‘feminism vs religion’ — really?

Regan Penaluna’s Christianity and Feminism: Oil and Water? at First Things has some food for thought, and I enjoyed the introduction to a few early feminists I had never heard of. But Penulana knows her audience well and has set up a false dichotomy that fits with the conservative world-view – that somehow (modern) feminists aren’t truly Christians, or perhaps even religious.

After all, the power of any ideology lies in its ability to frame the world with a clear border of us-vs-them, good-vs-bad. As if not accepting a patriarchal reading of Scripture means I don’t accept religion. I just don’t accept the partriarchal reading of Scripture.

Penuluna gives a little background on two feminists — Damaris Masham (1659–1708) and Mary Astell (1666–1731)  — who argued for women’s rights from within the Christian framework. That is, they argued that women, as portrayed in the Bible, are not weaker, less moral, less able than men. The dominant cultural notion in the 17th and 18th centuries was that women were not only lesser humans, they were evil — but a necessary evil.

Both feminist thinkers made their cases by emphasizing the uniquely feminine virtue of nurturing. The two women made claims for women’s value based on that virtue, but they came at it from different points-of-view: Masham saying that women as mothers must participate in society in order to raise better citizens; Astell saying that women as citizens could make valuable mother-inspired contributions that men couldn’t make.

In other words, each of these thinkers accepted the prevailing notion that women are essentially different from men and that their value comes precisely from that difference: their roles as mothers. These early feminists sought to rehabilitate “nurture” as something important and helpful to society at large. They didn’t seem to question the fact that women managed to get stuck with a role defined by all those virtues considered less important by culture.

Why a Role is Not Essential

Penaluna’s argument is the kind conservative ideologues love, because it allows them to believe that the feminists who disagree with them are just a radical fringe. It allows them to believe they’re more reasonable, more mainstream. You know, like people who are against gay rights but claim they’re not bigots because, hey, they have gay friends…

This is why conservatives have begun to rescue early feminists from obscurity. Have you noticed these articles cropping up?

But when you say women are different from men and define that difference with specific attributes — say “nurturing” — then all your energy is spent trying to get respect for a role rather than questioning  the validity of that role. You assume a role is built upon nature, rather than something less essential.

In this case, these early feminists were in a no-win scenario, trying to gain respect for something whose very purpose was to unburden the patriarchy of qualities necessary to maintain society but that were undesirable nonetheless, since they diminished independence and hence, power.

Perhaps those early feminists weren’t yet aware, as we are today with the benefit of generations of struggle, that you can’t win with a pair of twos when your opponent has a flush and has stacked the deck to begin with. It’s the roles associated with the sexes that need to be examined and redefined. This is the kind of work modern feminists are doing. This is the kind of work conservatives fear.

After all, when you redefine one sex’s role, you naturally begin to examine others, and I imagine most of the readers over at First Things are quite comfortable with the flush they’ve been dealt.

The history of Western feminism reminds us that our concepts of liberation and equality are not always antithetical to the Christian tradition and that Christian theology and Scripture have served as a source of women’s liberation. (Penaluna)

I don’t know where Penaluna gets this summary statement; at least, I don’t see where in her essay she has supported it.

If by Scripture as a source of liberation, she means the argument made by women such as Masham and Astell, I wonder how she defines liberation. Liberation to live out a role that lacks self-determination, that is assigned by a society run by those with the right to decide most things for you, including what you do with your money, your family, your body? Perhaps as a woman liberated by Scripture, you can demand — well, not anything so un-Christian, I suppose, as civil rights or equal opportunity, but certainly an acknowledgement that your subservient role has its uses.