Patriarchy's Persistent Bastion? Religion -- Sightings
The place of women in society has been in the news of late. There's the political storm that has emerged around the issue of contraception, and the question of whether or not the reaction to the ruling on contraception by the HHS was a patriarchal one (plus Rush Limbaugh's rant). While this is going on, Time Magazine highlighted the growing economic power of women with a cover story. Interspersed with discussion is the role of religion and whether it serves to keep women subservient, and whether the increasingly public roles of women, especially in the workforce, will change these dynamics. Felice Lifshitz notes in this piece that women have found ways of pushing back and creating their own space from the very beginning. The question is, have men found ways of keeping control, and whether in the long run they can maintain their control. So, is religion feminism's final frontier, or has this been in play for a very long time? It's an interesting article, that is worth discussing, so read and offer your thoughts.
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Sightings 3/22/2012
Patriarchy’s Persistent Bastion? Religion
-- Felice Lifshitz
In a March 8 Washington Post article (“Feminism’s Final Frontier? Religion”), Lisa Miller predicted that American women would soon abandon the Republican party in droves, just as they are reportedly quitting conservative Christian churches in historically large numbers. In both cases, women's disaffection appears to be fueled by the disrespect shown to them by male leaders, a disrespect revealed in the ecclesiastical sphere by evangelical minister Jim Henderson's new book, The Resignation of Eve, and visible in the political sphere to anyone who has followed the recent debates over access to birth control. As “the men of the right” (as Miller calls them) insult women of faith, many of the latter are rejecting the communities that demean them, and creating leadership roles for themselves elsewhere. She suggests that a similar dynamic will soon govern American party politics. However, the implications of the current situation may not be that clear-cut, religiously or politically.
Miller believes women’s disaffection to be a new phenomenon, spurred by the incongruities between a new found economic independence and an old-fashioned gender hierarchy: “In churches (and synagogues and mosques) across the land, women are still treated as second-class citizens. And because women of faith are increasingly breadwinners, single moms and heads of households, that diminished status is beginning to rankle” (emphasis mine). The assumption that previous generations of women of faith uniformly accepted an inferior position, that is, that religion constitutes “feminism’s final frontier,” leads the author to predict a major break with the patriarchal past due to a novel combination of propitious circumstances and female aspirations. But the “resignation” described by Henderson is not a new departure potentially signaling a major break with tradition; rather, it is the latest permutation of the gender conflict that has been part and parcel of the Christian tradition from earliest times.
Indeed, the struggle over gender and spiritual authority set in early enough to affect the canon of the New Testament. Many women supported Paul, the greatest early Christian missionary, including Prisca (Priscilla), who was instrumental in the apostle’s successes at Corinth and Ephesus, and whom he ordained as a congregational leader along with her husband Aquila (Acts 18). Yet, misogynistic editors of biblical manuscripts successfully obscured Paul’s respect for female religious leaders by falsely attributing to him (either through misplaced punctuation or outright interpolation) the sentiment that women should be silent in churches (1 Cor. 14:33-36). Nevertheless, women persisted by (among other things) writing or supporting the composition of egalitarian texts, founding and governing monastic communities, pressing the liberationist claims of virginal feminism, exercising a number of liturgical (at times sacerdotal) functions, articulating a whole range of new theologies (including feminine theologies of the godhead), and establishing innumerable beguine communities that were absolutely independent of male ecclesiastical authority. In sum, women consistently found ways to control their own religious destinies, and to assume leadership roles within Christian contexts, including during the European Middle Ages, a period popularly (albeit erroneously) conceived as particularly repressive of women. Yet, none of these activities ever fully erased the persistent commitment to gender hierarchy cherished by the “men of the right” whose values have determined the character of most mainstream hegemonic institutions.
Christianity has consistently been open to pro-feminist movements, but this has resulted neither in a fundamental egalitarian transformation of Christian institutions, nor in a mass exodus of disaffected women. The current wave of “resignations” fits squarely into a 2000-year-old tradition of tension over gender and spiritual authority; if proponents of patriarchal forms of religious organization do not feel particularly threatened by the alarm bells Henderson has rung for them, it is because historical precedent encourages complacency on their part. After all, their predecessors always managed to hold on to power. “The men of the right” have found, in every generation, a substantial number of Christian women who considered the limited roles and secondary status allotted to them to be quite comfortable. It is certainly easier to execute simple, circumscribed tasks such as meal preparation than to shoulder the responsibility for major policy decisions. But every generation has also witnessed rebellion and discontent.
Today’s feminists of faith can draw on a rich heritage to stake out positions that might ultimately justify both Henderson’s warnings and Miller’s optimism. Success may well depend precisely on an awareness of that inspirational heritage. A radical egalitarian transformation will require an unprecedented struggle; it will not be the inevitable result of the rise of the female breadwinner.
References
Lisa Miller, “Feminism’s Final Frontier? Religion,” Washington Post, March 8, 2012.
Stevan L. Davies, The Revolt of the Widows: The Social World of the Apocryphal Acts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980).
Kim Haines-Eitzen, “Engendering Palimpsests: Reading the Textual Tradition of the Acts of Paul and Thecla” in William Klingshirn and Linda Safran, eds., The Early Christian Book (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2007) pp. 177 - 193.
Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
D. W. Odell-Scott, "Let the Women Speak in Church: An Egalitarian Interpretation of 1 Cor. 14:33b-36," Biblical Thinking Bulletin 13 (1983): 90-93.
Sara S. Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Joyce Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (London: Verso Press, 1992).
Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565 (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
Felice Lifshitz earned a PhD in History from Columbia University and currently teaches in the Program in Women's Studies at the University of Alberta. She has published numerous books, articles, and essay collections concerning medieval Christianity.
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David M. Freidenreich's book, Foreigners and their Food (California 2011), analyzes how Jews, Christians and Muslims use food regulations to construct boundaries between "us" and "them." This month's Religion & Culture Web Forum features Freidenreich's chapter on Christian laws from the fourth through the ninth century. Here, Freidenreich argues that "Christian food restrictions define Jews in two different and, indeed, contradictory ways: as equivalent to or worse than heretics, which is to say insiders gone horribly bad, and as equivalent to or worse than idolaters, which is to say the ultimate outsiders." These contradictory depictions, however, "share a common feature: the ascription of impurity to Jews and their food" (112-13). Read "How Could Their Food Not Be Impure?" here.
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