Harvard Divinity School's Conference on "Religion and the Feminist Movement" by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

Vol. 26, No. 3

Fall 2002

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 2: A Speaker's Perspective
by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

As a writer/scholar/theologian who has done most of my work in solitude, I was pleased to be invited to Harvard to hear the stories of many women whose writings and activism had influenced my life. And the actual experience was even better than I imagined.

I was moved to hear Charlotte Bunch urge women not to concede religion to an anti-feminist agenda, and to learn that in her Center for Women's global Leadership she is trying to pass on to other women the incentive that the Methodist Youth Movement had provided for her. I wept to hear Letty Cottin Pogrebin's agony at not being counted in the minyan that was to recite kaddish for her deceased mother (only males count), and her later creation of a feminist seder because "necessity is the mother of revolution." I sorrowed that former EEWC member Roberta Hestenes could (despite all odds) learn to understand Scripture as supportive of equality for women, but could not extend that same liberation hermeneutics to include her lesbian sisters -- and that when a young participant asked her about that very issue, she refused to admit her well-known opposition to gay ordination.

I was overjoyed to meet Carol Christ and Vicki Noble and to assure them that their work on goddess/women's spirituality had been like an underground river nourishing the work of many of us in other areas of endeavor. And I was proud of EEWC's Alena Ruggerio, who was able to correct the great historian Gerda Lerner. After Lerner said from the platform that recent biblical feminist exegesis was "painful" because it replicated 700 years of feminist biblical criticism, Ruggerio pointed out from the audience that it is vital for each generation to bring its own questions to the Scriptures and to define answers in its own idiom -- and Lerner nodded her assent. (At Alena's age, I would have been deliriously happy to have successfully modified the viewpoint of a distinguished scholar. Congratulations, Alena!)

I was saddened but not surprised to hear Ada Maria Isazi Diaz's remark that the more she identified with Latinas, the more she became invisible. And moved by my old friend Riffat Hassan's distress that only two Islamic feminists were on hand to represent 500 million Muslim women. Riffat emphasized that the only way to help liberate Muslim women was to work within the Islamic tradition; Margaret Toscano, a recently excommunicated Morman feminist, made a similar point. Orthodox Jewish feminist Blu Greenberg emphasized "tinkering with Jewish tradition without flouting divine authority"; and I stressed that if feminist scholars in religion care about liberating fundamentalist Christian women, they must not speak dismissively concerning Scripture. In a sense, all four of us were fencing with Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, who had urged the group not to seek to "explain away" patriarchy in the Bible. She's correct, of course, that there are in the Bible texts of terror and reflections of hideous patriarchal injustices that must be frankly labeled as such. But if she means that recognizing the efforts of biblical authors to subvert and transform patriarchy is "explaining away" patriarchy, her approach would force text-oriented Jews, Christians, and Muslims to choose between their faith and their own liberation.

I loved the zest of African American Preacher Addie Wyatt, who at 78 described herself as "hopping but not stopping," and who talked about the labor union activism of her younger days. I loved the power of Lois Wilson, a senator from Canada and former president of the World Council of Churches, who left us with a feminist nursery rhyme: "Subversive and strong/ The whole day long/That's what little girls are made of."

I loved the eloquence of Jeanne Audrey Powers, who reminded us that "subversive seeds become a bloomin' thing" and that "power belongs to those who stay to write the report." And I loved the tough tenderness of Donna Quinn, a Catholic nun who defied the Vatican concerning abortion and who pronounced the whole Harvard conference "a eucharistic celebration" because we women "have each other."

There was talk of elitism because the conference could accommodate only 300 people and still retain the intimacy of give-and-take between platform and participants and the focus of having all presentations be plenary. Of the participants admitted, one-third were scholars, one-third activists, and one-third students. Although it was unfortunate that many were excluded, the entire conference was videotaped as an artifact of oral history, and a book is in the works. Mark Oppenheimer's article about the conference (Boston Globe, Nov. 24, 2002) displayed the media's lust for controversy; apart from Mary Daly, women did not attack one another because our stated purpose was to listen to one another's stories.

That the organizers did many things well was reflected in the fact that most of the questions and discussion came from the students, and among them, mostly from the African Americans and Latinas who only too often are squelched by white culture. So brava for the Harvard Divinity School organizers, and thanks for the memories!

Back to Part 1: A Participant's Experience

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Virginia Ramey Mollenkott is one of EEWC's founding members, a prolific author, and a much-in-demand speaker. Her web site is http://virginiarameymollenkott.com.