Christian Feminism Today

Hi Kimberly,

We seem to have come full circle, having begun this blog three and a half years ago with a discussion of Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique, and now we are ending it with another discussion of the same book viewed quite differently.

I have mixed feelings as I write this last post, understanding fully your desire to move in new directions in your writing and teaching.  And I wish you well as you look forward to your doctoral studies.  But at the same time, Kim, I realize I’ll miss these 72-27 conversations and the topics we have enjoyed exploring together.

Knowing that you’ve already said your goodbye to our readers in your August post (and being aware that this will be a one-way conversation, giving me the last word!) makes it a little hard to write.  I’m so used to writing these posts with the anticipation of your feedback in mind.  (Of course, our readers can be assured that you and I continue our personal friendship and communication apart from our 72-27 colleagueship as coauthors.)

Time and space won’t permit me to address everything you wrote in your last letter in which you responded to my May post on “What Betty Friedan Did and Didn’t Do. ”  And it’s not necessary because you already interacted with that post quite thoroughly—for example, in your summary of the “marketing of desire,” about the exploitive, manipulative nature of so much advertising.

Speaking of Women

But I do want to comment on your warning about the dangers of thinking of women as a monolithic group and the need to see how this issue of gender intersects with class, race, sexual orientation, and so many other issues.  I know what you mean, and I agree that we need to fine tune our language and avoid giving the impression that the concerns of the economically and educationally privileged, white, middle-class American woman of the 1950s and 1960s whom Friedan primarily addressed, represented the full meaning of the word woman or the concerns of all women.

Yet we need to keep in mind that at the time Friedan was writing, the image of the white middle-class homemaker was the prevailing image (and societal ideal) of womanhood throughout the majority culture in the United States.  It was the dominant image seen in the movies, on television, and in magazines.  The fact that there was discontent within this group of women, where it was least likely expected (according to societal norms), was noteworthy and a reason she wrote the book and pitched it to that audience.

As we’ve already discussed, Betty Friedan, having been a writer for women’s magazines, knew her suburban homemaker audience well.  She was well aware how members of that particular category of women were the targets of articles telling them their gender determined their destiny.  And along with the articles were the advertisements designed to persuade them that fulfillment and happiness were only a new refrigerator or dishwasher away.   Friedan knew the lie behind what she called the“feminine mystique,” the idea that women were somehow different by nature and would be content with lives that did not acknowledge nor fully utilize their talents and that stunted their growth as full human beings.  All they had to do was accept the one-size-fits-all model of womanhood and be content.  And she knew that the restlessness many felt and the yearning for something more than being a wife and mother (as wonderful as that could be), was a very real “problem with no name” that innumerable women experienced.

But of course you are correct in saying that Friedan was not explicit about writing for that particular audience when she wrote about “women” in what seemed a universal sense, nor did she deal with racial issues and other issues related to power systems that encompassed much more than gender—even though she was writing during the Civil Rights era. Much of white America, however, still seemed oblivious to the vast changes beginning to take place in their own lives and in society at large.

Friedan’s book was published in 1963, the same year as the March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.  And yet at that time, not only articles but even advertisements in mainstream magazines and television commercials in the 1950s and 1960s were devoid of black people.  People of color in general were in a sense invisible—or at least viewed as belonging to an altogether separate culture.  To see advertisements with black models, one had to turn to specialized magazines written specifically for the African American market, such as Jetand Ebony. I remember running across a copy of Ebony magazine during my teen years and seeing for the first time images of African American families represented in the same way as any other American families who might be interested in purchasing toothpaste, or floor wax, or a new car.  The situation is quite different today as both black and white models are featured in general interest magazine advertisements and television commercials, as well as in specialized publications aimed toward specific audiences with specific needs, concerns, and interests.

Different issues—different groups

I’ve been reading Melissa Harris-Perry’s  Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (Yale University Press, 2011), in which she uses the Hegelian concept of recognition as a framework for understanding the situation and struggles of African American women today. She writes that for a political system to be considered fair, it “must offer its citizens equal opportunities for public recognition, and groups cannot systematically suffer from misrecognition in the form of stereotype and stigma.”

In other words, both invisibility on the one hand, and misrecognition (in the form of myths about black women), on the other, are detrimental to African American women.  Why? Because the myths and stereotypes spill over into negative attitudes, expectations, and treatment of black women by both black and white people, as well as affecting the self-image of African American women themselves and the energy they must expend in attempting to counteract such stereotypes.  Harris-Perry found that three particular myths or characterizations stood out in her research with African American women in her focus groups: the black woman as Mammy, or as hypersexual, or as a strong woman (who might also be viewed as angry and emasculating).

Harris-Perry’s book provides an example of explicitly addressing issues faced by a particular group, whereas you and others have been pointing out that Betty Friedan wasnot explicit in naming the group whose issues she was addressing back in 1963.  True.  However, as I wrote in my  last letter, her middle-class audience needed that message of acknowledging the “problem that had no name,” which provided one of numerous wake-up calls taking place at that time, prompting many women, regardless of race or socioeconomic status, to realize they were being shortchanged and should not have to settle for the limited lives society wanted to assign them.

My own writings at the time, were among writings aimed at another specialized category of women: women of faith (and particularly women in conservative evangelical churches) who were finding that certain Bible verses were being used to keep them from being all they were meant to be.  The 21st century backlash and re-emergence of the “let the women be silent” and “submit to your husband” teachings  (which of course never really disappeared) is, of course, one of the reasons you and I started this blog in 2008.

New York columnist Gail Collins, in her book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (Little, Brown, 2009), tells how women in the 1960s were expected to act, dress, and live, without questioning or recourse.   They faced high barriers to their aspirations toward anything beyond wifehood, motherhood, and homemaking.

Collins writes:

“Medical and law schools banned female students or limited their numbers to a handful per class. There was, for all practical purposes, a national consensus that women could not be airplane pilots, firefighters, television news anchors, carpenters, movie directors, or CEOs.” (p. 7)

Many middle-class women, such as those Betty Friedan had addressed, began feeling less alone and were empowered to band together, challenge patriarchal ideas, and work to change the system.  A new women’s movement was emerging.  Have you seen the intriguing  history of Ms magazine that recently appeared in New York magazine for the 40th anniversary of Ms? (Like Friedan’s book, Ms was also criticized for being elitist and directed to the middle class, leaving many women out.)  The New York piece is a fascinating and honest account of both the successes and bumps along the way—including some serious conflicts at times within the Ms staff.  The readers’ comments with this recounting of Ms’s history are interesting, too.  One of the issues that came up, both in the recounting of the history of Ms and the comments about the article, was the same one we’ve been discussing in Friedan’s work—failing to give enough attention to women of color.  (The New York magazine article includes Alice Walker’s resignation letter over that issue. )

What Women Have in Common

So I think you and I can agree, Kimberly, that many power systems overlap and intersect in discussing gender concerns and that all of them need to be discussed, although different books and articles might address different audiences. At the same time, I believe there is a sense in which we can and should talk about women as a single category in which the word does have a universal sense.  Being a person of the female sex has meant—and continues to mean—to be in a position of inequality and vulnerability, although the degree that this is true may vary among individuals and groups and the times and cultures in which they live.

What do I mean?  Some of the issues that especially impact women as a category are issues related to reproduction and child and elder care, sexual harassment, rape, war and displacement, poverty, and a disproportionate burden of domestic chores whether or not women are gainfully employed.   If we were continuing this blog, we could have long discussions on every one of these topics (some of which we’ve already discussed to some extent in earlier posts).  Here, I can only comment on a few of them briefly.

“When One Woman Cries”

I titled this final blog post as I did because it sums up the idea of sisterhood—that we’re all in this together. The words come from a statement by a West African woman in the PBS five-part series, Women, War and Peace (which can be watched online).

Near the end of the final episode, titled “War Redefined,” there is an account of a large peaceful demonstration on March 3, 2011, as women banded together near Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast, to protest strong man Laurent Gbagbo’s refusal to relinquish power after losing the presidential election. As the women marched, supporters of Gbagbo, armed with machine guns, fired randomly into the crowd, killing seven women and wounding as many as 100 more.

Word spread quickly.  Three weeks later, in solidarity with the women of Ivory Coast, women from a number of other West African states banded together to form what they called “a thousand women march” and demanded to have their voices heard during the program of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a regional bloc of 15 West African nations, meeting on March 23 and 24 in Abuja, Nigeria.

Since two of ECOWAS’s member nations, Guinea and Niger, had already earlier been sanctioned by ECOWAS after anti-democratic actions and violence against protesters, the women felt that what they had to say about the post-election conduct of the losing presidential candidate in Ivory Coast and the ensuing violence there would also be taken seriously.

One of the women participating in the Thousand Women March told an interviewer:

“When one women cries in Guinea, she cries in Liberia; she cries in Ghana; she cries in Niger.  When one African woman cries, we cry all over. OK?  That’s why we gather everybody. We’re all speaking with one voice.”   (Quoted at about the 51 minutes and 12 seconds mark [51:12] on the documentary, “War Redefined,” Part 5 of the PBS series, Women, War and Peace.)

Her message is one we all need, no matter where we live. It is important that we as women, regardless of our physical or social location or any differences among us, keep listening closely so that we can hear the cries of women—women in our own circles and beyond—and then speak out and take action in various ways against injustices the world over.  We are sisters. When one woman cries, we all cry. And when one woman is empowered, we are all empowered.

Violence and the Cries of Women

Since space does not permit discussing in detail all the areas I mentioned earlier as having a particular impact on women, and since this is our last post for 72-27 and the discussion won’t be continuing, I’m just going to list some links worth checking out about a few of the topics—in particular, some that relate specifically to violence against women. On Alternet recently, I ran across this succinct definition:

“Violence against women is a complex set of destructive, primarily male behaviors that include psychological and emotional abuse, forced marriage, son preference, honor killings, sexual harassment, trafficking, and violence against women in armed conflict.”  (From  Hearts on Fire: Twelve Stories of Today’s Visionaries Igniting Idealism Into Action by Jill Iscol with Peter Cookson.  Reprinted in Alternet, Nov. 8, 2011)

I wish I could share links and thoughts about everything on that list, but here I’m going to mention only two of the behaviors and attitudes related to them.

Armed conflict. On this topic, I can think of no better way to alert us to how modern warfare and the proliferation of small arms affects women than to recommend the entire PBS series on Women, War and Peace. For an overview, here is a 16-minute expended preview of the entire series,  showing, as the narrators point out, the impact of wars on women and the impact of women on wars.

Sexual harassment. Among the most disturbing things about the recent accusations of sexual harassment by Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain were the failure of some people to think of sexual harassment as something serious, not a joke, and the hurling of insults toward women who accuse a man of sexual harassment.  The fact that contributions for the candidate increased greatly immediately after the harassment accusations was the subject of an opinion piece by theologian  Susan Thistlethewaite in the Washington Post (November 2, 2011). In that compelling article, she wrote, “Money talks, people say. And this week, I believe, money being given to the Cain campaign was speaking very loudly to women and what it was saying is that sexual harassment against women in the workplace is no big deal.” It’s worth taking the time to read the entire article.

Rape. I know you’ve written quite a bit about rape, Kimberly, on your own blog as well as on this one.  So I’m not going to write a lot about it here except to call attention to some material I’ve run across on the Internet recently.

1.  On this brief podcast from PBS, Gloria Steinem is interviewed about  “The Use of Rape as a Weapon of War.” She covers the main issues clearly and succinctly.

2.  A little off topic, since we’ve been discussing issues specifically affecting women, but we can cry with our brothers who suffer as well as with our sisters. Here is a topic that is seldom discussed when we think about gender-based violence:  rape as a weapon of war against men.  The article linked here provides a short overview of a recent study of men abducted during conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They were repeatedly and brutally raped in ways that often required medical help if they survived, including long hospitalizations.  They were also subject to other forms of sexual violence.  The study was conducted by Mervyn Christian from Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, who points out that although the rape of men as a war weapon is generally underreported and ignored, “the complex societal, psychological and physical consequences are very similar” to the consequences endured by women (apart from pregnancy, of course, as a consequence of rape faced by women alone.)  Those victims, male or female, who survive the rapes then face a life of stigmatization, as do their families.

3. Continuing with the subject of rape, Marie Fortune has written about the sexual violence against lesbians in South Africa who are subjected to rape supposedly as a punishment and “cure” or “corrective” for these women’s sexual orientation.  Dr. Fortune doesn’t hesitate to call it what it is, beginning with the very title of her essay, “Corrective Rape? No, Hate Crime.”

She writes:

“It is a message of terrorism and it is intended for all lesbians:  ‘You cannot choose to be who you are and experience life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  We will not allow it.’  Why is it that when women choose to step away from men (regardless of our sexual orientations), that some men feel compelled to convince us that we do not have that choice?” (From Rev. Dr. Marie Fortune,  “Corrective Rape? No, Hate Crime, ” Marie’s Blog, October 24, 2011)

I think you’ll want to read the whole essay, Kimberly.  As you know, we’ve published some of Marie Fortune’s other writings in Christian Feminism Today on the sexual abuse of children and on same-sex marriage.

4. Here’s another one worth reading. The Ms Magazine Blog has an article on efforts to change a common attitude about sexual assault within the U.S. Military, which, like sexual harassment, has all too often been the subject of jokes, trivialization, victim-blaming,  and intimidation and thus often goes unreported.

Other issues

Besides war and sexual violence in all its forms, we could go on to discuss so many other issues that touch women as a category in a unique way.   We could discuss reproduction and child care and child rearing issues, the effects of poverty on women, the double work load expected of many heterosexually married women who are expected to fulfill traditional gender roles and shoulder a disproportionate amount of domestic duties no matter how many outside jobs they may hold. And so many other topics could be explored.

But this post is already way too long!  I’m sure you will be writing about some of these topics on your own blog.  And as you know, I will soon be writing a new intergenerational blog as part of the EEWC-Christian Feminism Today website, along with Kendra Weddle Irons and Melanie Springer Mock, who also write—and will continue—their own blog, Ain’t I A Woman: DeConstructing Christian Images, as well.  We’ll announce on the EEWC-CFT website and Facebook page when the three of us will be starting the new blog together.

In the meantime, our readers can be assured that these 72-27 blog posts will be archived and will continue to be accessible even though we will not be adding new posts.

Kimberly, one of the things I liked best in your last letter/post was the way you picked up on Betty Friedan’s phrase and challenged us all to be looking for and naming new“problems that have no name” that are facing us in this rapidly changing 21st century world. Naming is empowering, enabling us to know more completely what we are seeing, feeling, and dealing with and then to do something about it.

I think that challenge is a good way to end this 72-27 blog, along with the realization that when one woman cries, we all cry.  And when one woman rejoices, we can all rejoice with her as well.

Thank you, Kim, and thank you, our readers, for traveling this cross-generational journey with us over these past several years.

With love and appreciation,

Letha

Hi Letha,

Thanks so much for your last post on Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, in which you helpfully outlined the historical realities that many women were facing during the time of the book’s publishing. You are so right—it is always important to understand the intended original audience in order to understand the importance of a book in a given moment. Thanks to you—and to others who wrote in both on this blog and the EEWC community list—for sharing your liberating experiences reading Friedan for the first time.It is important for younger feminists like myself to understand the historical reception of this book from the perspectives of those who first read it.

Given how much the book meant to so many of you, I felt you were very gracious to acknowledge the reasons I have some understandable hesitations with the book. As we have previously talked about, The Feminine Mystique has been a critical book in my own feminist development for more than one reason. When I first read it, it helped catalyze for me a more rigorous study of 2^nd wave feminism. Friedan helped me own the word “feminist,” and helped me understand the importance of exercising one’s talents and dreams— not just as a woman, but as a human being. In many ways, she plunged me into a deeper feminist journey.

And then the book held a second equally important lesson for me when I returned to it several years later, after having read a larger breadth of feminist materials (including texts written by Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Kimberle Crenshaw). It was at this point in my intellectual journey, that I realized how much my own feminism had been insidiously infused with an outlook that still privileged the white, middle-class woman as the “universal” woman.

I think perhaps more than anything else my last post was trying to nuance the complexity of my personal continuing journey. I know that you and I have always talked extensively about the importance of intersectional feminist analysis. And I distinctly remember that in the very first issue of Christian Feminism Today that I ever read (you had so kindly sent me a stack of the magazines in the mail), there was a brilliant article by Virginia Mollenkott that really aided me in seeing the interconnections between systems of power. That article by Virginia (and I am sad to say that I don’t remember the number of the issue in which I found it), served as another turning point for me. She just put such good words to what holistic social justice work looks like. Something in me exhaled a very deep “yes.” I was growing in my ability to see how gender oppression is always interconnected to all other forms of oppression.

All that said, you know that my journey as a feminist for the past few years has been deeply influenced by my desire to understand intersectionality more fully. Thus, my comments on my last post were guided by that desire to keep pressing into how my own white privilege has harmed my understandings of how feminism is a movement for allwomen, not just racially or economically privileged women.

At the same time, I think your extensive positioning of Friedan’s work within a historical moment and specific audience adds a great deal to my understanding of how and why Friedan was able to accomplish as much as she did.

While you covered many excellent points in your last post, I just will take up a few specific ones below to dialogue with.

The Marketing of Desire

First, you had written:

Kim, I know you think that Betty Friedan wasn’t aware of her class privilege, but I don’t think that’s entirely true.  When you spoke of her addressing women whose lives were filled with “matching slipcovers, cooking gourmet snails, and building swimming pools,” it came across as though you thought that’s what the women themselves desired for their lives. They could then be so easily caricatured as spoiled, ungrateful, bored and restless women who didn’t appreciate what they had, when so many other women had so little.

Letha, I think that you are making an important point about the marketing of desire itself and the construction of various representations of femininities. You helpfully nuance that women were being told to desire these things, and the real issue was that they had many deeper desires for self-development and expression that were unacknowledged.! These status symbols that Friedan references (“matching slipcovers,” “swimming pools,” etc.) were, of course, marketed to women who had the money to buy them, and like most of marketing today, the advertisements for these products probably promised satisfaction, while at the same time urging them to want even greater “satisfaction” through buying even more things.. But as Friedan so well explains, fulfillment remained elusive for these targeted female consumers if they were cut-off from a life in which they were given permission—dare we say even support—for developing all the fullness of who they were as persons.

With my criticism of these status symbols, I didn’t actually mean to imply that these women were ungrateful or bored. My critique—which perhaps I didn’t nuance very well in my last post—was that Friedan’s writing is encoded with a specific subject position. By “encoded” I mean that she has a certain audience in mind, namely white-middle-class women. There is, of course, nothing inherently problematic in wanting to address a specific audience. The problem is that when she uses the term “women,” while actually speaking about the concerns of a very specific group of women, I fear she renders invisible the realities women face who don’t have her privilege based on race and class.But as you said, Friedan knew her audience well and is probably intentionally speaking to a certain audience and not to others.

I just continue to struggle with how much of white feminism has this rhetorical pattern—using “women” to erase the very real distinctions among women. It’s a subtle, yet really problematic and pervasive way, that white feminists like myself perpetuate racism. Honestly, my own language in the past, and still even in the present, continues at times to collapse the highly diverse category of “women” into a monolithic representation, which then erases the matrix of power systems that infuse any expression of gender. My critique of Friedan is actually a critique of myself! I catch myself quite frequently using “women” as a monolithic category, with a subtly implied universal “woman” that is really a woman who looks like myself—white, American, and middle-class.

It is this problem I was addressing in the book–since it is this problem I am actually pretty concerned with in my own development as a writer, speaker, and feminist.

Expanding the Language to Name the Problems

A second and related point of yours that I wanted to address was this critical issue of giving language to problems—problems that are too often rendered invisible if we don’t name them. You wrote:

By describing and naming that empty feeling—even naming it as the “problem that had no name” (though its characteristics were readily recognizable)—Betty Friedan was able to show these women they were not alone.  She could help them realize that this nameless problem stemmed from a mythical and mystical view of women that denied women their full personhood and potential, a constellation of expectations that she termed the “feminine mystique.”  And she introduced many women to some facts and aspects of women’s history that many had never heard before.

As you explained, just by naming the issue of the “feminine mystique,” Friedan brought many women out of isolated feelings of depression, and into shared space to grow and heal. I am a huge believer that our language itself must grow and evolve in order for us to see the complexities of the systems in which we all live. It amazes me that in giving language to a problem, we can then grow in our collective power to be able to change the problem.

So, I am left wondering what “problems with no name” need to be named today? And how might our current use of patterns of language cover up a particular contemporary “problem with no name?” My hunch is that some of the “problems with no name” we are still dealing with have to do with the way our language itself maintains structures of hierarchy by making obscure or even invisible the complexities of intersectionality. That’s probably why I tend to focus so much on the implied subject in a writer’s use of the word “woman” or “women.” I am curious about how language is encoded with privileged subject positions, such that some of us (like myself at times) speak about “women” as a monolithic category without realizing our own racism and classism that infuses our speech patterns.

Exploring Language and New Chapters

Letha, you know from our phone conversations the past few years, that I have a growing interest in rhetoric. We narrate, interpret, and shape the world through the tools of our language. Our systems of language enmesh us in a worldview that operates within us at unconscious levels. These days, I am particularly interested in the ways in which hegemonic patterns of language—or the ways in which some in positions of power name the world, particularly in terms of narrating U.S. history—hide psychological defense mechanisms that keep injustices at the fringe of our consciousness.

In these next few months, I will pursue those questions by stepping into the work of PhD applications. I will also be devoting a lot of energy to growing my business as awriting coach and as a teacher of feminist theory. And as you know (and you have already shared with the EEWC council), I have decided that this is a season of life of many transitions, and one transition is that I will no longer be continuing to write our 72/27 column.

In these past 3 years, it has been a tremendous privilege to co-author this blog with you, Letha. I have just sensed that all things come in seasons, and have felt that my season of writing this wonderful blog has come to a close as I stretch my wings in other directions. I hope in the coming months to focus more on other areas for my own creative writing, as well as the writing over at my own website. And I certainly hope that you and I will continue to write together and publish our work in both online and print magazines and journals, as we did with our “Liberating History” article about this blog in the June 2010 issue of Sojourners.

Ending my time as a writer of this blog doesn’t mean that I am exiting the EEWC-Christian Feminism Today community! It just means that I am transitioning into different focus points and types of writing in my career. I am so grateful for our readership over the past 3 years, and I am deeply appreciative of the ways in which co-authoring with you, Letha, has taught me a lot about both feminism and the craft of writing. And, of course, it is our friendship itself that continues to be so important to me!

I know that there are many others in our community who might enjoy contributing to an EEWC blog. So, at this point, I will look forward to reading the contributions of others. I know there are a lot of changes planned to expand readership to the site, which I am excited to see as they are developed.

With love and gratitude,

Kimberly

Hi Letha,

I appreciated so much your discussion of the many forms of violence–especially verbal violence. I know a lot of women (and men) have been in relationships with verbal shaming and abuse, and I think it is incredibly important to talk about.

I want to pick up my letter, though, not with our discussion on violence, but rather with the last point you made: your mention of the new book that is out on the The Feminine Mystique. (Our readers can go here to listen to an NPR interview about the book, A Strange Stirring.)

Then and Now

Letha, I think The Feminine Mystique has been a good marker for me in my career as a feminist. When I first picked up the book, I was suspicious of it. I wrote in the margin of page one: “Sensing my own suspicion. Have I internalized the media’s depiction of feminists?”

The book surprised me. In particular, I didn’t expect Friedan to give so much attention to ideas about what makes a family healthy. She was promoting women’s rights, but she was not (in my reading) demoting the importance of families and parenting at all. Rather, she was saying that a women’s role ought not be defined by her role as a mother.

I was initially excited about Friedan’s ideas and how well thought through they seemed. Reading her was a marking point in helping me claim the word “feminist.” I realized I didn’t know a lot about what feminists actually wrote and said. What I thought I knew about them was actually based on stereotypes in the media, so Friedan helped grow my understanding in significant ways. I liked the ways in which she went about talking about women’s rights.

However, I have to be honest. Now when I re-read this book, I don’t have the same enthusiastic response because I don’t really see Friedan writing about “women” at all.  I see her writing about white, middle-class, heterosexual women. And while I still appreciate her contribution to the lives of millions of women, I am just aware that my thinking has grown and evolved since I read her.  (I know I have written about my critique of Friedan in the past on our blog, but I wanted to say a bit more, since she has come up in our conversation again because of the new book on her.)

I think this process of loving a book and then not being able to identify with it  5 years later happens for all of us. Certain books feel tremendously important to us; they help us develop our nascent ideas and coax our intuitions into words. And then, years later, we can appreciate the book that got us thinking and helped us along our path, but we now have new ways of critiquing the very book that originally got us started. The Feminine Mystique is like that for me.

When I re-read the first page today, what confronts me the most is Friedan’s lack of awareness about her class privilege. She writes of the silent angst suburban women feel doing household things like matching slipcovers, cooking gourmet snails, and building swimming pools! These images only work for women who have lots of access to resources.  Her, overall point, however, is a good one–women should be encouraged to live into all the aspects of who they are, including having careers. It’s just, one of the “problems with no name” in Friedan’s writing is that encoded in her language is an assumption about who the category of “women” includes. She says she is talking about “women,” but she is really talking about middle and upper class, white, heterosexual women.

Gosh, in 1963, African-American women were facing issues Friedan doesn’t even come close to touching (like the right to vote, or the murders carried out by the KKK). And poor women were not in angst about how unfulfilled they felt cooking gourmet snails. And while many suburban women wanted the right to work outside the home, many poor women have never had the option of being at home. We can also think of the thousands of women from poorer countries who have moved to the U.S. in recent decades to nanny for families here (usually, white, upper-class families), in order to have money to send home to their own children back home.

“Women” as a Category

The real problem, then, in my current reading of Friedan, is not simply that she talks about the lives of white, upper-class women, but rather that she assumes that “women”=white, upper-class women. That her assumption is encoded more than overtly stated is the crux of the problem.

I understand that is where her consciousness was at the time. I also understand that all of our consciousness is evolving, and my generation has had the privilege to learn from those like Friedan as we grow our ideas. I don’t mean to state my critique here ungraciously.

And in fact, the same issue I am critiquing with Friedan is more than common in a lot of feminist writing of women of my generation. Too often, it is women with privilege and resources who have access to promoting ideas about “women’s issues.” I have read a lot of  writing about “women’s” issues and controversial topics—from abortion to co-parenting to health care—that seem to leave out all economic analysis. I am utterly befuddled when I read such articles.

It’s as though the writer of such an article never had to think about what it’s like when there is $14 in the bank account. I don’t know if things were different in your generation, but I know many young adults who have always had abundant resources at their disposal; whereas, I feel as though most people of my parents’ or grandparents’ generation at least lived through a time of financial struggle. I think that times of financial struggle for young people shapes awareness and character. If one has never had such a time, it becomes hard to identity with the majority of people on this planet whose decisions and lives are shaped by whether or not they have access to resources.

Growing and Evolving

Letha, you have known me during a period of time when my ideas–and hopefully my consciousness–has grown and shifted. And, I hope to keep growing and shifting my ideas. I am aware that what I write today I will look back on and critique! The thought scares me a bit. I have lots of writing out there that I wrote years ago that lacks a lot of understanding of how issues of justice intersect. So, I make my comments here with (hopefully) a posture of humility. I just really want to press toward understanding the integration of all justice issues. I know many people are working toward understanding integration; I also know that many writers of 2nd wave feminism (like yourself) were always writing about integration. As we have talked about, it’s not as though my generation discovered intersectionality! (Even though sometimes we 3rd wavers pretend that we did.)

Well, Letha, that’s all for now. It’s rainy and cozy here in New Haven–the perfect day to remind me of Seattle. I am going to read and get ready for class now.

Kimberly

Dear Kimberly,

I had many thoughts as I read your last letter (December 31) about the fraternity hazing at Yale that required new pledges to march through the section of the campus where first-year women students lived, and then on to the Women’s Center.

I  also read about it in the national media.  And of course, the incident went viral on YouTube so that the world beyond Yale could hear the men chanting in unison (in the style of a “Sound off” military cadence or work song) words that were vulgar and offensive, celebrating rape.

I can see why you were appalled, Kim, and disheartened by the long delay in an official response, the refusal of many people on campus to take the incident seriously, and the fact that the concerned women who did take it seriously were accused of a theatrical show of hypersensitivity—and having no sense of humor.

Reading your post again about the outrage and dismay you felt, I find myself thinking about another recent report.   An  ABC news investigation has highlighted hushed-up and covered-over reports of high numbers of rapes of Peace Corps volunteers over the past ten years.  Many of these rape victims have come forward to report that they were not taken seriously, were offered only limited help, were told not to talk about it, and in some cases were even accused of causing (or at least of not pro-activelypreventing) the sexual assaults that happened to them.  This past week, a Congressional committee announced plans for an investigation.

In recent years, reports of the rape of women in the military have also received increasing attention.  And there have been the horrifying reports of massive rapes as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in Rwanda and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, when it comes to actual physical violence against women, not only chants about it, some degree of the same disturbing attitudes that were so troubling about the Yale incident are also often present.  There may be delays in taking action and discounting the seriousness of such incidents—even dismissing them lightly with a “boys will be boys” rationalization that requires women to be responsible for their own protection from harassment and predatory advances.

Behind actions are attitudes

You wrote: “I realize how many people want to pretend that boys chanting about rape is somehow notdeeply interconnected to a greater culture of violence.” And you also pointed out that “the chant is telling us a great deal about the socialization of 18-year-old boys.”  I agree.

Even now, half a century after the second-wave of the women’s movement got underway and laws, language, and customs began moving away from gender discrimination and toward opening more opportunities for women, many disturbing attitudes about masculinity have continued to prevail.  Such attitudes show up in sports when a male coach addresses his male team members as “ladies” or “girls” if he doesn’t like the way they played. Such attitudes show up in religious books and sermons warning of the “feminization of the church” when churches stress love, compassion, and inclusiveness rather than emphasizing a militant faith of “Christian soldiers, marching as to war.”  You and I have talked about this in earlier posts.

Tony Porter, co-founder of an organization named “A Call to Men: The National Association of Men and Women Committed to Ending Violence Against Women,” has a terrific 11-minute TED talk video about the socialization of boys (which he describes as living in “the man box”).  I hope you can take time to watch it, Kimberly. It really gets to the root of the problem.

And what is that root?  It’s the disrespect and devaluation of women, so that some men learn to see women as inferior to men and as objects, not totally human persons, but objects existing for the pleasure of men and under the control of men.  Maybe not expressed so crassly as that, but that is what comes through in the fraternity chant.

Do I believe that every man who was caught up in that fraternity “herd mentality” and joined in chanting those misogynistic words actually meant what he was chanting?  Of course not.   (Although I am puzzled about why some men wanted so badly to be part of a group that insisted on such behavior and thus were willing to participate.)

How verbal violence works

Actually, I consider the chant itself to be nothing less than an act of violence—verbal violence.

Verbal violence is not something to consider lightly, as we know from the damage that bullying does to its victims. The  taunts, insults, belittling,  and name-calling that bullies carry in their verbal weapons arsenal may not be the “sticks and stones that break my bones,” but they nevertheless do great damage. “Cutting words wound and maim,” says Proverbs 15:4 in The Message Bible paraphrase. Other translations say that abusive words “break (or crush) the spirit.”

Verbal violence can take place in schools; in dating, cohabiting, and marriage relationships; in parenting; in the workplace;  and elsewhere.  Verbal abuse can be carried out in person, through online social media, email, and texting, or in other ways. And it can be extremely destructive, causing lasting damage, sometimes even driving its victims to suicide (as in a number of suicides among young gay students last year).

You and I both know this is not a joking matter, although its perpetrators often try to excuse it that way.  I think about the Scripture passage that says,  “Someone who tricks someone else and then claims that he is only joking is like a crazy person playing with a deadly weapon” (Proverbs 26: 18-19, Good News Translation).

Verbal abuse is a deadly weapon, and covering it over with claims that one was “just joking” and accusing the targeted person of being too sensitive (“you have no sense of humor; you can’t take a joke”) doesn’t minimize its seriousness.  Such cover-ups do not undo or soothe over the deep wounds it inflicts.  In many cases, verbal violence precedes or accompanies physical violence.  Verbal violence is nothing less than psychological abuse, and such abuse leaves scars, even though they don’t show up on the outside as occurs with physical abuse.

Verbal violence, like rape and other forms of physical violence, springs from a desire to intimidate, humiliate, dominate, and control.  Behind it all is a desire for power—power over another person.

The damage done by verbal abuse

In her book, The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How to Respond (Bob Adams, Inc.,1992), Patricia Evans interviewed 40 women with verbally abusive male partners.  Evans, who has extensively worked with battered women, talks about different ways that verbal abuse operates, sometimes without the woman on the receiving end even recognizing it as abuse, in spite of the damage it is doing to her self-esteem and overall well-being.

Evans’s interviews enabled her to list (p. 43) multiple ways women were affected in their relationships with verbally abusing male partners. She found found that, among other things, verbally abused women learned to distrust their spontaneity; experienced a loss of self-confidence along with a growing sense of self-doubt and distrust of their own perceptions; developed an “internalized ‘critical’ voice’”;  felt they must be constantly on-guard, fearful of the next unpredictable verbal explosion; became worried that something was wrong with them or that they might be going crazy; grew increasingly uncertain about how they were coming across in communication; blamed themselves and engaged in constant soul searching to determine what had gone wrong to cause their partner’s outbursts over seemingly simple and innocent remarks; grew concerned that what they thought were their best qualities might be their worst qualities because of how their abuser spoke of them; experienced lowered self-esteem; and often experienced physical symptoms indicative of deep emotional distress (“a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach,” “an ache in my throat,” “a stab in my heart,” Evans, p. 57).

Of course, women can be verbally abusive, too—to men, to other women, and to children.  And habitual verbal abusiveness as a control mechanism can happen in both gay and straight relationships.  But what we are talking about here is the way traditional male socialization can be conducive to an attitude of superiority, privilege, and the right to control and have one’s own way, even if it means coercion by words or actions that deny a woman’s humanness, autonomy, and agency, as in the chant of “No means yes.”

What systems of domination and oppression have in common

In writing about the Yale fraternity incident, Kimberly, you pointed out that the chant ended with a shout that indicated an interlacing of ideologies of male domination with a mindset of nationalist domination.  You concluded:

“Thus, the work we must do as feminists is to analyze how multiple systems of domination function together—in other words, our job is to study gender ideologies as they are interconnected to ideologies about class, race, and country. Religion, of course, is one important place to study how these interconnected systems work together.”

Systems built  on ideologies that promote the rights and privileges of one group, while denying or downplaying the rights and privileges of another group, have this in common:  a failure to practice what most religions teach (but whose adherents often don’t practice themselves), namely, the admonition to treat others as we ourselves want to be treated.  The Jewish and Christian scriptures teach us to “Love our neighbor as ourselves” (Lev. 19:18; Mark 12:28-34).  That requires respect and empathy, which in my January 26, 2010 post I called an antidote to “othering.”   Respect and empathy are counter to the quest for power that promotes domination and oppression.

Closing thoughts

I realize the tone of this letter has been very serious, but I think you and are very much on the same wavelength and I couldn’t help but pick up on what you were feeling in your last letter—perhaps especially strongly because the incident happened on your own campus.

But I wanted to turn to another topic and mention one more thing because it relates so much to two of our previous posts (and maybe many more than that).  Did you happen to hear social historian Stephanie Coontz on NPR’s Fresh Air program last week when she talked about her new book, A Strange Stirring? NPR titled the episode, “Stirring Up ‘The Feminine Mystique’ 47 Years Later.” Try to listen to her interview with Terry Gross if you have a chance.  Also take a look at sociologist Christine Whelan’s piece, “Stirring up the Feminine Mystique for a New Generation,” in Psychology Today in which she discusses Coontz’s book and concludes that “The problem has been named–but not yet solved.”

All of this renewed discussion on the book was of great interest to me, as I’m sure it is to you, Kim, because you and I began this blog in 2008 with our intergenerational dialogue on The Feminist Mystique from the standpoint of one who had lived it and one who had just recently read it 45 years after it was published.  Our readers can find these posts in our archives: The “Feminine Mystique”–Then and Now, Part 1 (Letha) and The “Feminine Mystique”—Then and Now, Part 2 (Kimberly).

Another reason that I was struck by Coontz’s book (which I’m ordering and am looking forward to reading soon) is that she wrote it at the request of her editor for a series her publisher was producing on a history of books that had made some sort of impact. That was fascinating to me, not only because in thinking of biography one doesn’t often think of the history of books, but also because I had just recently started my long talked-about project of writing the story of how Nancy Hardesty and I coauthored our 1974 book, All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to Women’s Liberation. And it was that book, of course, that brought you and me together, Kim, when you were given a copy in 2008 and wrote to me about it.  So in a sense, this blog is the result of the part both books (the one by Friedan and the one by Nancy and me) played in our lives!  That just struck me as I wrote today’s post and thought you’d be interested too.

I look forward to our next phone conversation as well as our continuing correspondence.  It’s always so good to hear all that is happening in your life at Yale Divinity School and about your classes and new insights and the new writing you’re doing. I was so glad to see your piece launching the new “Feminism and Faith” series for Feministing,  Congratulations on its publication!

All for this time.

Love,

Letha

Dear Letha,

I hope you are enjoying the festivities of the holidays. I finished up a rather grueling semester (120 pages written just the last month alone!) and now I am spending time resting up with my family in Washington State. Tonight, a huge snowstorm just blew in! I sit with a cup of tea at my sister’s house, enjoying being warm while the new snow sparkles out the window.

Interconnections: Gender Ideology in Religion and the “Secular”

Letha, in your last letter you wrote about the gender hierarchy and heterosexism that exists within some practices of Christianity, but you also helpfully explained:

This ideological gender construct is not confined to internal disputes within church walls or theological seminaries, nor is it relegated to an earlier time. It comes up constantly in news reports, books, articles, blog discussions, and political decisions of the day—whether they relate to gay marriage, don’t-ask-don’t-tell policies in the military, workplace pay, family planning decisions and more.

I think this point you are making here is important to re-emphasize. The gender ideologies that we want to change within faith communities are not really all that different from the gender hierarchies that exist in so-called “secular” spaces in society. And, therefore, the work that religious feminists are doing is deeply interconnected to the work being done by secular feminists. I have been reminded of these interconnections many times this past semester.

For instance, I remember a day in class when the professor was talking about the gender hierarchies that exist within certain conservative evangelical communities. This particular class was not primarily made up of students studying religion, but rather consisted of students with majors of all kinds. From the look on some of their faces, I suspected that many of them were a bit shocked to hear the kind of gender ideologies that still exist in certain conservative faith communities. After all, when most people hear of religious movements like Quiverfull (as you cited in your last letter), it’s easy to think that the most egregious forms of rigid and harmful gender hierarchy are produced by religion.

But, as we talked in the class about the problems within religious circles, I couldn’t help but think of what had just happened on our own campus. A group of fraternity boys had just “hazed” other fraternity boys by making them chant a sexist, militant, and sexually violent song in front of the Women’s Center on campus. The chant celebrated rape and other horrific things and then ending in cheers for “USA.” A limited portion of the chant (with the words “No means yes, yes means anal”) was caught on you tube and therefore gained a lot of attention.

One of the truly horrifying parts about the whole thing was that Yale took a week to make a statement about what had happened. Even worse, the Yale Daily News ran an article accusing the Women’s Center’s response to the chant as “histrionic.” The article admonished:

Feminists at Yale should remember that, on a campus as progressive as ours, most of their battles are already won: All of us agree on gender equality. The provocateurs knew their audience’s sensibilities and how to offend them for a childish laugh. They went too far. But the Women’s Center should have known better than to paint them as misogynistic strangers and attackers among us, instead of members of our community; after all, they once partied in the brothers’ basement.

Jezebel magazine had a blog posting that took a similar approach in reprimanding feminists for being so upset about the chant. The blog’s title was “Yale Frat Boys are Not Worthy of Your Outrage.” The author concludes the following about the chant:

Sometimes a supposedly satirical comment reveals something deep and fucked-up about the culture that produced it, a not-so-secret belief that whatever’s being presented as humor is in fact the truth. And sometimes a chant is just a chant, a nakedly obvious attempt to piss people off for the sake of pissing people off. Paying too much attention to the latter has a way of trivializing the former — and it also makes us look bad.

If you click on this link to Jezebel’s blog about the chant, you can also read the words of the chant and see the you tube link with the portion caught on tape. Trigger warning, though—the chant is very violent and offensive.

When I read the article in the Yale Daily News and the blog in Jezebel, or reflect on the amount of time it took the president of Yale to make a public statement condemning the event, I realize how many people want to pretend that boys chanting about rape is somehow not deeply interconnected to a greater culture of violence. It was as though the event was merely an exceptional anomaly that we ought not pay much attention to. Seen in this light, feminists then make themselves look bad (according to the Jezebel blog) when they are outraged by “silly” chants.

As I sat in class that day, mentally comparing what had happened on campus and what is taught in some churches regarding male dominance and female submission, I developed a theory. My theory is that it is fairly easy for many of us (especially those of us more on the left) to be rightly appalled by the gender injustice we see in conservative religion. And yet, when evidence of the very same system of gender dominance and oppression is seen within secular society at large (as evidenced by this chant), some institutions will want to ignore that violence as though it is an anomaly in an otherwise “equal” and post-feminist world.

The problem, though, is that college boys chanting rape in front of the Women’s Centers is not something we can dismiss as only an extreme prank by frat boys. The chant is actually evidence telling us a great deal about the socialization of 18-year-old boys. Michael Kimmel has one fascinating take on what the chant can tell us about gender ideologies in our day and age.

While Kimmel makes some really interesting points in his article about the social construction of masculinity, I would also add that the chant reveals much more than gender ideologies. For instance, it’s not a coincidence that the chant ends in cheers for the USA: the lyrics about male domination of women are interlaced with a mindset of nationalist domination. Thus, the chant is an important “text” to remind us that ideologies of masculine domination in this country have always propped up other forms of violence.

Thus, the work we must do as feminists is to analyze how multiple systems of domination function together—in other words, our job is to study gender ideologies as they are interconnected to ideologies about class, race, and country. Religion, of course, is one important place to study how these interconnected systems work together.

Well, Letha, it’s late and I better turn in. As always, I really appreciate having these discussions with you. And thank you again for filling in for me this fall when life got too busy for me to post. I am now going into my last semester at Yale. Can you believe it? These two years have gone by so quickly. I am so thankful for my time at Yale, and I am deeply grateful for you and EEWC’s friendship and support along the way.

With love,

Kimberly

Dear Kimberly,

Since you’re inundated with your Yale studies and deadlines for papers at this busy time of year, I’m happy to help out by writing this month’s post, even though it will mean two posts by “72” in a row.  (I can assure our readers that you, “27,” will be back with another letter in late December. I know they’ll be eager to hear from you.)

Actually, this revised schedule works out well because I had wanted to add some further thoughts to my October post anyway—especially about how the slippery-slope metaphor and similar ones are used as warnings intended to keep people in line.

Fear is the designated sentry guarding boundaries

I thought about such warnings as I watched the new movie Never Let Me Go, which is based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian science fiction novel about children in an English boarding school who are unknowingly destined for a cruel future unlike that of other children. In one scene, a new teacher arrives and watches the children playing a game of cricket. When the ball is batted across a simple wooden picket fence, easily accessible through a gate, the boy chasing it stops short and doesn’t even attempt to retrieve the ball.  The teacher calls another child aside and asks why.  “There was once a boy who ran off beyond boundaries,” the girl replies. “He was found later in the woods with both his hands and feet cut off.”  The teacher asks who told the children these stories. “Everybody knows them” the girl says simply, as though puzzled by the teacher’s seeming naiveté.  The teacher continues her questioning. “How do you know they’re true?”  The girl replies with the assurance of a true believer: “Who would make up stories as horrible as that?”

That scene illustrates how fear-as-a-control-agent works.  The fear is planted in the form of a warning—a warning about particular consequences that will result if a boundary is crossed (“There was once a boy” and look what happened to him!).  Such stories are not questioned but are socially reinforced within the particular community or reference group where the stories were planted (“Everybody knows them.”).  If questioning does occur (“How do you know they’re true?”), the question rather than the belief is considered absurd (“Who would make up stories as horrible as that?”). The question is dismissed rather than mentally entertained or discussed.  Case closed.

And so people are kept in line and become afraid to cross over particular boundaries because they’ve learned that to do so is to court danger.

Of course, missteps and slippery slopes can be dangerous in a literal sense (I just saw the movie, 127 Hours!), but the problem comes when we move away from literal examples and use them as metaphors to discourage honest questioning — particularly, in the case we’re discussing, the question of certain traditional interpretations and applications of biblical passages.  True, there are actual consequences of our actions, but there are also fabricated consequences — warnings about inevitabilities that have no basis in fact but are voiced by those who want to keep others from stepping over certain established boundaries.

Concern about gender boundaries

Perhaps no other boundaries concern conservative Christians as much as boundaries built around gender.  Whatever the metaphor (slippery slope, camel’s nose in the tent, or crossing over fences), you and I both know, Kim, that warnings against violating established gender norms are sounded loudly and often. We’ve both mentioned this in our recent letters about Elisabeth Elliot’s writings.

In this slippery-slope way of thinking, if a person takes one step (acceptance of the idea that women and men are equal and were not created to have separate, divinely-instituted roles), another “downward” step will follow. And soon that person will end up in what such doomsayers consider the worst place of all.  As you pointed out, for Elliot that “worst place” is the acceptance of homosexual relationships.

That same downward-track idea also comes through in the writings of other major writers who likewise espouse patriarchy (although they now prefer to call it by its supposedly softer name, complementarianism, which we’ve already discussed in previous posts).

Wayne Grudem, in his book Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism, describes a series of steps that he considers to show a movement away from biblical truth.  In his model, the slippery-slope slide begins with interpretations of Scripture that advocate women’s ordination and the rejection of male headship in marriage. These steps are followed by a “rejection of anything uniquely masculine” and the endorsement of female terminology for God.  The final step, according to Grudem, “Is the endorsement of the moral legitimacy of homosexuality.” He claims that all of these steps indicate “a rejection of the effective authority of Scripture in people’s lives,” which he calls “the bedrock principle of theological liberalism.”

It’s really about the Bible

Back in 1978, shortly after Virginia Mollenkott and I coauthored the book, Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?, I was invited to be one of two keynote speakers at a conference on Christianity and homosexuality in which contrasting views would be presented.  I was seated on the speakers’ platform next to the other speaker, a professor and administrator from a conservative theological seminary who had been chosen to represent the traditional conservative viewpoint.  As we shared a hymnal, he whispered to me, “As soon as your book All We’re Meant To Be [on the equality of women and men] was published a few years ago, I said to my wife that your next book would be on homosexuality.” (The music had started, so I didn’t have a chance to ask what he meant and why he predicted that — although I was puzzled, because at the time the first edition of All We’re Meant to Be was published [1974], neither my coauthor, Nancy Hardesty, nor I would have considered writing a book on homosexuality.)

In my innocence at the time the theologian made that remark, I thought that maybe his statement to his wife meant that once a person interpreted the Bible to teach that God respected the full personhood of all human beings as equal in worth and dignity and that all oppressed groups should be lifted up, then it would be only logical to realize that LGBT people should also not be regarded as lesser human beings any more than women should be so considered.  Jesus had taught us to love our neighbor as ourselves and not to lord it over others.

But I should have realized the theologian was engaged in slippery-slope thinking instead, and rather than having seen my writing as a desire to lift up, he was thinking of it in terms of sliding down—that I taken the first step (feminism) toward slipping away from the authority of Scripture (or more accurately, his interpretation of Scripture).

Similarly, Marry Kassian in her book, The  Feminist Gospel: The Move to Unite Feminism with the Church(later published as The Feminine Mistake), sees a trajectory of “namings” centered around a woman’s agency and experience — first, a woman’s assumption that she has a right to name or identify herself and her place in creation; next, a right to name the world (including seeing patriarchy as a systemic problem); and finally, a right to name God (including what Kassian calls “the feminization of God”).  Like Elliot and Grudem, Kassian concludes that “Feminism is a slippery slope that leads toward a total alteration or rejection of the Bible.”

Persons of this persuasion see only one way to interpret the Bible—a hierarchical view.  Homosexuality is therefore feared because a model in which two persons who are committed to each other in a same-sex relationship is seen as destroying the hierarchal model of heterosexual marriage in which one sex (males) are divinely ordained to be dominant over the other sex (females).  To question that model is seen as an attempt to destroy what they consider a sacrosanct theological system built on hierarchy, which insists that males and females were designed by God to fulfill distinct, designated roles.

Gender in the news today

This ideological gender construct is not confined to internal disputes within church walls or theological seminaries, nor is it relegated to an earlier time. It comes up constantly in news reports, books, articles,  blog discussions, and political decisions of the day—whether they relate to gay marriage, don’t-ask-don’t-tell policies in the military, workplace pay, family planning decisions and more. Another example is the recent article, “Housewives of God,” that appeared in the New York Times magazine November 12.  Shortly afterward, the Ms Blog used the article as a take-off point for telling us more about the new patriarchy and complementarianism. (See “I Am Biblical Woman, Hear Me Roar” by Kathryn Joyce, author of the 2009 book, Quiverfull: Inside the Biblical Patriarchy Movement.)

One of the most extreme examples of beliefs about masculinity was presented in a commentary by Bryan Fischer, an official in the right-wing American Family Association, who complains that the Medal of Honor is being “feminized.” After President Obama recently awarded the medal to a brave soldier for risking his own life to save others, Fischer wrote: “When are we going to start awarding the Medal of Honor once again for soldiers who kill people and break things so our families can sleep safely at night? I would suggest our culture has become so feminized that we have become squeamish at the thought of the valor that is expressed in killing enemy soldiers through acts of bravery.”

Adam Weinstein of Mother Jones has written an incisive commentary about Fischer’s remarks, showing how far removed they are from the teachings of Jesus.

Why so much talk about gender hierarchy and slippery slope dangers?

The big concern among many who are disturbed by the questioning of a society’s gender norms is that social order will be disturbed and chaos will result.  Especially when religious authority is viewed as the keeper of order, there must be an insistence on conformity because such order is viewed as God’s will.

I don’t know If you had a chance to view the recent PBS series, God in America (available for viewing online), Kimberly, but if you did, you probably noticed how often this same issue arose from the time the first European settlers came to America, beginning with Anne Hutchinson’s daring to say she had had a personal experience with God and Scripture independent of what the clergy taught.  She thus saw nothing wrong with holding Bible studies in her home. As you know from your own studies, she went to trial (the trial is partially reenacted in the PBS series), and when she insisted on her right to understand and teach Scripture, she and her family were banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  Then came along the great revivals of George Whitefield which also met with disapproval from church authorities.  The TV program’s narrator had this to say: “Like Anne Hutchinson, Whitefield had fallen afoul of a religious authority that distrusted any message that gave an individual power over their religious experience.”

The narrator’s voiceover comment is followed by the onscreen appearance of Yale Divinity School professor Harry S. Stout. (Is he one of your professors, Kim?)  Stout explained, “They were still part of a view of the world as a world divided between superiors and inferiors, and you had to know your place. And if you didn’t know your place, order would break down and all chaos would ensue.  Whitefield smelled the dissolution of the old aristocratic order. He saw what had been was not what was going to be” (from Hour One, “A New Adam,” God in America).

This same thing has happened over and over in church history.  And it is happening now as women and men realize they were not created to be confined to stay in their respective places but to be supportive of each other in living up to their full potential within their homes, their work, their public activities, and their faith.

We need different metaphors to encourage questioning

Many girls and women, particularly those from conservative religious backgrounds, wonder how they can be true to their faith and yet not be afraid to ask questions that arise from their own experiences that don’t fit with what they have been taught the Bible says about gender roles.  Will considering another viewpoint or biblical interpretation damage their relationship with God?  Should they worry that their questioning will begin a slide down a dangerous slippery slope that will take them far away from God?

First, I really believe what the hymnwriter said about God’s love, It is a “Love that Will Not Let Me Go.” We have a God who holds on to us “with kindness and with love, not with rope” (Hosea 11:4, CEV), a God who “keeps us from falling” (Jude 24).

Second, our questioning need not lead us away from God; it can in fact do just the opposite. It can strengthen our love for God and our sense of wonder as we open the minds God gave us to come to new understandings and insights about what it means to know, love, and serve God.  Our questions can lead to new truths that energize us to work to bring justice and compassion to the world.

I really think we need to move away from slippery-slope thinking and find new metaphors for our questioning and where our questions can lead.  We need to help women — young women especially — to move away from a fear-based faith fed by certain religious teachings that hold them back from being all that they were meant to be. (Many religious teachings and approaches not only hold young people back, but perhaps even more often, they drive young people away. See one minister’s analysis of why.)

One alternative metaphor to the slippery-slope concept could focus on building up rather than sliding down. We can think in terms of a construction site rather than a dangerous mountain crevice.  Our faith can be viewed as a solid foundation, dug into the rock, and our new understandings can be part of a strong edifice built upon that strong foundation rather than something that will destroy it.

Another metaphor is that of growth. We can think of our faith as a sturdy, growing tree, watered and nourished by God’s loving care so that we, “being rooted and grounded in love, will be able to grasp fully the breadth, length, height, and depth of Christ’s love and, with all God’s holy ones, experience this love that surpasses all understanding, so that [we] may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (From Ephesians 3:17-19, The Inclusive Bible).  The tree metaphor is a very biblical one, of course (see Psalm 1).

Questioning, stretching our minds, and always learning is an exciting way to live.  I know you realize that, Kimberly, and you live it!  I hope both of us can help others to do the same.

In the warm bonds of friendship,

Letha