Harvard Divinity School's
Conference on
"Religion and the Feminist Movement": Two Perspectives
Editor's note:
EEWC was represented at a historically important conference held
recently at Harvard Divinity School. This issue's Council
Columnist, Alena Amato Ruggerio, shares her experience from an
attendee's perspective; and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott shares her
experience from a speaker's
perspective.
Part 1: A Participant's
Experience
by Alena Amato Ruggerio
On November 1, I flew to Cambridge, MA,
grateful for the blessing of attending a watershed conference that
would bring together so many of the feminist theologians who had
influenced me through their books and activism. The goal of the
Religion and the Feminist Movement Conference at Harvard Divinity
School was to create a space for oral history at the intersection
of religion and second wave feminism.
I'll admit it, part of the reason I wanted to
go was to see my "rock stars." The academic life is
lived through books, and so the opportunity to meet in person the
women who had been so pivotal in my personal religious feminist
journey and in my academic research was impossible to pass up. The
prospect of hearing the stories of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,
Rosemary Radford Ruether, Delores Williams, Carol Christ, Judith
Plaskow, and Letty Russell was exciting.
I was not the only one who sensed the
history-making nature of the conference and yearned to
participate. According to Anne Braude, director of the Women's
Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School, the
conference venue originally held only slightly more than 100
seats. After learning of greater interest, the conference planners
moved to an auditorium that would seat 300 people. Registrations
continued to flood in so quickly that a room to hold even more
people connected via closed-circuit television was added to the
plans. Even then, approximately 150 hopeful registrants were
turned away, and countless more never had the chance to apply
since the registration process had to be closed down about two
weeks before the conference.
From personal experience, I can understand the
logistical and budgetary nightmare of not knowing exactly how many
participants will attend the conference. The RFMC conference
planners had no idea there would be such an overwhelming flood of
interest in their conference, and they could only expand it within
the limits of their budget and their time frame.
What bothers me, however, was how they
apparently chose those fortunate ones who would attend. On the
registration form, each person was asked to list her feminist
credentials in the interest of "ensuring a diversity of
voices" at the conference. Rather than simply accepting the
registrations of the first 300 applicants, the conference
committee evaluated the registration applications based on
criteria that were never disclosed. I don't have a problem with
the necessity to limit registration; I do have a problem with
invoking diversity as the criterion for exclusion.
Multiculturalism 101 tells us that instead of silencing those you
think will be speaking the loudest, a better way to ensure more
diverse voices in the conversation is to have as many
interlocutors as possible, specifically seeking to hear those
voices which might not otherwise be heard.
The issue of making the painful decisions
about who would get a place at the table was not limited to the
throng of participants. The speaking schedule was crowded enough
with 25 stellar presenters, most of whom had the floor for only
twenty minutes, but neopagan women like Starhawk (who did not
attend due to the observation of Samhain), Hindu women, and
Buddhist women were conspicuous by their absence. (Vicki Noble,
the co-creater of the Motherpeace Tarot, however, mentioned her
Buddhist practices but did not frame her narrative in terms of
Buddhism.)
On the other hand, those speakers who did
attend stirred the hearts of the audience. I was especially moved
by Azizah al-Hibri, who spoke about Karamah, her organization
which works within the system of jurisprudence to advocate for
Muslim women, and Riffat Hassan, originally from Pakistan, whose
poem, "I Am a Woman," so touched us that a participant
paid for copies for many of us to take home. The tears also flowed
at the recounting of Margaret Toscano's trial of excommunication
from the Latter Day Saints church. The most controversial speaker
was Mary Daly, who accused feminists still affiliated with
patriarchal religions of being "deader than dead."
Naturally, my favorite speaker was Virginia Mollenkott, who
described the support we showed her at the EEWC conference last
summer after she identified as transgender as "a moment of
unconditional love."
Another EEWC connection--or at least an
opportunity for such connection-- occurred when I had an
opportunity to speak with a young woman from the audience who had
asked World Vision representative Roberta Hestenes about
lesbianism in the evangelical church. After that panel
presentation, I sought out the young woman to invite her into the
activism of the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus. This
example not only highlights the opportunities for networking at
the conference, but also the strong presence of the younger
generation. Harvard Divinity School carefully delineated the
conference's focus on second wave feminism, but many young women
asked questions from the audience and presented their own
perspectives on the future of feminism. Although there was some
generational tension (for example, historian Gerda Lerner
admonished those who would claim their theology as new and
groundbreaking to acknowledge the hundreds of years of women whose
writings and activism preceded them), I found the atmosphere
welcoming in comparison to accounts of the recent Re-Imagining
Conference, where Mary Daly reportedly dismissed third wave
feminism as divisive without having attended Rebecca Walker's
bridge-building speech hours before.
I returned home with my head full of
provocative ideas and a deeper sense of the recent history of
feminist struggles in religion. Even in a time of budget cuts,
Southern Oregon University valued my participation in the Religion
and the Feminist Movement Conference enough to help fund my
travel, but I find that the lessons I learned there will extend
far beyond the classroom, providing inspiration to help tell the
next part of the story of religious feminist activism.
Continue to Part 2: A Speaker's Perspective
Alena Amato Ruggerio
is an Assistant Professor of Communication and a Women's Studies
Associate at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon and a
member of the EEWC Executive Council. The Council has elected her
to serve as the next EEWC Coordinator, beginning January 1, 2003,
as Linda Bieze's term of service ends.
© 2002
Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus
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