Feminism – Feminism and Religion

Gloria Steinem: A Personal Remembrance by Beth Bartlett

Wikimedia Commons, Jewish Women’s Archive, Share Alike 2.0.

I was only in my 20s, a kid really, when I first heard Gloria Steinem speak to a small gathering in a church in Little Falls, Minnesota. I don’t remember a word she said. I only know that that day she changed my life forever. I left that meeting knowing that that was what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to become like her — an activist, a mover and shaker for the feminist movement. I was already writing my PhD thesis on 19^th century feminism – the First Wave of feminism in the US, but here was the Second Wave right in front of me and I wanted to dive in. I’d found my passion.

A month or two later, I left Little Falls for Duluth, Minnesota. Little did I know that I was moving to one of the most significant hubs of feminist activism in the country at just the right time.[i] Within my first week here I connected with a group of women at the university who were in the process of trying to start a Women’s Studies minor and was quickly recruited to join them in their efforts. I spent the next year very involved in what would be a successful effort and was lucky enough to teach the first Intro to Women’s Studies ever offered at UMD a year later.

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Are We Living in a Rape Culture?

This was originally posted on November 24, 2014. It is shorter than our guidelines state now but it is too powerful and too pertinent all these years late to ignore.

Slippery tongued Witches by Claire Bullion

“It is still Eve the temptress that we must beware in any woman” St Augustine (354-430 CE)

I’ve been annoyed recently by suggestions that the ‘feminization’ of institutions involves increased deceit and manipulation because of an inherent deviousness to be found in women. Why is the idea of the manipulative woman still so powerful in our culture? When 165 of the 193 countries with UN membership are led by men and the top 10 richest people in the world are all men, why are these manipulative women doing so badly? Are men manipulating women to think they are manipulative? Both Helen Andrews (2025) and J. Stone (2019) in their essays, which insist that the increase representation of women in institutions is ruining the world, quote the work of Harvard Lecturer Joyce Benenson as evidence of this inherent feminine deviousness that needs to protected against.

“Woman, by her nature, is the instrument of the devil. A woman’s voice is the hissing of the serpent” Pope Urban II (c.1035-1099CE)

Holy Acts of Becoming: Sacred Reclamations and Gender in Children’s Literature, part 2 by Elanur Williams

part 1 was posted yesterday

Liminality of the Soul

‘Hansel and Gretel’ illustration by Karrie Fransman in ‘Gender Swapped Fairy Tales’ by Karrie Fransman and Jonathan Plackett (Faber & Faber, 2020). Used for commentary and review purposes under Fair Use guidelines. Website: https://karriefransman.com/project/gender-swapped-fairy-tales/

I have always adored fairy tales and folk tales, as they were the original, shimmering mirrors of my own interior world. In my own spiritual formation, I found my earliest refuge in the ‘monsters’ of the canon. I was drawn to the Selkie, whose power lived in her shed skin, and the shapeshifters who refused to be fixed in a single narrative. These were my mysterious teachers who offered profound knowledge, that I might have an interior life that does not match the exterior expectations of the world. By re-reading these archetypes, I see that the ‘liminal’ is not a place of exclusion, but the most sacred place of all: the threshold where the divine creates.

The traditional “curse” of the beast in fairy tales can be approached as a narrative of liminality, an invitation to exist in the “in-between” where nature and spirit intersect. This “curse” is, fundamentally, a colonial misunderstanding of power and a fear of the fluid. Figures like the trickster, the shapeshifter, and the mermaid reveal that the “soul” has never been bound by a static form.

Holy Acts of Becoming: Sacred Reclamations and Gender in Children’s Literature, part 1 by Elanur Williams

‘Little Red Riding Hood’ illustration by Karrie Fransman in ‘Gender Swapped Fairy Tales’ by Karrie Fransman and Jonathan Plackett (Faber & Faber, 2020). Used for commentary and review purposes under Fair Use guidelines. Website: https://karriefransman.com/project/gender-swapped-fairy-tales/

For generations, books have served as children’s first primers on the soul, and long before children encounter formal theology, they are offered spiritual blueprints through folklore, myths, and fairy tales. Although folklore is a metamorphic and often subversive space, too often these stories have been constrained by essentialist moralism, a framework where goodness must be beautiful, evil must be deformed, and gender is an immutable divine decree. Imagine the princess waiting in passive, delicate virtue; the prince acting with muscular, conquering strength. Any disruption of these orders (think of the cursed beast or the transformative sea witch) is framed as a tragedy, a cautionary tale against altering one’s inherent form.

But these interpretations do a profound disservice to the expansiveness of the divine. Spiritual language does not need to be rigid; spiritual experience is often the opposite. In fact, the lexicon of faith, mysticism, and mythology is uniquely, beautifully equipped to honor gender fluidity and the trans experience. To diversify children’s literature is not merely a political act; it is an act of holy reclamation.

Pretzels: The cruelty behind patriarchal women in positions of power by Sara Wright

” I would say it’s not just patriarchal men in power. The patriarchal women in power are doing plenty of damage as well. The cruel choices are deliberate and to see the pretzels they turn themselves into to justify the cruelty is a sight to behold.”
Janet Rudolph

During the last year I have been repeatedly betrayed by women. In retrospect my mother initiated me into woman betrayal by terrorizing a sensitive little girl by threatening to send her away if she wasn’t ‘good’. My terror of all women and my mother’s skepticism/dismissal of my grandmother as an ‘old woman’ whose opinions didn’t matter eroded my relationship with my grandmother that followed me into adulthood with catastrophic effects.

My fear kept me separate from the comfort of developing friendships with any woman until I became a feminist (yet I felt like an orphan when my grandmother died so my love for her survived).

I came to feminism through the back door through my love for Nature, the only real mother I have ever known. My love for animals, plants, trees, did their best to sustain me although I was very lonely. It is important to acknowledge that I also chose to be alone because I seemed to have so little in common with women in general (my 50 percent).

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Anne Hutchinson, America’s First Feminist Theologian: 1591-1643

This was originally posted on Oct 20 2014

“She had rather been a husband than a wife; and a preacher than a hearer; and a magistrate than a subject.” Reverend Hugh Peter of Salem

Anne Hutchinson was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for heresy in 1637 and excommunicated from the Puritan Church of Boston in 1638. Her banishment came just three years after she, her husband, and eleven living children arrived in America seeking the freedom to practice their religion as they saw fit. Governor Michael Dukakis pardoned her in 1987. Historian Howard Zinn called her a true American hero.

I managed to get through graduate school in Religious Studies without ever having studied the theology of Anne Hutchinson,* though I vaguely remember references (probably with smirks of disapproval) to the “Antinomian Controversy” which is associated with her name. I recall Anne Hutchinson’s name because of an article published in Feminist Studies in the 1970s, when I had just begun to study women and religion. However it was not until recently that I learned of her place in history through reading American Jezebel by Eve LaPlante.

Hutchinson was accused of theological errors in her trials. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination figured heavily in the accusations. But the real issue at stake was that Anne dared to follow her own inner knowing, to articulate it theologically, and to teach her views against the grain of the Puritan authorities in Boston.

From the Archives: Gift-Economy in a Time of Lack by Elisabeth S.

This was originally posted on May 17, 2019

Carol Christ wrote about gift economy on this blog in 2013, and I am taken by her story of the woman who brought raisins or cracked nuts to the group even though she had very little. In beginning to encounter the literature on gift economy myself, I am wondering how it all works, especially wondering, perhaps outside of such a conversation if it doesn’t relate or misses the point, what someone who feels they have nothing to give can give.

When Genevieve Vaughan wrote about gift economy in Ms. Magazine in 1991, she wrote, “where there is enough, we can abundantly nurture others. The problem is that scarcity is usually the case, artificially created in order to maintain control, so that other-orientation becomes difficult and self-depleting.”

I think we start to look for other ways of existing when we experience the brokenness of a current existence. The exchange economy under mindless capitalism does not honor equal, fair exchanges. If we could keep from manipulating and being deceptive about what a product is worth, if we could more generously assess the contribution of workers, then some of us might not be bothered. Of course, for that work which is never compensated by money, mostly women’s work, that is the other issue that might not be solved by more equal exchange, and probably more the point of Vaughn’s.

From the Archives: A Poem for Our Abortion Rights by Marie Cartier

This was originally posted on June 24, 2022

Fecundity: the ability to produce an abundance of new growth, but also the ability to produce new ideas

And now in the hour of our discontent, we are asked to worry about

fecundity. I suppose we can call it that—have we made enough babies yet?

As a people. A people ruled by patriarchy. No small thing. “A social system in which males dominate and hold primary power.”

Oh my god—am I sick of it? Anyone with a brain is sick of it…I want to think.

But they have brains, right? The afore mentioned patriarchs? Who are

creating this new social system?

A meme goes out on social media—I’m not pro-murder I’m pro-Ellen, thirteen years old and pregnant by her father

I’m pro-Margaret, with five kids and I cannot to afford to feed another

I’m pro-Eliza, pregnant with a baby known to have serious birth defects

I’m pro– you get the idea.

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Anger is Not a Panacea: The “Next Stage” after Rage

This was originally posted August 18, 2104.

In a recent post Xochitl Alvizo cited Beverly Harrison’s much-loved essay “Anger as a Work of Love.” Harrison captured feelings that were in the air at the time of its writing several decades ago. Women were laying claim to the right to be angry at the silencing of our voices, the double standard, the media portrayal of women, income inequality, lack of access to good jobs, failure to prosecute rape and domestic violence, and a host of other injustices.

Most of all we were protesting the cultural stereotype that the “good woman” (understood to be white, Christian, and married or hoping to be) would not protest loudly or at all, would turn the other cheek, and would think about others rather than herself. (Jewish women and black women had to strive doubly hard to “live up” to this standard, as it was assumed that Jewish women were “overly assertive” and that black women were “too strong” and often “angry.”)

In this context Harrison’s essay and Mary Daly’s epithet “rage is not a stage” gave women—especially white women–permission to get in touch with our feelings of anger and to express them. We understood that “good women” had been hiding and repressing their feelings for centuries if not millennia with the result that the structures of injustice remained intact.