Foremothers – Page 3 – Feminism and Religion

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Do White Feminists Have Ancestors?

This post was originally published on Aug. 12th, 2011

Carol P. Christ is a founding mother in the study of women and religion, feminist theology, women’s spirituality, and the Goddess movement. She teaches in the Women’s Spirituality program at CIIS and through Ariadne Institute offers Goddess Pilgrimages to Crete. Her books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and the widely used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions.

Some years ago when I was speaking on ecofeminism, womanist theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher posed a question that went something like this: What I am missing in your presentation is reference to ancestors. For black women, this issue is critical.

Baker-Fletcher’s question provoked a process of thinking that continues to this day. For example, I began to notice that when black women spoke at the American Academy of Religion, they often began by thanking their foremothers Delores Williams and Katie Cannon for beginning the womanist dialogue. It is far rarer to hear a white woman thank Valerie Saiving, Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Ruether, or Marija Gimbutas before her talk.

To the contrary, many white women take great pains to distance themselves from feminist foresisters. I once heard a white woman Biblical scholar tell women students to do work on women in the Bible or other areas of religion without using the word feminist or placing their work in a female or feminist train of thought– if they wanted to get it published. She was very proud that she had used this method and succeeded. In other words, she was following in the footsteps of Mary Daly, Phyllis Trible, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza but acting as if she had invented the study of women and the Bible herself. The reason for this, she freely admitted, was that male scholars who held power in her field would not respect her work if she used the “f” word. Continue reading “Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Do White Feminists Have Ancestors?”

Book Review by Kristen Holt-Browning: Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Theresa of Ávila (Bilingual Edition), translated and with commentary by Dana Delibovi

The Catholic mystic women of the medieval and early modern era—such as Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and Theresa of Ávila—can seem unknowable to us now. How did they nurture their fiery love of Christ within the rigid patriarchal (indeed, misogynistic) structure of medieval and early modern European Christianity? How did they find the strength and bravery to write about Jesus as husband, mother, lover? The writing of these mystic women can strike us even now as shocking, given that they often described Christ as their husband, their lover, or even their mother.

In Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Theresa of Ávila (Bilingual Edition), poet and professor Dana Delibovi gives us the words of the sixteenth-century proto-feminist in a timbre close enough to our own to help close this gap. As Delibovi notes in her perceptive and illuminating Introduction, she centers Theresa’s balance of the mystical and the practical in her translations. Indeed, Delibovi admits that, “I had to fight the temptation to pretty-up her words and make them seem, well, more saintly.” And yet, it is this precisely this direct language that, paradoxically, heightens the divine fervor behind the writing, as when a shepherd speaks of Mary in “It’s Dawn Already”:

REMEMBERING THE MAGIC OF MAMA DONNA HENES: 1945-2024 by Diane Saarinen

For those who don’t know who Donna Henes was, her official bio:

Donna Henes is an internationally renowned urban shaman, spiritual teacher, award-winning author, popular speaker and workshop leader whose joyful celebrations of celestial events have introduced ancient traditional rituals and contemporary ceremonies to millions since 1972. More at her Wikipedia page here.

Donna, known affectionately to many as Mama Donna, was so in tune with the seasons (even putting out a quarterly publication for a time called Always in Season), that when her time came to leave this sparkling, stunning incarnation of hers, she left on Autumn Equinox Eve 2024, just two days after her 79^th birthday.

Sad news to those she left behind and sad news to the planet. But as we approach Samhain, Halloween and Day of the Dead, what wonderful memories my friend Donna Henes left me with! And “what is remembered, lives.” So live on, Mama Donna!

*******

How the Nineteenth-Century Spiritualist Movement Gave Voice to American Women -Part 2 by Theresa Dintino

Moderator’s Note: This post is presented as part of FAR’s co-operation with The Nasty Women Writers Project, a site dedicated to highlighting and amplifying the voices and visions of powerful women. The site was founded by sisters Theresa and Maria Dintino. Part 1 was posted yesterday

Spiritualism began with two young girls, the Fox sisters, hearing knocking sounds in their home near Rochester, N.Y . They determined the knocking to be coming from a man who was murdered and buried under their home. The knocking was soon categorized into an alphabet out of which seances began. In seances groups of people gathered and put their hands on a table while asking questions of ancestors who made themselves known by rapping and knocking in response. Next, mediums in the form of young women speaking the answers of the dead as the bereaved asked them questions, emerged. Instructions were disseminated on how to be a medium and how to run a seance. The movement took off.

The movement was largely white, northern Protestants but other ethnicities were involved. The Black population may have influenced the arising of these practices with traditions brought with them from West Africa.

Sojourner Truth, the photos by Beth Bartlett

Moderator’s Note: We inadvertently left out the photos from Beth’s posts on Sojourner Truth. The photos, all by themselves, pack an emotional punch and so we want to be sure they can be seen. These are Beth’s photos from Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza in Akron, Ohio

You can see Beth’s posts here. Part 1 and Part 2

MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE: IN HER NAME, AMERICAN WOMAN WRITER AND ACTIVIST (1826-1898), part 2 by Maria Dintino

part 1 appeared yesterday

Leila Brammer in her book Excluded from Suffrage History: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nineteenth-Century American Feminist, explains the long-term impact of the dismissal of Gage:

“The loss of Matlida Joslyn Gage from the history of the woman suffrage movement and her ideas from the intellectual history of feminism speaks to the influence of exclusionary processes in social movements as well as their unfortunate consequences…we must remember that Joslyn Gage was intricately involved in the movement, wrote in newspapers and magazines, and published a book, but all these activities and her significant feminist thought had to be re-created and rediscovered nearly a century later”(120).

MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE: IN HER NAME, AMERICAN WOMAN WRITER AND ACTIVIST (1826-1898), part 1 by Maria Dintino

Moderator’s Note: We are pleased to announce that we have formed a co-operation with The Nasty Women Writers Project, a site dedicated to highlighting and amplifying the voices and visions of powerful women. The site was founded by sisters Theresa and Maria Dintino. To quote Theresa, “by doing this work we are expanding our own writer’s web for nourishment and support.” This was originally posted on their site on January 5, 2021. You can see more of their posts here.

A few weeks back, I came upon a term I had not heard before, the ‘Matilda Effect’. It’s defined as: a bias against acknowledging the achievements of those women scientists whose work is attributed to their male colleagues (Wikipedia). This term was coined by science historian Margaret W. Rossiter in 1993, in her essay The ~~Matthew~~ Matilda Effect in Science.

The Matthew Effect, labeled in 1948 and credited to Robert K Merton, and later to Harriet Zuckerman as well, refers to the way that: eminent scientists will often get more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher, even if their work is similar; it also means that credit will usually be given to researchers who are already famous (Wikipedia).

Sojourner Truth: Part Two: The Speech and the Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza by Beth Bartlett

Part one was posted yesterday.

Most of us are quite familiar with Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech as recorded by Frances Gage several years later, with its powerful “ain’t I a woman” refrain. However, the actual speech as transcribed at the time by Marius Robinson, while similar in content, does not contain the refrain. Rather, Truth simply states that she is “a woman’s rights” woman.[i] It is unlikely that she spoke in the southern dialect Gage used in her transcription, since Truth grew up knowing only Dutch, eventually learning English as spoken in New York, and probably spoke with a Dutch accent. Much of the content in the Gage version was fabricated – such as the statement that she bore thirteen children, when she only had five children, though she did cry out in a mother’s grief when she learned that her only son, Peter, had been illegally sold south to Alabama.[ii]

Sojourner Truth: Part One: Her Life by Beth Bartlett

On May 29^th, 1851, a striking, 6’ tall, African American woman rose to speak at the Women’s Rights Convention being held in Akron, Ohio. There Sojourner Truth gave her famous “Ain’t I a Woman Speech.”

Originally named Isabella, and known as “Bell,” Truth was born into slavery in 1797, the second youngest of James (“Bomefree” – Dutch for “tree”) and Elizabeth (“Mau-mau Bett”) who were enslaved by a wealthy Dutch man, Johannes Hardenbergh, Jr., who had a large estate in Ulster County, New York, which was inherited by his son, Charles, when Truth was just an infant. Upon the death of Charles, at the young age of nine, she was sold at auction to John Nealy, where she “suffered ‘terribly-terribly’ with the cold”[i] and beatings. In her own words, “He whipped her till the flesh was deeply lacerated, and the blood streamed from her wounds – and the scars remain to the present day.”[ii] She prayed for deliverance, and soon after was sold to a fisherman and tavern owner, Martinus Schriver, where she led “a wild, out-of-door kind of life,” carrying fish, hoeing corn, foraging roots and herbs for beer. Only a year later she was sold again to John J. Dumont, where she lived out the remainder of her enslavement until her emancipation by the State of New York in 1828. She described her life there as “a long series of trials” which she did not detail “from motives of delicacy, . . . or because the relation of them might inflict undeserved pain on some now living”[iii] whom she regarded with esteem. Knowing the conditions of enslaved women, we can deduce what those trials entailed. Despite her affections for a man on a neighboring estate, who was beaten to death for visiting her when she was sick, she was forced to marry a much older man, Thomas, also enslaved by Dumont, with whom she bore five children. Because Dumont reneged on his promise to free her, she walked away with her infant daughter in 1827 and was taken in by the Van Wegener family where she lived for the next year.

From the Archives: Writing Through the Body: Betty Smith’s A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN by Joyce Zonana

This was originally posted on April 29, 2017

In her 1975 manifesto, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” French feminist Hélène Cixous urges women to write: “Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. . . . Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes . . .”

“The Laugh of the Medusa” remains a thrilling essay, challenging and inspiring women to “return to the body” and to language. “Woman must write woman,” Cixous insists, “for, with a few rare exceptions there has not yet been any writing that inscribes femininity.”