Exploring the F-word in religion at the intersection of scholarship, activism, and community.
As we approach the election period infused with controversy, saturated by television commercials, as well as endless advertisements on the radio, Internet, and yes, even Facebook, we must remember the sacrifices made by our foremothers during the suffrage movement, which gave women the right to vote. While all elections are important, this one has targeted issues involving women in a way that could negatively impact our rights – to the point of rewinding the clock on progress made in women’s equality during the last 40+ years. This election needs the voice of all informed voters. However, it is imperative for all women to make their voices heard this year by casting a vote. To turn a blind eye to these issues diminishes the sacrifices our foremothers made for us. To not cast a vote takes away your voice, makes you a silent bystander – something that was tried by the government and patriarchal system during the suffrage movement.
To illustrate this, I would like to highlight Lucy Burns and the Night of Terror endured at the Occoquan Workhouse by her and many of her friends. Of all Suffragettes, Lucy Burns spent more time in jail then any other protesters. Born 1879 in Brooklyn, Lucy was raised in the Roman Catholic tradition by a father who believed that his sons and daughters should be educated equally. Burns gradated from Vassar College in 1902, then attended Yale Graduate School studying linguistics. She eventually went to Oxford University in England to resume her studies. It was at Oxford that she became involved with activism and the suffrage movement. Continue reading “Lucy Burns, A Look at a Catholic American Suffragette by Michele Stopera Freyhauf”
It was recently reported that Saudi Arabia will develop a women’s only city in order to allow career oriented women to pursue work while abiding by the countries Islamic laws. While work for women is not outlawed by Sharia Law, currently only 15% of the workforce is made up of women in Saudi Arabia. This new municipality will produce women run firms and production lines and will create a total of 5000 new jobs. Continue reading “IN THE NEWS: An All Women’s City in Saudi Arabia – Liberating or Continuing the Cycle?”
Why is it that some who experience violence as children repeat the pattern while others imagine a world without violence? I have been pondering this question in recent weeks.
Yesterday while visiting a neighborhood grandmother who is recovering from surgery, I witnessed a truly horrifying scene. The grandmother’s son, who knows I ran for office on the Green Party ticket in the recent elections, stormed onto the terrace, pointed his finger at me, and said with a vengeance, “You should know that everyone is going to be voting for the Golden Dawn from now on.” The Golden Dawn is the fascist neo-Nazi party that won 18 seats in the Greek Parliament and now claims the loyalty of nearly 10% of the Greek people. Golden Dawn members and supporters have (allegedly) been involved in hundreds of violent attacks on illegal and legal immigrants since the June elections. The police have done little so far to stop these attacks, perhaps because many of them support the Golden Dawn.
“We can’t go on like this,” my neighbor continued, “we must do something.” Continue reading “Violence Begetting Violence by Carol P. Christ”
What I think we must consider in analyzing any form of “health” that is encouraged, and even enforced, is that such encouragement comes back in the end to the ability to work, to be “productive,” and, in turn, to spend the money that one earns.
What is “health”? What does it mean to be “healthy”? Physical well-being and energy? Mental and emotional balance? A sense of general control over one’s body and self? I had originally meant to speak of the frequent reduction in our culture of “health” to appearance: sexual attractiveness, muscle tone, body size, etc., but Lesley Kinzel has already given an analysis of this paradigm, twice, in fact. Go read her articles, then come back here and we’ll talk about some other stuff.
Attractiveness as a measure of “health,” which we will consider as being already established as a cultural fact, effectively defines health neither as a personal sense of well-being nor as a set of conditions agreed upon in consultation with a physician. Rather, aesthetic criteria render health a metric that lets other people judge – and judge others on – a level of “health.” This judgment affects women disproportionately and, being external, reduces the value of female subjective experience and the power of subjectivity in the individual. Yet this externalization by no means ends with quotidian social interaction, but also extends to the medical establishment and the regulation of bodies in terms of the normal and the pathological – no great revelation here (Foucault already said it) – and these measures are already part of the intrinsic layout and values of the culture to which a given medical establishment belongs. Continue reading “Working and Working Out: “Health,” Obesity, and Labor by Stefanie Goyette”
This post is the first of a new weekly feature on Feminism and Religion that will be published every Wednesday. “In The News” is designed to invite discussion on topics that are showing up in news and media outlets and are relevant to feminism and religion.
Diane Winston recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times regarding the role of faith in politics. She comments that recent poll results give the impression that religion is not playing a significant role in the current elections, for how else does one make sense of the fact that the Republican Party’s ticket is made up of a Mormon and a Roman Catholic? However she is quick to point out that although religious labels may be passé, “the religious values that inform who’s taxed, what’s regulated, how jobs are created and when or where we help those in need,” are still very much the driving force behind how people vote and with whom they form coalitions. Thus, in the U.S. seemingly incompatible religions as well as denominations within those religions have come together in an effort to control and legislate women’s bodies and autonomy. As the editors of the Religious Dispatches asserts, “the Moral Majority couldn’t have come together without a big interfaith effort.”
But theirs are not the only religious voices on the scene. Continue reading “IN THE NEWS: Religious, Atheist, and Political Feminists – Unite?”
Becoming a Godfather was more than just a reentry into the Catholic traditions I had long given up but rather a journey back in time that would grant me the ability to rewrite the wrongs I felt as a kid growing up in a tradition I not only didn’t understand but also didn’t feel like I belonged in.
I often wondered why I wasn’t asked to be the Godfather of my niece and nephew. It made perfect sense to me that I would be the best person to guide and provide spiritual care for either of them as I was the only member, in both my family and my brother-in-law’s, getting a PhD in Religion. I didn’t think there would be much to it. I would go, hold my nephew, and watch a priest pour water over his head, and then go and enjoy some very sugary cake in my sister’s backyard.
On August 18th, 2012 my wish came true and I became the Godfather to my sister’s second child, Drew. I had always believed that there was nothing to being a Godfather. That it was a title in name only and a tradition that many individuals bestowed upon members of their family as ritualistic habit rather than a sacred institution of spiritual care and upbringing. Boy, was I wrong. Continue reading “8 Simple Rules for Being a Queer Godfather by John Erickson”
Why has Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith mostly been a non-question in his political life? John Kennedy was asked if he would obey the Pope or make his own decisions, Jimmy Carter was asked how his Baptist faith would affect his Presidency, and Barack Obama was asked if he agreed with the sermons of his preacher. Why is the press afraid to ask Mitt Romney if he agrees with the patriarchal teachings of his church and if so, if this affects his views on the rights of women?
Like other patriarchal institutions, the Mormon Church believes that women’s place is in the home. Every Mormon man is a priest and a patriarch in his own home. Mormon belief teaches that men are to make the final decisions in the family, that only they can be leaders in the church, and that they are the members of the Mormon community who should speak and act in the public (non-home) dimensions of life. Traditional Mormons believe that “ [The] LDS [woman is] always [to] accept counsel from her husband, and not as just his opinion, but as God-inspired revelation.” Continue reading “LET’S ASK MITT IF MORMON PATRIARCHAL BELIEFS AFFECT HIS VIEWS ON WOMEN’S EQUALITY by Carol P. Christ”
Sex sells. The sexual objectification of women is used in advertising to sell anything from auto parts to cologne to alcohol. Despite the myriads of feminist critiques of women’s sexual objectification to sell products, it still exists. Open a Vogue Magazine or walk into an Abercrombie and Fitch store. Women are posed half, to almost totally, nude in sexually suggestive ways trying to entice the generic person in patriarchal society, the “average” male (usually white, middle-class and heterosexual) to buy the product. Sometimes that same sexually suggestive pose is meant to also sell a product to the “average” woman as well with the mistaken notion that she will look as attractive and satisfied as the model if only she own the product too.
One of my part-time jobs is as a clerk at a liquor store where there are a good number of sexually explicit ads for alcohol. I also have three other part-time jobs teaching in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Boston College, in the Religious and Theological Studies Department at Merrimack College and in my shul’s religious school. My combined income from the four jobs barely covers rent, food and bills and some months when I don’t get paid from teaching I use the little savings I have to make ends meet.
Recently I have noticed how silenced my feminist voice has become in the liquor store because of my precarious financial situation. I am hesitant to speak up about the sexist ads for fear of losing my job. This muted feminist voice is a class issue within feminism. Specifically, classism affects one’s ability to stand up for one’s self when one’s livelihood is on the line. Often, I find myself thinking about this as I sell customers vodka or beer.
But I also spend a lot of time at the liquor store thinking about religion. Continue reading “Alcohol is a Feminist Issue Too. By Ivy Helman”
As I painted her icon, I knew that “the room of one’s own” must engulf more space on the canvas than she did, her heart beating in the room and outside of it, and her arms outstretched as though she is inviting other women into the room.
I first encountered her in the lyrics of a song. The Indigo Girls shaped my adolescence, molding me into a young feminist as I sang in harmony with other teenage girls:
They published your diary
And that’s how I got to know you
The key to the room of your own
And a mind without end
And here’s a young girlOn a kind of a telephone line through time
And the voice at the other end
Comes like a long lost friend
So I know I’m alrightLife will come and life will go
Still I feel it’s alright
‘Cause I just got a letter to my soul
Emily Saliers and Amy Ray (the Indigo Girls) were singing about Virginia Woolf, naming the song after her. As I belted out the lyrics with my soon-to-become-feminist friends, I had yet to learn who Virginia Woolf was and how her life and work had shaped my own. All I knew as I harmonized those many years ago was that this woman must be special if the Indigo Girls dedicated a song to her. I felt a longing to know her, to learn more about her, for her to call me on that telephone line through time and tell me I’m alright. Accordingly, Virginia Woolf is our Holy Woman Icon for September. Continue reading “Painting Virginia Woolf by Angela Yarber”
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