Faith and Feminism

A Holy Alliance

Helen LaKelly Hunt

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781416590514
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Les femmes dans l'histoire

Why do so many women of faith have such a strong aversion to feminism? And why do so many feminists have an ardent mistrust of religion? These questions are at the heart of Helen LaKelly Hunt's illuminating look at the alliance between spiritual conviction and social action. Intelligent and heartfelt, Faith and Feminism offers a perceptive look at the lives of five spirited and spiritual women of history, women who combined their undying faith with feminist beliefs and who made the world a better place by doing so.
• St. Teresa of Ávila, a woman whose bravery in confronting her shadows gave her the strength to connect with the world and live a life of divine action.
• Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister, who rose from her quiet upbringing to become a passionate speaker and activist working tirelessly on behalf of justice and peace.
• Sojourner Truth, a Christian slave, who spoke out with unwavering courage to claim her God-given rightful place as an African American and a woman.
• Emily Dickinson, an extraordinary poet, who touched the world with her ability to capture and transform the experience of suffering.
• Dorothy Day, a radical journalist, who lived a life of voluntary poverty as a way of expressing her passion for the Christian faith and care for those in need.
A remarkable book that focuses on the idea that spirituality and feminism are really different expressions of the same impulse to make life more whole, Faith and Feminism offers a powerful catalyst for reflecting on our sense of self -- and for living and loving according to our deepest values.

Chapter 1

To Build a Dialogue

Attempting to bridge secular and faith-based feminism is very important. Women of faith feel that the rights movement is anti-religion, and the rights activists haven’t made enough effort to listen to and include the women of faith. The social justice movement needs both voices. We need to be able to move to the next step, of dialogue between the rights world and the religious world.

—DOROTHY Q. THOMAS

In past decades, many of us have been aware of a gulf between faith-based and secular feminism. On one side were activists who found religion indispensable to their activism. On the other were activists who found religion outdated, superficial, or perhaps just irrelevant to their activism. While on a personal level, there was some interaction between these two groups, an occasional casual friendship, on the philosophical level, there was a barrier. If a feminist happened to refer to her spiritual life in “mixed company,” she was likely to be met with an embarrassed silence. But if she talked exclusively from a secular point of view, she was using the lingua franca of the movement, and nobody would raise an eyebrow.

Dorothy Q. Thomas, founding director of the Human Rights Watch Women’s Rights Division and a 1998 MacArthur Fellow, has spoken eloquently about this division and the need for healing through dialogue. I agree with her. More women in the movement are looking for ways to reconnect and reintegrate secular and faith-based worldviews into a single, stronger feminism. In order to bridge the gulf, we need to consciously create opportunities to talk and to listen. Dialogue gives us a way to find common ground.

In 1995, I found an opportunity to engage in dialogue with women about faith and feminism. In the spring of that year, I was preparing to attend the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China.¹ It seemed to me that the conference was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear from women from all over the world about important issues in their personal and social lives.²

I decided to interview conference participants about their thoughts on religion and the women’s movement, and developed a survey consisting of three open-ended questions. The questions were designed to encourage my interviewees to share their personal experiences regarding religion and feminism. Originally, I had hoped to interview women from all over the world, but as I thought about it, I focused only on women from the United States. I had a hunch, which was later confirmed, that women from other countries might not split their faith from their feminism the way we do in the United States. My questions to American women were simple. Was the social activism of secular women and faith-based women unified and coordinated? Did they experience a split between the two? And if so, why was there a split? What should be done about it? I didn’t know it then, but these questions became the impetus for this book.

The results were striking. All of the fifty women I interviewed said they felt a polarization.³ Not one of them thought that secular and faith-based feminists were working in coalition or in harmony with one another. As they talked about the reasons for the split, many said that while spiritual matters were important to them personally, organized religion had been no friend to women. The institutionalized church has been one of the fiercest opponents of women’s social and political equality. One of the women I interviewed put it most graphically: “Of course feminists shy away from religion. There is blood on the cathedral steps.”⁴ She was talking about the blood of women sacrificed because of the church’s doctrinal traditions.

She was right. The historical record of the church includes too many examples of women’s oppression and too few documenting support for women’s rights.⁵ I understand why feminists might want to stand apart from these male-centered ideologies and theologies. Why be a willing participant in an organization that has acted in opposition to its own core teachings on the equality and worth of all human beings?

If you are like me, this is a question you have asked yourself. All thoughtful people of faith must come to terms with the church’s damaging contradiction between principle and practice on the subject of women’s rights. I have wrestled with it for many years. Because I was raised in a Christian family, my spirituality has been nurtured within the Christian tradition. But I had to learn how to maintain integrity while practicing allegiance to a faith that I knew was deeply flawed when it came to being expressed in daily practice.

I admit to being led first by my heart in these matters. I love my faith. The beauty of the ritual and liturgy reminds me of the oneness of the entire human family. My faith makes clear to me that equality and justice are not just social constructs, but an ontology, part of the divine order of life. That we are all a part of a large web of connection that is sacred, if we have eyes to see.

For me, the brainwork comes later, after the love. Nevertheless, the brainwork has to be done. In order to be a Christian and a feminist, I must understand and reconcile apparent opposites. This reconciliation takes place within me every single day as the seeming contradictions of my faith and my feminism actually amplify and enlarge, even complete one another’s core values.

What I know to be true is this: the crimes of any religious institution do not negate the value of universal love and the religious ideals at its core. Sadly, human institutions will always be flawed reflections of the values they hope to embody. Every women’s organization falls short of its values and ideals as well, and the work of feminism is to name these ideals and to strive for them. If there is blood on the cathedral steps, we must also recognize the bloodshed inherent in combating political oppression. If we are so angry at the deeply flawed parts of religious institutions that we cut ourselves off from our spiritual birthright, we make no gains. Instead our anger is exacerbated by profound loss. I say preserve the anger, yes, but also preserve our right to our spiritual traditions. The patriarchy may have stolen our freedoms, but we don’t have to be complicit in the abandonment of our souls.

Two Revolutions: Feminism and Religion

When I talk about Christianity and feminism, I do so with the awareness that each is a whole complex world of ideas and feelings. Although I am clear about the ways they are different, I see them springing from the same originating impulse. Both are revolutions of consciousness, a manifestation of the desire and need for inclusion and connection.

Early Christianity shook up the established order of life under Roman rule by proclaiming that freedom and grace belonged to everyone. Nearly two millennia later, early feminism (the 1830s) emerged with a similar message and made it more specific and inclusive. Then the second wave of feminism (the 1960s) articulated the message once and for all through the proclamation of the National Organization for Women,⁶ which defined feminism as “the radical notion that women are people.”⁷

These two revolutions of faith and feminism, though very different, were built upon the same fundamental assumption: every person is intrinsically as valuable and worthy of love as any other. The implications of this revolutionary doctrine are staggering. Both Christianity and feminism did more than suggest a few fresh ideas to the prevailing worldview. They shook things up until a new world order emerged. The new Christian and the early feminist could see the kingdom of justice and equality for all was just within reach.

In their dynamic, pure form, both of these revolutions sought to enlarge our capacity for compassion and empathy. Both preached the transformation of the human mind and heart, and both have contributed to the evolution of new social orders. On a personal level, each of us separately can reflect on whether our experiences with Christianity and feminism have felt congruent. Have our feminist experiences been Christian? Have our Christian experiences felt feminist?

Feminism

I wanted to take some time to study the origins of American feminism, and in so doing, accidentally stumbled upon the abolitionist feminists of the nineteenth century, whose relatively unknown story needs to be told. These were women of color as well as white women, who knew that their country was founded on the ideal of “liberty and justice for all,” and decided to take this declaration at face value. They took offense at the idea of a liberty that was for white men only. The same rights belonged to men and women of color, to poor people, to immigrants, to children; all humans were deserving.

The story begins with a fierce band of Quaker women who began to ponder the unequal treatment of women and people of color in the culture. In the silence of their meetings, a voice spoke to them and guided them to the work they needed to do in the world. They developed absolute certainty that God’s law demanded freedom for all people. Slavery must end. They were confident that they were being called by God to bring this vision of justice into the world. No more taxation without representation. No more pay discrepancy. No more silence in the church. They tucked their Bibles under their arms and marched to the first abolitionist-women’s rights meetings, propelled by the vision of this spiritual mandate.

Increasingly, scholars acknowledge that American feminism was rooted in the abolitionist movement, and that religion played a central role in condemning the institution of slavery and substantiating the need for immediate abolition. Women created many local female abolitionist societies. Representatives of these societies came together in New York in 1837, forming the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, the first national political women’s meeting in America’s history. Both black and white women met and began to break the taboo of speaking in public and petitioning in the political arena. Calling their work “the cause of God,” this courageous band of 180 women saw themselves on a mission to unite Heaven and Earth, in the form of a society that would live and practice the democratic and religious ideals it espoused.⁸

This convention has received relatively little study by historians. But the documentation of this meeting shows these earliest feminists to be revolutionaries and visionaries who had their eyes on a universal law that superseded man-made ecclesiastical and governmental laws of the day. I studied these earliest feminists for two years, focusing on how they were galvanized by their religious passion to act in radical revolution. They were catalyzed into action not by a social ethic, but by a belief in an ontology of connection—that we are all meant to live in equality and harmony. It was this metaphysical vision that set fire in their hearts and started a social revolution. Having the conviction that something needed to change meant doing whatever was required. “This is a cause worth dying for,” declared Angelina Grimke about her commitment to speak out against slavery.⁹

The backlash against women meeting together publicly was severe. When these same women met again the next year, this time in Philadelphia, a mob of 10,000 men encircled the building, shouting and angrily throwing stones through the windows. It got to the point where no one inside the meeting hall could hear what was being said. When it was impossible to continue the meeting, the women filed arm in arm out into the street. While they were able to exit safely, the mob continued to riot around the meeting hall, breaking the doors and windows. They finally set fire to the building.

This public backlash to the women’s convention was devastating in some ways but also galvanizing in others. Reading the women’s diaries and other primary accounts of this event, I could feel the deepening resolve of these early feminists. It came naturally, from the deep springs of their faith in God. The women documented the proceedings of each convention, and these writings help us see how their faith and their courage to fight for social reform were intertwined. They began their meetings with prayer. Then they voted on public resolutions such as this one: “The time has come for woman to move in that sphere which Providence has assigned her, and no longer remain satisfied with the circumscribed limits with which corrupt custom and a perverse application of Scripture have encircled her.”¹⁰ This statement is the first public call for women’s rights in America.

I can’t read these words without feeling stirred. And I find the phrase, “a perverse application of Scripture,” to be a startling acknowledgment that the ecclesiastical structures of the day used religion as a weapon against women, especially against those who were fighting for the professed ideals at the heart of Christianity. This is not an unknown tactic in our own time. I am often embarrassed or outraged by fundamentalist doctrine that, in my view, has been used to set back the progress we’ve made in human rights. We must continue to be wary of the “perverse application of Scripture” for the purpose of justifying policies and institutions that keep people divided and excluded.

As I studied this early feminist organizing, I saw it was significant in other ways. The abolitionist feminists insisted on “Sympathy for the Slave” as the organizing motto. They worked in pairs, circulating petitions, and in groups on collaborative writing projects. And in so doing, they acknowledged their awareness that their abolitionist activism brought the values of empathy and relationship they had cultivated in their homes into the public realm. They had no intention of leaving behind the strengths and beliefs they knew would serve them well as they enlarged the sphere of action. Empathy and relationship—two values desperately needed in public life today.

Ten years later, in 1848, what is generally acknowledged to have been the first women’s rights meeting in America was held. Five women met in Seneca Falls, New York, for what became a notorious tea party where women plotted revolution. The women were Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martha Wright, Jane Hunt, Mary Ann McClintock, and Lucretia Mott. They shared their outrage over not being allowed to participate in public meetings or have a voice in society. The decision was made at this small but historic meeting to place a notice in the newspaper calling for a Women’s Rights Convention to be held at a nearby church. The purpose would be “to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of Woman.”¹¹ The notice ran on July 14, 1848, and only five days later, three hundred people, including some forty men, attended the first Women’s Rights Convention. About a hundred attendees signed their names to the famous Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Some of the same women attending this convention had helped plan the antislavery conventions, and their knowledge of protocol helped to make this gathering a great success. This Seneca Falls Convention is considered to have officially set in motion the most important social movement of America’s history.

In her memoirs, Elizabeth Cady Stanton states that there was “a religious earnestness that dignified all the proceedings.” ¹² While this meeting laid the groundwork for what became the suffrage movement, in truth, the movement’s social implications were broader than that. By starting with the issue of the vote for women, they were ushering in a social transformation that cut across the political, social, and economic structure of the country. Think of it! Five religious women sitting at tea...