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

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

Dear Kimberly,

You and I are so much on the same wave length and such good friends that I can’t recall our ever disagreeing, even though we’ve discussed innumerable topics by phone, letter, email, in person, and on this blog.  But this time I’m going to take issue with your Feb. 28 post.  I felt your critique was a bit too hard on Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique.

When Friedan was writing

As you know, Kim, we’ve often talked on this blog about the time period in which Friedan was writing (as in, for example, my Sept. 8, 2008 and Sept. 19, 2008 posts)—a time that is very real to me because I lived it. I don’t think anyone can fully appreciate what Betty Friedan was trying to do in her book without taking into consideration the gender expectations of the 1950s and 1960s.

To criticize her for not addressing the broader interrelated concerns of other social inequities and economic injustices isn’t really fair; it pulls her book out of the context in which it was written, including the audience to whom it was addressed.

Why the book doesn’t speak to you today

At the same time, I really do understand why it no longer speaks to you as a Third Wave feminist in the 21st century.

First, because it wasn’t written for the world your generation is encountering but rather for an important segment of my Second Wave feminist world, which is where it had its greatest impact.

And second because you are constantly learning, growing, and stretching your mind—as a Christian, as a feminist, and as an all-around brilliant, gifted young woman.  You have simply outgrown the book, my friend, and you have learned so much more since you read it just a few years ago (which was around the time we started this blog in 2008).  So much has changed in your life since then, including these past two years of studying at Yale Divinity School.   Understandably, you find that much of the book is dated, and certain particulars are inapplicable to our world today—or, more specifically, simply don’t go far enough.

This is a perennial problem for authors in a rapidly changing world—even after a book has had a major impact and helped catalyze changes at a particular time.  As you know from reading the serialized story I’ve been writing about Nancy Hardesty’s and my coauthoring our 1974 book, All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to Women’s Liberation, we did not stop at one edition. We revised our book twice to incorporate some of the later biblical and theological scholarship, social science research, feminist theory, gender studies, and current concerns at the time each of the three editions was written. The third edition (1992) was extensively revised, expanded, and updated.

Times change, circumstances change, and we as people change.  But, of course, books can’t keep being revised for ever.  We need new books to be written.  And I hope you’ll be writing some of them, Kimberly.

The audience

It’s also important to be aware of Friedan’s audience at the time she was writing.  Yes, it’s true; she was for the most part addressing middle-class women— the actual or aspiring “Betty Drapers” of the 1960s United States suburbs, perhaps married to men like those depicted in the Mad Men television series.  These were women who were told by the culture of the times that they were living a fairy-tale “happily ever after” life—even though so many of them felt strangely empty inside.  Each woman who experienced the “problem that has no name”—as Friedan called it—blamed herself and wondered what was wrong with her.  Why wasn’t she happy?  Why did she feel such discontent?  What more could she desire?  Didn’t she have a husband who loved and provided for her and the children? Didn’t she live in the house of her dreams?  Didn’t she own the latest appliances?  What more could she possibly want?  The very fact that she wanted something more (more of what? she wondered) made her feel guilty, ungrateful, selfish.

A problem deeper than socioeconomic class

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.

But what we must keep in mind in reading that first page of the Feminine Mystique is that the life described was not necessarily what the women in Friedan’s audiencewanted.  Rather, it was the message that those who were considered the experts were telling the women that they should want.  And many women following such advice found themselves feeling empty inside.

(I’m reminded of a line in an Ingmar Bergman film of the early 1970s, where Marianne, some time after a divorce, writes in her journal that she was surprised to realize she didn’t know who she was, that she had always done what people told her, always tried to be agreeable.  “I have never thought: What do I want?  But always: What does hewant me to want? It’s not unselfishness as I used to think, but sheer cowardice, and what’s worse—utter ignorance of who I am.” (From “Scenes from a Marriage,” in Ingmar Bergman, The Marriage Scenarios, Pantheon Books, 1974, English Translation by Alan Blair, pp.122-23.)

At the time that Betty Friedan wrote, the popular culture of the times was stressing that each woman was supposed to glory in a certain image of femininity (as the experts defined that term). Fulfilling that image was considered a natural part of having been born female.  She was expected to want what others “wanted her to want,” namely, to fulfill her destiny as a wife and mother—a destiny that was far more than a role (one that was parallel to the role of husband and father as only one part of life) but as the driving force comprising the whole of her life.  And she was given instructions about how to live out that destiny. In a consumption-driven society, advertisers especially delighted in telling her what they “wanted her to want.”

I think of the lines from the movie Marty when bachelor Marty, who lives with his mother, brings a young woman home to meet his widowed mother.  Suddenly, the mother is struck by the thought that Marty might marry and leave her alone with nothing to do but wait to die.  “Your children grow up and then, what is left for you to do? What is a mother’s life but her children?” she says.  She feels it is essential for a woman to have a house to clean and a family to cook for. What is there when that is gone?  “These are the terrible years for a mother,” she says.

Wanting something more

Women who wanted something more were considered neurotic and destined for unhappiness.  The women’s magazines  were filled with advice about how to go about living out a certain image of womanhood—what Friedan termed the “feminine mystique”—day  by day.

Friedan had worked for these magazines and knew well the audience they were reaching. In the 1985 introduction to her collection of writings titled, It Changed My Life, Friedan explains both her purpose and her intended readership.  “I started to writeThe Feminine Mystique because the very assumptions of the articles I was then writing for women’s magazines no longer rang true to me—though I, as other women in America, was living my life according to these assumptions” (p.xx).

Religious institutions reinforced these ideas about womanhood by insisting this was “God’s will.”  Physical and mental health professionals in large part bolstered these ideas by telling women that the emptiness they felt while trying to conform to societal expectations could be alleviated by accepting—and yielding to—the prevailing “feminine mystique” and not resisting it.

In other words, just wanting to be human was considered to be a rebellious act against this mystical quality supposedly endowed by nature that automatically made women’s yearnings for learning and achievement different from those of men.  It was that limited construct, that image of what girls and women were expected to be and think and do, that Friedan had in mind in speaking of a “feminine mystique.”

Human personhood and dignity

At its root, the problem being addressed was far greater than whether or not a particular woman had a choice about working outside the home or being a full-time homemaker supported by a husband whose single income was sufficient to provide such support.  I think Friedan’s far deeper point had to do with the core of a woman’s being as a human being.

You and I have talked about this again and again, Kim.  And so have others over time.  In 1790, under the penname “Constantia,” Judith Murray wrote an essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” for Massachusetts Magazine in which she challenged prevailing attitudes.

Should it still be vociferated, “Your domestick employments are sufficient”—I would calmly ask, is it reasonable, that a candidate for immortality, for the joys of heaven, an intelligent being, who is to spend an eternity in contemplating the works of Deity, should at present be so degraded, as to be allowed no other ideas, than those which are suggested by the mechanism of a pudding, or the sewing of the seams of a garment?  Pity that all such censurers of female improvement do not go one step further, and deny their future existence; to be consistent they surely ought.  (As quoted in Aileen S. Kraditor, ed., Up from the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism. Quadrangle Books, paperback edition, 1970, p. 34.)

In the 19th century, Lucy Stone expressed similar thoughts about what women were told was to be their extremely limited role in life. She, too, argued that conformity to that image contradicted a woman’s humanness as it was intended by the Creator.

I know not what you believe of God, but I believe He gave yearnings and longings to be filled, and that He did not mean all our time should be devoted to feeding and clothing the body. (From Stone’s extemporaneous speech at the 1855 National Woman’s Rights Convention in Cincinnati. Quoted in Kraditor, p. 73.)

Underlying all such arguments that countered prevailing gender norms was the key ideathat persons born female were born to be fully autonomous human beings no less than were men and should be so recognized and respected. This whole issue has to do with human personhood and dignity.

The former slave, Sojourner Truth, was making that same point (and, indirectly, many other points as well) in her powerful “Ain’t I a Woman” speech at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851.

Regardless of which version of that speech is the more historically accurate, its intent was clear.  If what the clergyman, who had stood up in the meeting, had said about women were true—that women were delicate, fragile beings that needed help climbing into and out of carriages and must be given a high place on a pedestal just by virtue of being female, then what about her?  How could she, Sojourner Truth, be explained?  Wasn’t she a woman?  Surely that was proven by her having given birth to many children.  But no one helped her in and out of carriages.

She held up her muscular arm and declared that she had done all types of hard heavy physical labor expected of men and that no man could have done it better or shown greater strength and ability.

And she had been required to do such work while regarded as the property of a slaveholder who had sold her children into slavery as well.  She had borne the lashes of a whip.  She had experienced oppression doubly—even triply—on the basis of her gender, her race, and her social class (no class could be lower than a slave who was considered property!). Nothing fragile or delicate about her!  Her experience put to rest the idea that by nature a woman was to be identified in a certain way and should be expected to act in conformity to that delicate “feminine” way.

The women at the conference reportedly cheered her on.  The movement for women’s rights had, after all, grown out of the abolition movement.  Abolishing slavery, abolishing discrimination against women—the two were interrelated.  And Sojourner Truth’s personal experience of womanhood, coupled with her experience as an enslaved black person, demonstrated the issue of intersectionality long before the concept was recognized or the word used.  And at the core of it all was the matter of human dignity.

But, of course, no one likely saw it in quite that “intersectional”way at the time.  And later, we even see some of those working for women’s suffrage actually distancing themselves from African Americans and their rights rather than risk alienating whites who might aid in winning the vote for women if the movement were kept “pure” and separate from black rights.

Kimberly, I know this is where much of your criticism of Friedan’s book comes in.

What Betty Friedan didn’t do

It’s true that Friedan in 1963 did not provide a critique of so many other social inequities she could have discussed, nor did she specifically address issues of race and class.  And you were understandably disturbed that she seemed to suggest that by using the all-encompassing word women, she seemed to think she was speaking to and for all women rather than just addressing the white, educated, privileged middle-class women whom the book seemed to hold up as the norm.

Your criticism is well taken, Kim.  As Stephanie Coontz points out in her insightful analysis of Friedan’s work from the vantage point of nearly half a century after its publication, such judgments were already being voiced by some readers even at the time of publication (Coontz, A Strange Stirring, 2011, p. 105).  One of the first was Gerda Lerner, who herself would later  shed new  light on women’s history through her own noteworthy scholarship and writings.  Shortly after Friedan’s book was published, Lerner wrote a personal letter to Friedan, praising the book for what it did do, while at the same time calling into question what it did not do.  She said her one reservation about how Friedan addressed the subject was its attention solely to college-educated, middle-class women while ignoring less privileged women, especially black women, who were disadvantaged not only by the feminine mystique but by the economic opportunity system as well.  Lerner pointed out that the same mistake was made in the suffrage movement and, in her opinion, hindered the advancement of women which needs the work of women from all demographics.

At the same time, perhaps we should not read too much into Friedan’s narrower focus.  It does not necessarily mean she was unconcerned about these larger social inequities.  She may simply have made an editorial decision to use this particular book to reach the audience she had addressed during her days of writing for women’s magazines, while also being aware that the book couldn’t cover all that it could have covered.  Coontz writes that “in early drafts of The Feminine Mystique, she drew parallels between the prejudices against those of women and those against African Americans and Jews” (p.104).

Friedan and Minorities

Friedan also worked with African American activists such as Dorothy Height, whom  we’ve discussed (including links) on this blog before. Height believed in forging coalitions and saw women’s causes as encompassing both African American and white women, saying they had much in common.  Thus, Betty Friedan, along with Dorothy Height, Shirley Chisholm, and Gloria Steinem, helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971, a mentioned in most obituaries when Dorothy Height died last year.  (See here, here, and here.)

Friedan was especially a product of her time in regard to homosexuality, as various statements in her book illustrate. I, as someone who has written books and spoken a great deal about acceptance, inclusiveness, and respect for LGBTQ persons, of course found it troubling to read of her unwelcoming attitude toward lesbians as part of the women’s movement—particularly in the early days of the National Organization for Women (NOW).  However, Betty Friedan did change her attitude later.

In reading homophobic statements in The Feminine Mystique, such as Friedan’s reference to “the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky fog over the American scene,” it’s important that we keep in mind the way homosexuality was regarded in the 1960s.

I don’t know whether or not you had a chance to watch the PBS American Experiencepresentation of “The Stonewall Uprising” recently, but it’s very revealing in terms of today’s changing attitudes toward LGBTQ people as compared to the times in which Friedan was writing.  The PBS program included actual clips from documentary-type films of the 1960s, among them the 1967 CBS Reports special program titled “The Homosexuals,” which painted an especially scary picture of homosexual persons, pointing out how the law, mental health professionals, and religion at that time were united in viewing gay men and lesbians as unspeakably evil or sick.

(You can view the PBS “Stonewall Uprising” program online. Most of the clips from 1960s films that were intended to educate the public on the supposed dangers of homosexuality are featured in the first 20 minutes.)  Since most gay and lesbian people were of necessity remaining closeted at the time, the American people for the most part were not knowingly acquainted with gay and lesbian persons—so they either thought little about the topic or else believed what the media and religious institutions were telling them.  It’s important to keep that in mind in reading some of Friedan’s statements on the topic. It does not excuse them, but it explains them.

What Friedan accomplished

But rather than thinking about what Friedan didn’t do, we need to appreciate what shedid do.  She tapped into something that was bothering a considerable number of women in the 1950s,1960s, and into the1970s, causing them to experience intense self doubt, lowered self-esteem, and a sense of emptiness and discontent, feelings that they could neither explain nor name but that made them feel alone and left them wondering if something were wrong with them.

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.

It was an “aha” moment for countless women—women who saw they could give themselves permission to have independent interests beyond homemaking and childcare, as important as these responsibilities were.  And it empowered women to believe they could complete or increase their education, find new outlets for their talents, realize their right to be complete human beings, and see themselves in a new light.

Some insights from Stephanie Coontz in A Strange Stirring

Stephanie Coontz was able to see this tremendous impact of the book as she recently surveyed 188 women and men, later conducting interviews with some of them as well.  They and countless others can recall how The Feminine Mystique affected them when they read it more than 45 years ago.  It was a book written for its time—not ahead of it, and it accomplished its major mission.  As Coontz wrote:

It in no way disparages Friedan’s accomplishments to point out that The Feminine Mystique was not ahead of its time.  Books don’t become best sellers because they are ahead of their time. They become best sellers when they tap into concerns that people are already mulling over, pull together ideas and data that have not yet spread beyond specialists and experts, and bring these all together in a way that is easy to understand and explain to others.  (Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, Basic Books, 2011, p. 145.)

Coontz shows how Friedan achieved all this.  (That paragraph is also a good way to think about successful non-fiction writing.)

I highly recommend Coontz’s book, Kimberly.  Maybe you’ll have some time to read it this summer with your coursework out of the way.  She shares some remarkable stories about women, as well as some men, who read the book around the time of its publication. And she sets the stage by opening her book with a detailed description of the enormous legal and societal obstacles women had to face at the time Friedan wrote, which explains why The Feminine Mystique was such a welcome relief and sign of hope for so many.

But Coontz also is totally in tune with your response as a Third Wave feminist.  She said her  students reacted similarly after she had assigned the book for a college class. They saw it as outdated and unrelated to their concerns in today’s world—except for one chapter, Friedan’s chapter titled, “The Sexual Sell.”   Coontz said her students really resonated with the message of that chapter. “Almost all testified to the pressures they felt not only to buy consumer goods but to present themselves as objects to be consumed” (A Strange Stirring, p. 177).  Did that chapter in Friedan’s book stand out for you, too?

Your thoughts?

I’ll look forward to hearing any further thoughts you might have on all this, Kim.  I’m thinking about you a lot at this exciting time as you look forward to your graduation this month with a Master’s degree from Yale Divinity School.  I’m tremendously proud of you and happy for you!  You’ve accomplished so much!

I also want to apologize to our readers for my long delay in replying to your last post, which has thrown the 72-27 blog off the monthly schedule we were trying to keep.  As you, Kimberly, and many of our readers already know, my coauthor of All We’re Meant to Be, Nancy Hardesty, died last month.  As the cancer metastasized and her condition worsened quite rapidly the last couple of months, I had been putting much of my writing time into trying to finish writing the backstory of our coauthorship of the book while she was still with us. Nancy and I started writing our book only six years after Betty Friedan wrote hers, so some of the readers of 72-27 might wish to read that backstory, too (including some of Nancy’s and my correspondence and photos from those times).  The backstory, “Coauthoring All We’re Meant to Be,” is told in serial form on my “Letha’s Calling” blog that is part of my personal website.

That’s all for this time.  Again, heartiest congratulations on your graduation, Kim!

In loving friendship,
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

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

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

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

After reading your September 14 post, I purchased Elisabeth Elliot’s Passion and Purity. I didn’t want to discuss something that I hadn’t even read!

As you know, I had read all of Elliot’s books about her missionary work and many of her other writings from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s; and she and I had kept up an occasional personal correspondence for ten years. But I had not read this particular book, nor even knew about it, until you and I started writing to each other.

I remember your telling me about how much the book had meant to you during your teenage years when conservative Christian leaders were urging young people to embrace its teachings “as though it were right up there next to the Bible.”  And judging from many of the comments on the Web right now (for example, on sites selling books and soliciting readers’ reviews), Passion and Purity is still similarly esteemed by many. So it was interesting to hear how different your feelings were upon rereading the book as an adult.

So much to talk about

There is so much we could talk about now that I have read the book, too; but three main topics jumped out especially:

1. Human sexuality in relation to our Christian faith

2. The paradigm that informs Elliot’s worldview and explains much of her opposition to gender equality

3. “Slippery slope” arguments and fears

Then and Now

Also, because you and I, Kimberly, as two women born almost a half century apart, are engaging in an intergenerational dialogue, I thought I might be able to provide some generational perspective on Elliot.  She is essentially part of my generation, having been born just nine years before I was, and we had similar backgrounds in our understanding of the Christian life. Yet, as you know, she and I have gone in very different directions on gender equality and other issues. It might help to have some background.

Sexuality and God

I’m guessing that one reason Passion and Purity was so meaningful to you as a teenager was its message that our Creator is a personal God who cares about every part of us, including our sexuality, and that we can prayerfully seek God’s guidance in all aspects of our  lives.  I believe that, too. This image of God is not a punitive one, but rather a view of God as tender, wise, and caring—a God who wants the best for us.

When you read the book this time, however, parts of it struck you differently because I think you ran into some of the problems that occur when an author uses her or his own life story as a vehicle for moral advice and urges others to follow the same model.  Reading it with new eyes made you aware of some attitudes  and actions you definitely didn’t like.

For me, reading the book was like a journey back in time—a time before TV discussions about casual hook-ups or movies showing couples expecting to hop into bed together almost immediately upon meeting—sometimes before they knew each other’s names. A time before communication occurred through texting, the Internet,  short “tweets,” and social networking.  A time when many couples who, while preparing for mission work and other ministries, found their friendships deepening into love just when they would be facing long separations and would be able to communicate only through lengthy letters, as was true of Jim and Elisabeth.

Letters were a way to express both feelings for the loved one and one’s own personal faith journey.  They helped many couples to get to know each other on a deep level, in spite of frequently long intervals between letters.  Often mail had to be transported over great distances, such as when Elisabeth and Jim were separated by the Andes mountains and carriers traveled on foot or on horseback. (Unfortunately, apart from these natural physical barriers, as you pointed out, it was Jim who controlled the courtship and was the major decision-maker about whether, when, and how often the couple corresponded or got together, regardless of how his “Bett” felt about it—a pattern she accepted as part of the paradigm she espouses. More about that later.)

Memories of another era

In reading the story, I couldn’t help but reminisce, however.  I was a student at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago about seven years after Jim and Betty had met at Wheaton College (Illinois), so there was an overlap in both our time periods and the Christian fundamentalist culture we moved in.

I, like many others who were studying in conservative Christian schools at the time, was memorizing the same hymns, reading many of the same devotional readings as Elisabeth quoted, and applying many of the same Bible verses to my life. And I have a box of similar letters exchanged between my future husband and me, illustrating how romance and spiritual life were personally intertwined and discussed in depth.  So, as you can probably see, much of the book was very familiar to me.

Like Elisabeth Elliot, I remember hearing a guest lecture on sexuality by the Rev. Stephen Olford, a prominent preacher and orator at the time. I remember his telling Moody students that we should forget about embarking on any kind of ministry unless we had a complete answer before God about our sex lives.  (In view of the sex scandals among all too many Christian leaders in our own time, that would seem to be sound advice!)

What evangelical young adults were reading

There weren’t a lot of conservative Christian books on the topic available during that time, but just as you read Passion and Purity as a young person in the 1990s, Kimberly, many young persons of the late 1940s and 1950s tended to look for guidance in two slim books, both coincidentally published in 1948:Heirs Together: A Christian Approach to the Privileges and Responsibilities of Sex, published by the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, and The Sanctity of Sex, published by Good News Publishers.

(The assumption in most materials published at that time was that everyone was heterosexual.  Homosexuality was seldom discussed and not at all understood; and if it ever was mentioned, it was called a terrible sin that faithful Christians would avoid.  But attitudes in the secular society at that time were no better.)

For real-life examples of a Christ-centered courtship, we drew inspiration from books such as The Triumph of John and Betty Stam, the story of a young couple who had met at Moody Bible Institute, served together as missionaries in China, and were killed by the Chinese Communists in 1934.

“Higher life” teachings as they were applied to romantic relationships

The particular “brand” of evangelicalism that both I and the Elliots experienced was rooted in the British Keswick holiness movement taught at the Keswick convention in England’s Lake District. The emphasis was on what was known as the “higher life” or “deeper spiritual living.”

Thinking back on this and analyzing what we learned and absorbed through this influence, I see that when it was applied to issues of love, romance, and sexuality, the Keswick model primarily emphasized these principles:

• concern about finding God’s will in the choices of both Christian service and the right life partner,
• an expectation that there would be spiritual struggles while making these decisions,
• caution lest we fall into idolatry by exalting the loved one to a higher place than God in our lives,
• the practice of self-discipline and deferred gratification in the physical expression of love.

You can see all of these standards coming through in Passion and Purity as Elisabeth Elliot recounts her and Jim’s courtship.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that their experience was really not that unusual in this particular evangelical subculture. Many of us followed similar  guidelines in which couples, moving toward marriage, first kissed each other at the moment they became engaged. (I don’t recall, however, ever hearing any teaching quite as extreme as is promoted in the 1998 Dave Christiano Christian film,“Pamela’s Prayer,” where a young girl is constantly admonished by her father to steer clear of even so much as a kiss until the minister at the wedding ceremony pronounces, “You may now kiss the bride.”)

The 1948 book mentioned earlier, The Sanctity of Sex, for example, was a bit more realistic in suggesting that the engagement period should be not only a time of deepening friendship and growing knowledge of each other, but also “the time to discuss in a prudent and godly manner, matters of sex; so that the final experience of marriage brings no shock, but is the physical consummation of the spiritual unity already established. . . .A measure of caressing and petting is legitimate, but beware of one touch leading to another and of any handling or stimulating of the erogenic zones. . . .Let each betrothed pair enjoy the sacred liberty of courtship in its pure and fullest measure, but keep watch also for the moment when the least suspicion of embarrassment arises” (p. 59). Exactly where the lines would be drawn would be up to the couple, not by a formula or prescribed set of rules.

As you can see, this was a very different world from the social and sexual culture of today.

Paradigms

You said you were troubled by the controlling attitude Jim Elliot displayed in Passion and Purity, and you wondered how Elisabeth could acquiesce so readily to his delays, demands, and criticisms in spite of feeling hurt.  Some of that deference comes from the way certain Scripture passages were interpreted to teach male headship and female subordination. But much of it comes from her own embellishment of such teachings, laying the groundwork for the incorporation of specific extra-biblical sources she appears to have added over the years.

“Mutual submission (God knew when He set up His hierarchy) will not work,” Elisabeth declared in her scathing critique of the first Evangelical Women’s Caucus conference in Washington, DC in 1975. She had attended and covered the gathering as a correspondent for The Cambridge Fish, a quarterly newspaper of conservative Christian commentary then published in Massachusetts by a group called the Cambridge Fish Fellowship.  They took their title from the fish symbol used by early Christians as a secret code to identify themselves as followers of Jesus.  In her article about the conference, she wrote:

For the tremendous hierarchical vision of blessedness—often compared to a Dance in which initiation and response are the movements—the feminist substitutes a vision of blessedness which holds all human beings on a level plan—a faceless, colorless, sexless wasteland where rule and submission are regarded as a curse, where fulfillment depends on the denial of that “graduated splendor” which we see in all creation, of which the differentiation of male and female is earth’s most splendid.  (From“Feminism or Femininity,”Cambridge Fish, Winter, 1975-1976, p.6 ).

Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, a literature professor and noted Milton scholar and author, responded in the next issue. She pointed out that Elisabeth Elliot’s views in that article were “based far more on Medieval and Renaissance Neoplatonism than on the Bible. And particularly in her assertion that God knew mutual submission would not work, she has placed herself in overt contradiction to the entire emphasis of the New Testament where human relationships are concerned” (Cambridge Fish, Spring/Summer, 1976, p. 3).

Dr. Mollenkott was referring to a paradigm embraced by Elliot, a paradigm rooted in ideas of Plato and Aristotle, which by the medieval and Renaissance periods had developed into a vision of the social order as a mirror reflecting the supposed hierarchical order of the universe.

Chains

Understanding that paradigm can help us understand the whole system on which Elliot bases her ideas of male-female relationships and why she is so adamantly opposed to feminism.  Take away the paradigm and everything falls apart.

The paradigm, sometimes called the “scale of nature,” or “the Great Chain of Being”  (see Arthur Lovejoy’s classic book by that title), offered a picture of the cosmos as a great chain stretched between heaven and earth, with graduated links from Perfection (in religious terms, God) down through the lowest possible form above nothingness.

The idea was popular into the 18th century and was used to justify an unequal social order by appealing to the claim that “the universe is a system whose very essence consists in subordination,” as Soame Jenyns wrote in 1757.

“According to this conception,” explained C.S. Lewis in his Preface to Paradise Lost, “. . . . Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.”

This “chain” metaphor was used in preserving economic and social inequality, including justifying slavery and the concept of racial inferiority.  Divine Providence was said to have designed a place for every created entity, and it would be violation of that divine order to leave one’s designated place out of a desire to enjoy equality with those assigned a higher place on the scale.  (For more about this, see my essay, “The Great Chain of Being and the Chain of Command,” in Kalven and Buckley’s 1984 book,Women’s Spirit Bonding.)

The Re-emergence of the “Chain of Being” Idea

What does all this have to do with Elisabeth Elliot?  Because we need to recognize the infusion of the chain-of-being philosophy into her writings, even when she is claiming to be presenting “what the Bible says.”

You can see this in her “graduated splendor” comment in the Cambridge Fish article quoted above.  You can see it in Passion and Purity where she claims, “We all crave order, design, harmony. The way we live and behave ought to have some congruence with the fundamental order of the universe.”  To make her point, she adds, “Is it significant at all, we may ask, that it has, until very recently, seemed incongruous for women to lead and men to follow?”  In her mind, female leadership is a violation of the hierarchical pattern of the cosmos.

We see the influence of her philosophical model when she says everything in life stands for or represents something else, serving as a kind of mirror reflecting a divine order.  We see the paradigm’s influence again when she says men were created to initiate and lead, and women were created to respond and follow—and that this principle means that a woman should not even ask a male friend out for coffee. The man must always be the initiator.   She even claims that such an initiation-response distinction is built into the design of the male and female reproductive organs.

She is teaching a particular system of thought as though it is a biblical mandate.

In Sunday school curriculum that she wrote in 1975, she was explicit. She spoke of God’s establishment of  “a hierarchy of beings under God” from the highest order of angels through “paramecia and microbes and who knows what yet undiscovered beings? Every creature is assigned its proper position on the scale.”

I referred to this material in my chapter in Women’s Spirit Bonding, where I wrote:

She emphasizes that “every creature—whether the horned ox or the scaled fish, the man or woman, the clam or the archangel—glorifies God by being what it is, by living up to God’s original idea when he made it.” Elliot says that she understands that “women, by creation, have been given a place within the human level which is ancillary to that of men,. . .an inferior place within the human locus.” She hastens to point out that by “inferior” she is referring to position and not worth.    (Excerpt from Letha Dawson Scanzoni, “The Great Chain of Being and the Chain of Command,” in Women’s Spirit Bonding, edited by Janet Kalven and Mary Buckley, Pilgrim Press, 1984, p.45, quoting Elisabeth Elliot Leitch, I Am Somebody, a curriculum booklet for the Sunday school Lifestyle Course series published by David C. Cook Publishing Company, 1975. [For a short time, she added her second husband’s surname, Leitch, though later dropped it to return to her own better-known name.])

A revival of the “chain of being” type of thinking seems to occur in times of social change—when the status quo is questioned and hierarchical arrangements are challenged by efforts to implement justice and equality.  Some variation of it may emerge in different forms.  I’m sure you can think of ways this philosophical outlook figures into aspects of the economic, religious, and political situation today.

Slippery slope anxieties

Those who want a static view of social order, with a designated place for everything and everything in its place and who operate on the assumption that all the answers are already in, do not encourage questioning.

So in an attempt to prevent change, they will often use another metaphor, “the slippery slope.”  Dare to question the foreordained-place-for-everything idea, abandon this or any other paradigm or a particular biblical interpretation, suggest a new way to think about something, and you will slide down a slippery slope leading to __________.  The blank may be filled in with words assumed to incite the most alarm among particular  groups in different times and places.  It’s a scare tactic—a method of control.

In a future discussion, I hope you and I can talk more about how the slippery slope argument operates — especially among many conservative evangelical Christians, as some of our readers noted with their excellent comments after your most recent post, Kim. I had hoped to talk about that right now, but space will not permit all that I would like to say.

But I do want to say this: You mentioned in that post that you were especially appalled at Elliot’s claim that feminism can lead to homosexuality, incest, and bestiality, and in essence eventually leads to the fall of the universe. As you pointed out, such statements bear false witness against both feminists and lesbian and gay persons. It is sad to see this tactic used again and again to warn people away from feminism while also at the same time vilifying LGBT people. Such vilification is all the more disturbing in view of the recent reports of so many tragic suicides by gay young people.  I hope you’ve had a chance to watch the video of the gay city councilman in Fort Worth who tearfully told his own story because he wanted to offer hope and help to young people who are bullied and harassed because of their sexual orientation.

On a related note, I noticed in another  book by Elisabeth Elliot that you told me about (The Mark of a Man: Following Christ’s Example of Masculinity, 1981) that she takes issue with  Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? A Positive Christian Response, the book I coauthored with Virginia Mollenkott, which is based on the Scriptural admonition to love our neighbor as ourselves. Elliot says that she considers our positive acceptance of the committed love relationships of same-sex couples to be a “rearrangement of society,” which is “not an improvement, but a profound disorientation of God, man, and the world, leading finally to disintegration and chaos” (Mark of a Man, p. 31).  She predicts, probably tongue in cheek, that books will eventually be written with titles like, “Is the pederast my neighbor?”  Slippery slope panic could not be more clear.

Well, I’d better sign off.  This is much longer than intended, especially since in your last post you told our readers that we had agreed to start writing shorter posts and making sure something new was up on this blog monthly.  Well, at least, by getting this posted in October, I fulfilled the monthly part, if not the “shorter” part of our agreement!  Did you see the recent Slate article about the blurring of distinctions between blog posts and articles?  I guess this one could be categorized as an article.  You can tell I’m from the generation of long letters!

Hope your studies at Yale Divinity are continuing to go well.

Your longwinded but loving friend,
Letha

As you know, I’ve just returned to school, after spending a summer working in the Pacific Northwest. It feels good to be back at the academic tasks. I love the possibilities of the month of September—ever since I was a young girl, I have delighted in this season of new beginnings and fresh notebooks.

 The Stories We Tell

Letha, there was so much in your last letter that I could comment on, but I would like to focus my post by reflecting some on your section about Elisabeth Elliot. As you know, I did an extensive research project on her work last fall. I believe that she is such an important figure in 20th century American religious history, and yet there is almost no scholarship on her. For evangelicals of my generation, she had enormous influence on our ideas of gender and sexuality. Her book, Passion and Purity, was next to the Bible in importance for many of us. For those who have not read that book, it tells the story of her courtship with Jim Elliot; it was published many years after their marriage and his death in Ecuador while doing missionary work.

For my research paper I chose to re-read Passion and Purity, along with several other of her texts and radio programs. I was specifically examining her representation of feminism. In Elliot’s world, God arranged laws according to a hierarchical binary of men and women. If feminists had their way, according to Elliot, the whole cosmos would come unraveled—for feminism led to homosexuality, which led to incest and bestiality (in that order). She created an entire drama in her representation of feminism and gay and lesbian people.

No wonder sociologists find that many fundamentalist and evangelical women are so outspokenly anti-feminist in their language, even while seeming to adopt so many feminist values under the surface! The story that is told about feminists by people like Elisabeth Elliot bears such false witness against feminism (not to mention gay and lesbian brothers and sisters), that who would want to self-identity with a group that supposedly leads to bestiality and the fall of the universe?

Just like the Bayly Blog that accused you of promoting “sexual immorality,” Elisabeth Elliot was often so quick to effectively “other” those who disagreed with her. (And I must say, I was deeply grieved to read the Bayly Blog and its words toward you. I was left asking why Christians can be so unkind.)

A Space for Compassion and Psychological Reflection

I have to say, though, that the more I read Elliot’s writing this past spring, the more I saw her own pain and felt a growing compassion for her. When I re-read Passion and Purity I was actually appalled at how her boyfriend/husband Jim had treated her. Here was a relationship I had idealized in my teenage years, and yet when I read the story now (especially having a psychology background), I am deeply disturbed at all the ways he led her on, criticized her, refused to commit to her, and yet spiritualized all his actions. The story somehow seemed so romantic when I was sixteen; now it seems to verge on emotional abuse and manipulation. But Elisabeth had a way of narrating the story that made one want to live the story. The story is written in such a tantalizing and dramatic way: one feels that if you do everything as she and Jim did, that you will be swept into a passionate, adventurous life. Assuming, of course, you can put up with five years of ambivalent courtship in which you never quite measure up to the expectations of the person you love! (I never noticed when I first read the book the moments of criticism that Elisabeth endures from Jim.) And since the book stops at the wedding night, it is left to the imagination to consider what the substance of true commitment and relationship actually is.

A generation of young evangelicals imbibed this bestselling book. Dozens of other books were inspired by Elliot’s genre of Christian dating manual, including the popular I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris. We are left to reflect on what is the psychological, spiritual, and emotional impact of internalizing such stories? Stories that seem to cover up as much as they reveal; stories that are shaped to sell within a very particular evangelical culture and publishing industry.

I have to be honest, Letha: when I re-read Passion and Purity or study certain aspects of what is taught in the name of evangelicalism, I feel a toxicity run through my body. There is so much dysfunction within religion that passes for spirituality. There is so much pain that gets buried under polished narratives.

Dwelling on Goodness

As I sit down to write, I’ve just come from an evening church service. We are a tiny congregation of about 40 people, and service is held in a beautiful stone chapel on the “old campus” at Yale. I am taking a class in meditation this term, and I already feel an increasing ability to center, pause, and worship when I am in service. The time tonight felt so restful, and I just said a prayer of thanks to be able to participate in such warm community.

As I have meditated and prayed this past week, I keep getting an image of the root system of a tree. I want my “root system” to be deeply planted in all that is nourishing and good. Cultivating that kind of root system requires a space of prayer, play, rest, and reflection that is difficult to find in a graduate program. This semester will be awfully intense (PhD applications are due!), but I feel as though if I don’t learn how to be “rooted” now, then I never will. And reflection and meditation are beginning to feel more and more important for me; all the theory, scholarship, and knowledge in the world doesn’t matter a bit, if we don’t actually know how to be nourished by goodness.

Your words about Martin Ginsburg and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg were so nourishing to read because I spend so much of my time looking at what is not right with relationships. Reading about partnerships that are actively committed to mutuality and partnership is such a gift to me. I am realizing that I need to spend more time envisioning and reflecting on such goodness.

Final Thoughts

Letha, our readers might be noticing that this is a much shorter post than usual. (I confess, part of that is due to the 300 pages of reading I have yet to do for tomorrow.  But, mostly it’s due to your and my decision to write shorter, web-friendlier letters. In writing shorter letters, we hope to post more consistently (at least once a month). So, while we’ve had some long spaces between posts this summer, we hope to get back into our regular monthly schedule. Thanks to our readers for their patience!

Love,

Kimberly

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

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

Looking Ahead

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

The Ginsburg Marriage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complementarianism

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

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

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

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

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

Complementing and Complimenting in the Ginsburg marriage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Competition and Conflict

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Pedagogy Post

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

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

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

All for this time.

Your friend,
Letha