but Knox knew that an appeal to the Bible on questions of women’s place would provide a convenient argument to condemn the rule of these particular women.  He understandably despised them because of their power in persecuting Protestant reformers (”Bloody Mary” got her nickname from putting 300 Protestants to death on charges of heresy).  But Knox was condemning women as a group, not certain individuals who were misusing power as individuals.  In any case, Knox felt it was his duty to sound what he called “the first blast to awaken women degenerate.” He  wrote, “‘I am assured that God has revealed to some in this our age, that it is more than a monster in nature that a woman shall reign and have empire above man.”

Well, I won’t go on about that any further, Kimberly; it just surprised me to see someone referring to this 16th century treatise to argue that it would be contrary to God’s will for women in the 21st century to aspire to high government positions.

More about Remembering Our Childhoods

In reading your last letter, a second thing that especially struck me was the way you elaborated further on the gender freedom of childhood.  I appreciated your sharing the feelings generated by remembering that period and also how the memories of childhood touched such a deep emotional core among both women and men who attended your workshop.

What you said fits so well with what I was saying last time about how I resonated with the 10-year-old girl in Beth Brickell’s drama, Summer’s End. The energetic free spirit and outdoor activities of the little girl in the film reminded me so much of my own childhood in a tiny Pennsylvania town. And the story took place around the same time period.  I turned 10 in 1945, and the picture on the right was taken shortly before my 10th birthday.  I didn’t have to face the prospect of having my pigtails cut off or permed as Kath did in Summer’s End, but I was becoming uneasy about what it would mean to grow into a young woman and leave behind the carefree, adventurous days of childhood.  I already sensed that whether I wanted to or not, I would be expected to conform to an image that I didn’t think would be the real me.  Would I dare defy those expectations?

“The Girl Within”

In her book, The Girl Within, Emily Hancock writes about the adult women she studied for her doctoral research at Harvard.  Her findings correspond to my own remembered feelings and those that you and your workshop participants also remembered, Kim, even though we’re of different generations. The feelings also match those that were expressed in both Summer’s  End and in the Dar Williams Song, “When I was A Boy.”

Hancock wrote:

It was through the process of telling me about their experiences as adults that women stumbled almost by chance on the girl they had long ago left behind. They themselves were distressed to find that they had lost her — a disturbing insight that often came to them unbidden when they confronted the contrived self that had stolen in to take her place. They were unprepared to find that the task of a woman’s lifetime boils down to reclaiming the authentic identity she’d embodied as a girl. (The Girl Within, Ballantine Books, Fawcett Columbine imprint, 1989, p. 4)

Hancock says that the women in her study at Harvard, along with the scores of women she has talked with since then, have each expressed a similar sense of loss. They couldn’t name what they had lost but they knew something was missing, and they were especially aware of it when they remembered what they had been like at age 9.

There was melancholy and sadness as each woman Hancock spoke with “realized that she had early put this girl aside, replacing her vitality with feminine compliance.” She goes on to describe the women’s composite picture of the 8- to 10-year-old girl as “one who pulls on her blue jeans, packs her own lunch, and gets on her bike to ride to her best friend’s house to build a fort or a tree house. Liberated from the confines of the family, she is proud of her newfound ability to order and direct her life” (p.7).  She collects things — stamps, coins, bugs, stuffed animals, rocks, sea shells.  She may aspire to be a scientist or detective or writer or athlete.  She has confidence, and “no matter what her particular bent, this independent and adventurous girl has many capabilities. . . . Heady with the power that comes from genuine competence, she brims with initiative” (p. 8).

But then something happens. “Suddenly, well before puberty, along comes the culture with the pruning shears, ruthlessly trimming back her spirit” (p. 18).

“Reviving Ophelia”

A similar picture emerges in psychologist Mary Pipher’s best-selling book, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (Grosset/Putnam, 1994).  She speaks of our culture as “girl-poisoning.”  Pipher was writing her book more than ten years ago.

In light of how she defined the characteristics of a girl-poisoning culture, I’d say the problem is magnified today.  Her book was based on her observations of what was happening in the lives of young adolescent girls who came to her for therapy with eating disorders, self-mutilation, and suicidal thoughts, as well as less dangerous problems that were nevertheless serious and puzzling.

Pipher writes, “Girls between seven and eleven rarely come to therapy. They don’t need it. I can count on my fingers the girls this age whom I have seen.”  She points out that “most preadolescent girls are marvelous company because they are interested in everything — sports, nature, people, music and books.”  She goes on:

They can be androgynous, having the ability to act actively in any situation regardless of gender role constraints. An androgynous person can comfort a baby or change a tire, cook a meal or chair a meeting. Research has shown that, since they are free to act without worrying if their behavior is feminine or masculine, androgynous adults are the most well adjusted. (p. 18)

Androgyny as Simply Being Human: A Biographical Note

I think Pipher’s comment in that paragraph brings us full circle to what Dorothy Sayers said in Are Women Human, which you and I discussed in our posts for August 18 and 22.   If we could just be, rather than feeling we must act in ways that society considers “feminine” or “masculine — in other words, if we could just be human and develop all that being human means in terms of our potential as individual persons — how much better we’d all feel.  Both males and females could be spared a lot of anguish. Why do differences in biology have to make a difference in who we are and how we want to live in this world?  What difference does difference have to make?

Speaking personally, I think it was that kind of questioning — and a resolve not to be straitjacketed by traditional gender roles — that helped me avoid the hazards of adolescence and make my teenage years quite happy. True, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I did not have to face the particular kind of “girl poisoning” environment that Mary Pipher observed forty years later, but there were plenty of toxins in the gender constructs and societal messages during the time period when I was a teen, too.  As you know from our earliest posts in July and August, Kimberly, that historical period was the time that laid the groundwork for the “problem that has no name” that Betty Friedan wrote about in the early 1960s.

What I think made the difference for me rather than anything else during my teen years was my music.  When I was 12  years old, I began playing the trombone and it became the love of my life.  I practiced hours and hours and excelled.  And I rather liked the fact that the trombone was not considered a stereotypical “feminine” instrument. (Yes, research has shown that gender stereotypes even affect how musical instruments are perceived.  Brass instruments, for example, have been perceived as masculine, and flutes and violins considered feminine.)

Of course gender has nothing to do with musicianship or choice of instruments, but it has remained a perception nevertheless and has affected the choices of both male and female children as they choose instruments, though perhaps a bit less so now than when I was growing up.

It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy being a girl.  I did.  But I wanted to be my own kind of girl.  I didn’t want notions about limited opportunities for girls to keep me from being all I could be. I believed girls and women should be able to achieve anything that boys and men could achieve, and my trombone would be one way of demonstrating that.

I had my own band, which I called the “the Swing Teens,” with kids from four different high schools. I entered contests and would always be the only girl in the regional and state trombone competitions. When I gave solo performances, I usually wore an evening gown, leading one of my high school teachers to tell my parents admiringly that she considered me to be a “tomboy-lady.”

How “Gender Fundamentalism” Clips Wings

Like you, Kimberly, I dedicated my life to Christ when I was a teenager.  It didn’t happen in a church but through reading a book on my own.  I didn’t tell anyone about it at first.  I went on as planned to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY and studied under the world-famous trombone teacher, Emory Remington, who encouraged me by telling me about one symphony orchestra that hired a woman as first chair trombonist.

It was only after I transferred from Eastman to major in sacred music at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago that I first ran into a systematic promotion of what you call “gender fundamentalism” and was told that God had created women and men to fulfill distinct roles. Women were designed to be helpers and to subordinate their interests to those of men. I heard that women couldn’t be ordained as pastors because it would be usurping authority over men. They could, however, be missionaries when there were no men to do the job. I was told that women couldn’t be entrusted with doctrine because women were last to be created and first to fall into sin.

I knew the Bible verses some of my teachers were using to teach these things, but it did not make sense to me, though I said nothing at the time. It just didn’t sound at all like something that the God I loved and served would do!  Why would God create females with brains and talents and abilities and yearnings to serve and advance the good news of the gospel and then say, “No thanks, I don’t need or want your service”?

It is painful to have one’s wings clipped. I tried to follow the gender hierarchy that I was taught, but down deep the seeds of what would later be called Christian feminism were taking root.

Kimberly, I feel so sad when you tell me that you ran into the same kind of teachings in your teen years more than four decades after mine.   And I’m sadder still that the liberating message of the Christian faith, which means so much to both you and me, is today still being commandeered by some preachers and teachers who use Christianity to clip women’s wings rather than helping them to fly.

Your friend,
Letha

Hi Letha,

I know this is sort of unusual for our exchange of letters, but I realized that I wanted to let you and our readers know about a “day of remembering” happening the weekend before the election throughout cities in America. A few friends and I up here in Seattle have been planning and promoting an idea to encourage women to think about the history of women’s suffrage. We think knowing that history will underscore the importance of exercising our right to vote come election day. I’ve pasted a short article/announcemet below that we have been sending out to women all around the country, hoping that others will want to pick up on our idea and join us in “remembering” by gathering together in small or large groups to watch a remarkable film together.

Here’s the article, which anyone can feel free to copy onto other blogs/websites as well:

In the early 1900s a group of courageous, risky, amazing women dared to push the boundaries of political protest, convention, and even their own personal health and safety to secure women’s voting rights. The inspiring HBO movie, Iron Jawed Angels, starring Hilary Swank and Frances O’Conner, recounts the struggle behind the passage of the 19th Amendment. The film invites women to a poignant and informative look at our own history and compels us into a future we are yet to write and influence. You can watch the trailer and read a synopsis on this website: http://www.hbo.com/films/ironjawedangels/

On Saturday, Nov. 1, just days before an important election, we are inviting women from all political parties in cities all over the country to gather together and watch and reflect on this compelling film. We are encouraging a day where collectively we dwell in gratitude for those women who have gone before us to secure our freedoms, as well as consider what the contribution of our own generation will be. Regardless of who we choose to vote for on election day, we can all agree on how grateful we are to have that right. In the midst of so much division in our national politics, we can come together and remember a shared and important history.

This movement to watch Iron Jawed Angels began in Seattle, WA, when after first discovering this film, a small group of independent, bi-partisan, and passionate women decided to organize a large gathering of women to watch this movie on Nov. 1.* Please join them by gathering some women together in your own cities! And feel free to pass this information on to other blogs.

And after Nov. 1, if you want to share about your event, there will be a place to do that on womenimagine.blogspot.

*Please note this is a grassroots effort with no affiliation to a political party or HBO. Also, we (in Seattle) received written permission from HB0 for a one-time showing in a public venue.  If you have any questions about copyright issues, please contact HBO’s James-John Kerigan, media specialist at HBO. (His email is: James.Kerigan at hbo.com. His email here is written “spamproofed” for the internet, so you will need to translate the “at” to the usual “@” sign in an email address, and take out the extra spaces when you type it into  your email.)  We, unfortunately, are not able to advise on copyright issues. Thanks so much!

Hi Letha,

I just finished watching the trailers of the movies you mentioned in your last letter, and I look forward to watching the actual films. Just the short excerpts were haunting. The image of that little girl on the baseball field, and the ensuing scenes with her distraught mom, speak perhaps more than any explanation of what it means to be socialized into a gender construct.

Debating versus Remembering

As pastors (like the one in my last letter) contribute to this resurgence of gender fundamentalism, it is all too easy for me to start debating these issues. I often find myself trying to find the right angle of argument to convince people of the harm and absurdity of what that man is doing from the pulpit. And yet, when I watch those trailers of the movies you suggested, I realize that all of us (whatever camp we may find ourselves in) would greatly benefit not from debating but rather from remembering.

Remembering ourselves as young people—boys and girls with natural and individual spirits who too soon had to learn how to conform. Those often forgotten memories of our childhoods give us access to where our wounds are—and what redemption might look like, too.

As I think about my own past, I am grateful that in my own family, I did not have to endure such limiting messages on being a girl. (As we talked about in earlier letters, most of the harmful messages I heard came when I had my own personal conversion experience as a teenager and started attending church.) Growing up, I was raised by a mom who broke all the stereotypes. Sure, she would sew my sisters and me matching polka dot Easter dresses and bake us cinnamon rolls on rainy days, but she also was the only mom in the neighborhood who built a backyard deck, laid linoleum, and even knocked down walls in our house, all activities she managed when she wasn’t working her nursing job at the hospital! I grew up with a model of doing anything you put your mind to—a model that has greatly shaped the woman I am today.

And yet, I know that during my teenager years (and this is certainly not just the fault of the church) I grew more hesitant in who I was. The world is not an easy place for young people; there are so many pressures to quickly find an image or a group of friends, because living too much into your own particularity means you will stand out. And by all means you don’t want to stand out. As the mother says bitterly in “Summer’s End,” something is wrong with her daughter because “she does not fit in.”

I remember when I was quite young my mother gave me this still lingering piece of advice: she told me that people who seemed “weird” to me were just not conforming as much as everyone else. It was like she let me in on a secret—most people tacitly agree to play this game of conforming. Those who don’t succeed, or don’t want to, are the ones the rest of us can point out. And yet, the real question is why the rest of us are succeeding at the game. 

The Procrustean Bed

I am glad you mentioned this ancient fable of the robber who lays his victims out on a bed and saws off their limbs or stretches them mercilessly if they don’t fit. As I was writing my last letter to you, I just kept thinking about the violence of gender stereotypes, but was afraid such a word would sound like hyperbolic description. But, I don’t think it is too strong. I know too many stories of women and men who have heard those messages and then cut off pieces of their own heart or dreams or passions. Particularly when spiritual demagogues are making decrees about how men and women must conform themselves, regardless of “their own personalities, interests, and preferences” as you said, such messages are violent—a form of spiritual abuse.

Spiritual abuse controls people by shaming them, and by convincing them that any “rebellion” is going against God’s will. In the sermon I referenced last week, the I Timothy 5:8 verse about men who don’t provide for their families “being worse than unbelievers” was applied to men who stayed at home providing for their kids! As my friend Stacy pointed out immediately to me, that verse has nothing to do with gender roles. It’s about how to best care for widows in the church, and the importance of caring for vulnerable people in your own family. But, the pastor hijacked it to uphold his view of gender, and shamed stay-at-home dads as being “worse than unbelievers!” I was so angry on multiple levels.

Shame is such a powerful tool of spiritual demagogues. It keeps us fearful and un-free. Deep within us we internalize very harmful, very controlling messages. And I don’t think we can “debate” our way out of it as a Christian community. Debate will only take us so far, because what we really need to do is have the courage to grieve.

“When I Was a Boy”

I am glad you mentioned the song by Dar Williams, “When I Was a Boy.” I discovered that song almost a year ago on my 27^th birthday. I had asked friends to share songs, poems, or passages of books that had gifted their journey, and one man and his wife brought that song. All the contributions were special, but something about “When I Was a Boy” seemed to invite every person in the room to open up. It was like we all got permission for 4 minutes and 47 seconds to remember being children again, and there was a communal space of grief and acknowledgment at what had been lost.

It’s funny you happened to mention the song when you did, because I had just used it this past weekend for a 1-hour workshop I taught on gender. After I gave my lecture and helped lead some conversation, I realized the tendency for most of us—and in particular, many of the men— to talk about gender in abstraction or theory and from a so-called rational framework. But I had hoped to be talking about it from the level of our lives. When I finally played “When I was a Boy,” something opened up in the room.

We grieved together. Some of us wept. And none of us really knew what to do in the tenderness and discomfort. But, I truly believe it is important for men and women to find safe spaces to be seen in their grief and to long for something more whole together.

OK, I better go, even though there always seems much more to say on this topic. I look forward to hearing from you.

Your friend,

Kimberly

Dear Kimberly,

I’ve been concerned that some of our recent conversations might strike our readers as irrelevant during this current economic crisis.  It’s one thing for us to talk theoretically about whether or not women should make a career of caring for the home and children while men earn income in the workforce; it’s quite another to face up to the realities of today’s marketplace where such choices may not even be possible.

The percentage of women in the workplace has fallen in recent years.   Noticing the trend, some writers have claimed that more and more women have chosen to opt out of paid employment to devote themselves to homemaking instead.

Not so, say recent government data.   True, many women are leaving jobs, but so too are many men.  As Louis Uchitelle, an economics reporter for the New York Times, has written:

“After moving into virtually every occupation, women are being afflicted on a large scale by the same troubles as men: downturns, layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages or the discouraging prospect of an outright pay cut. And they are responding as men have, by dropping out or disappearing for a while. . . .While men are rarely thought of as dropping out to run the household, that is often the assumption when women pull out.” (”Women Are Now Equal as Victims of Poor Economy,” New York Times, July 22, 2008)

Maybe instead of saying women are leaving jobs, we should be saying that jobs are leaving women — and men.  And in these troubled times, finding new jobs of any kind, much less at comparable pay, has become extremely difficult.

Out of Touch Pastors

And yet, in spite of all the economic woes, some preachers (such as the one whose sermon you described) insist on telling wives that God doesn’t permit them to shoulder part of the economic load by earning income — and telling husbands they are less than men if they shoulder part of the household load, especially if it involves staying home to care for the home and children.

How couples divide up these respective responsibilities is up to them, not some judgmental preacher who knows nothing about their situation.  Furthermore, what a couple decides may vary at different periods of life as determined by variable circumstances, different preferences, and the growing maturity of children as they move toward the time they will be independent.  There’s no one-size-fits-all pattern for marriage and parenthood.

I was appalled to hear that the preacher you mentioned indicated that couples who mutually work out an arrangement in which the husband stays home to care for children while the wife works at her career (regardless of reasons) may be considered candidates for church discipline — perhaps even excommunication! For a pastor to claim such dictatorial power over people’s everyday lives and personal decision-making smacks more of cult-like authoritarianism than it  conjures up an image of a loving community of believers representative of Christ’s body, the church — a community in which the pastor nurtures and guides and steers clear of issuing orders and threats.

I once heard a pastor say that if a wife works outside the home, it means that the couple is “living beyond their God-intended means.”  Again, it shows a pastor out of touch with reality.  His comment is based on the assumption that work is done only to make money, with no hint of understanding that a woman might want to contribute her knowledge and abilities to make the world a better place, or because she loves her profession — or wants to fulfill her dreams, as you have often expressed it in your letters.  Such a statement about “God-intended means” also assumes that all two-earner families are spending their money extravagantly and that one earner could be expected to be paid adequate income to provide for a family in these times of income freezes, pay cuts, and constantly rising costs — even for such essentials as housing, food, clothing, health insurance, transportation, and a college education.  With few exceptions, such a living wage just isn’t happening in today’s economy.

Those who insist that gender roles are ordained by God for all times and places — and that such roles are rigid and unchanging — are robbing couples of the freedom for which Christ has set us free and are imposing a legalistic interpretation of Scripture.  Couples should not be made to feel guilty for trying to find what works best for them in their particular situation.

What Heterosexual Couples Can Learn from Gay and Lesbian Couples

As I write this column, the Connecticut Supreme Court has just overturned a ban on same-sex marriage, making Connecticut the third state to legalize marriage for gay and lesbian couples. (The other two states are Massachusetts and California.)  As legalization of same-sex committed relationships occurs more often, whether through civil unions in some states or marriages in others, social scientists are studying how these couples are handling the everyday details of their lives together. On the basis of the evidence in thus far, some scholars are concluding that heterosexual couples may have much to learn from these same-sex couples who are legally committed to each other.

A same-sex couple, just like a heterosexual couple, must work out issues in their relationships, including how they deal with power issues, personal conflicts, and how they handle various household, child-care, and income-earning responsibilities.  Studies are showing that since such couples cannot automatically fall back on prescribed husband-wife roles and  a traditional division of labor based on gender, they by necessity have to make arrangements that work for their personal situation. And as a result, same-sex relationships tend to be more egalitarian. These couples have also been found to handle conflict more satisfactorily than heterosexual couples who are governed by traditional gender-role and power expectations.

Rigid Gender Roles as a Procrustean Bed

According to an ancient fable, the robber Procrustes engaged in a cruel practice toward those who had the misfortune of becoming his victims.  He placed them on a bed of a certain size and forced them to fit its dimensions either by stretching them mercilessly or sawing off their limbs.   An insistence on inflexible gender roles to which all persons must conform, regardless of their own personalities, interests, and preferences, can feel very much like a Procrustean Bed.

That was what I meant in my last post (September 30) in which I said I wanted to talk more in this current letter about your remarks about the loss persons can feel when they begin to experience society’s messages about how they should feel, act, and be on the basis of gender.  You were talking about a study in which fathers were reminded of their own loss as they watched their sons enter a school environment where their previous tenderness was expected to be hidden under an exterior of toughness — even though it was hard. The quivering lip and misting eyes must be held in check, since “big boys don’t cry.”

Dar Williams’s Song, “When I Was Boy”

In her concerts, contemporary folk singer Dar Williams often includes a song she wrote titled,”When I Was a Boy.” It captures the sense of  freedom and openness to adventure that both girls and boys experience as young children but which boys are permitted to retain throughout life. Young girls, however, are expected (or required ) to give up such freedom as they move into young womanhood.

So in her song, Dar looks back on her childhood days, fondly remembering them as the time when she, too, enjoyed  exhilarating freedom and daring adventures and, in essence, “was a boy.”   She could fly high in her imagination, fight, climb trees, imagine she was a pirate, ride her bike fearlessly (even topless, until a neighbor says she must put on her shirt), and go out at night to catch fireflies.

But as she grows to be a young woman, she begins feeling the loss of who she has always been.  In a clothing store, she gets the message that her body is supposed to objectified by dressing for the eyes of men rather than for her own comfort and activities. And as she is leaving an event with some friends one night, she is told it’s not safe unless she has a man to protect her.  So she tells her male companion about her early life “as a boy” and concedes the war of the sexes, admitting that he, being male, has won the contest to be his true self and enjoy a status superior to that of females.

But he surprises her with his “Oh no, no, no.”  He tells her that when he “was a girl,” he and his mother had enjoyed their long talks and time together. And he liked to pick flowers.  And he had felt free to cry and to be tender and kind.  The song ends with his saying he and she are just like each other.  In other words, they had both lost something because of society’s gender constructs.  (Dar recorded “When I Was a Boy” on her album, The Honesty Room, and the song is also available in MP3 format for purchase as a single online.)

“Summer’s End”

Years ago, I saw an award-winning television drama on a similar theme when it was broadcast on PBS.  Titled, “Summer’s End,” and written by Beth Brickell, it has also been broadcast on Showtime, A & E, and Nickelodean and shown at numerous film festivals, garnering honors all along the way.  I had been trying to find it again for years, because I had so identified with the 10-year-old girl featured in it.  The drama depicts one day in the child’s life.  It takes place in a small town shortly after the end of World War II — another reason I identified with it because I was that same age around the same time, and my childhood activities were much like hers.  I mention it here, Kimberly, because it makes the same point as Dar Williams’s song made.

In “Summer’s End,” a mother has made an appointment with a beautician to rid her “tomboy” daughter of her pigtails  (I had pigtails, too) and give her a permanent wave so that she can be acceptable to other girls and their mothers as she enters the sixth grade at summer’s end.  The mother, who accepts and abides by traditional gender roles without question, believes that by making the girl more ladylike, she will be shielding the child from social ridicule.   But instead she breaks the little girl’s heart. The child just wants to be herself and follow her own interests, curiosity, and activities.  It is clear that the mother’s message is not about hairstyles but about gender-role conformity. It is the girl’s father who understands and comforts her as he tells her that “being a boy isn’t so easy either.”

I was recently able to view this drama again after an Internet search showed me that “Summer’s End,” along with another of Beth Brickell’s short dramas, “A Rainy Day,” are now combined on a DVD called Mothers & Daughters: Sometimes a Difficult Relationship.   Try to watch the DVD sometime if you have a chance.

(The other story on the DVD fits with our recent discussions, too, and shows how a child can be harmed by a mother who makes housekeeping and parenthood her total career and gives her child too much attention, discouraging the little girl’s independence. The mothering becomes smothering.  You can watch the trailer for both short films here.

Well, I guess I should move from Summer’s End” to “letter’s end” and bring this to a close! I think we’re talking about topics that touch a nerve for a lot of people, and it’s always so good to hear the comments that our readers add to the conversation, as you said in your last letter.  I’ll sign off now and look forward to your next post.

Your friend,
Letha