Feminism and the Roots of All Problems

War and Peace

Interestingly, it is men who have advanced the strongest claims about the effects of women’s empowerment on prospects for world peace. Francis Fukuyama’s 1998 Foreign Affairs article, “Women and the Evolution of World Politics,” begins with detailing murderous male chimp behavior and proceeds to argue that a world governed by females would be more peaceful because men are the biologically violent gender.

Fukuyama’s critics – including, Barbara Ehrenreich, Katha Pollit, and Jane Jaquette – countered that Fukuyama gave

“insufficient weight to the dynamics of the nation-state system…Wars start not in biology… but in realpolitik.” (Jaquette)

British “transhumanist philosopher” and author of The Hedonistic Imperative, David Pearce, has recently (2011) picked up Fukuyama’s thesis:

“The genetic source of most human predatory behavior has been identified: the Y chromosome… For evolutionary reasons, almost all wars are started and waged by men. Enacting legislation that allowed only women to stand for national public office would probably save hundreds of millions of lives this century—possibly more…” (Pearce)

I suspect that Jaquette is right that modern war has more to do with the dynamics of the nation-state system than Fukuyama or Pearce acknowledge. Still, removing the male aggression, plausibly, would have some effect. Even better than female-only national governments, however, might be this radical notion: equality. Conditions of equally-shared power tend to produce changes in the men, moving them away from those aggressive Y-chromosome correlates that more often come to the fore in all-male company. Even if we accept the simplistic equations of women with peacefulness and men with aggression, wouldn’t it be better to bring out the peaceful side of men rather than remove all of them from office, leaving them to stew (and get into fights)?

Other Issues

Poverty. Forty percent of female-headed households in this country fall below the poverty line. Perhaps eradicating the root assumptions that produce sexism would also change assumptions that our economy has to have winners and losers, that competing for dominance is good and necessary and that cooperation so that we can all live decently is just an idea for wimps.

Environment. Are the ecofeminists correct that a greater genuine and authentic honoring of feminine nurturing – not just a placating card and some flowers on Mother’s Day – would shift all our attitudes toward a nurturance of the earth? Do the values that go with women’s empowerment represent the best hope for addressing environmental degradation and adopting sustainable lifestyles planet-wide?

Race and class issues. The Other is often out of our sight – hidden off in a factory or a field or a side of town that we rarely visit. When it comes to the Other gender, however, few of us are so segregated. For many of us, indeed, the Other is right there sharing our living quarters and bedroom. Maybe true justice begins at home, and if everybody could work out in their personal lives a way to recognize kinship while also embracing and celebrating difference, then maybe we could better do that outside our homes as well and end injustice based on race or class.

There’s a case there to be made for feminism as not just a commitment to end isolated injustices based on gender. It’s a way of seeing every major social issue as flowing from the same underlying psychosocial dynamics that also produce those gender injustices. It’s a strategy for working toward a world in which relationships of equality and respect replace relations of dominance and exploitation – a strategy that sees addressing gender issues as the first, best place to learn how to relate with genuine equality and respect.

In a world successfully cultivating such relationship capacity, perhaps war, poverty, and all forms of discrimination would be on the way out, and living sustainably, aware and appreciative of our bondedness to the earth, would be rapidly spreading.

Maybe.

On the other hand, there’s something to be said for the view that if you want to work to end racism or poverty, then work directly to end racism or poverty. It would be, after all, a feminist point to distrust hierarchies of issues that place some at the center or the top and other issues at the periphery or bottom.

There’s no doubt that social issues do interlink. Perhaps they do so in a centerless web rather than all flowing outward from the roots of our gender attitudes.

I don’t suppose there is any grand unified theory. My life, so far, with feminism continues to be a mish-mash of not entirely coherent yearnings – rather like the stacks of magazines on my parents’ coffee table.

For all that, it’s a story, I hope, of slowly learning how to be, moment by moment, on the side of mothers and daughters, fathers and sons. On the side of the forces that create and uphold life. On the side of the ongoing dance for peace and justice.

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This is part 5 of 5 of "Feminist Theology"
Previous: Part 4: "Lynchpin to World Peace"
Beginning: Part 1: "I Was a Teenage Feminist"

Lynchpin to World Peace

Our Unitarian Universalist approach to religion is a feminist theology in this most basic way: it avoids any closed canon. As James Luther Adams said:

“Liberal religion depends first upon the principle that revelation is continuous. Meaning has not been finally captured. Nothing is complete and thus nothing is exempt from criticism.”

We say religion isn’t about what we believe – and therefore it is not about the words that we might feel like asserting. Religion is about experience, and about how we live, and about relationship. In this way, Unitarian Universalist theology is feminist theology. Perhaps, then, my embrace of the label “Unitarian Universalist” has, over the years, slowly made it seem less urgent for me to also proclaim myself “feminist.” I’m as feminist as ever, even if I don’t say so as often – because, for me, saying I’m Unitarian Universalist is saying I’m feminist – in matters of theology, at least.

Besides matters of pure theology, there are matters of social strategy. We want, ultimately, a world of peace, prosperity, and justice. How do we get there? What are the changes which not only are requirements of justice in their own right, but will also be particularly instrumental toward realizing a world of peace overall? Pay equity for women, gender balance in positions of power, reducing domestic battering of girlfriends and wives, and ensuring reproductive choice are, it seems to me, good candidates. If women were liberated from all that holds them back – which would mean men were liberated from the prejudices and assumptions into which men tend to fall when only men hold the positions of public power – would our prospects for peace and justice be better? Yes.

The “Because I Am a Girl” website reports that:

“70% of the one billion people living in extreme poverty are women and girls. Girls are 3x more likely to be malnourished than boys. Globally, 66 million girls do not attend primary or secondary school. Girls and women in the world's poorest countries are the most vulnerable members of society, denied the same rights and opportunities as their brothers."

Former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, observed,

"research is also clear that when girls reach their full potential, through improved status, better health care, and education, it is the most effective development tool for society as a whole. As a country's primary enrolment rate for girls increases, so too does its gross domestic product per capita."

Specifically:

“An extra year of school for girls increases their lifetime income by 15%. Children of women who have completed primary school are less likely to die before age 5 than children of mothers with no schooling. Women invest more of their income in their families than men do….When girls are educated, healthy and informed, they pull themselves, their children and their communities out of poverty. The most vulnerable are potentially the most powerful.” (becauseiamagirl.ca)

In developed countries like the US, the more progress we make toward equality, the more unjustified and unnatural the gender inequalities in the rest of the world will seem. Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined notes that empowerment of women correlates powerfully with reductions in violence in a society. This doesn’t tell us whether women’s empowerment caused violence to decline, or the violence decline caused (created the conditions that allowed) women’s empowerment. Plausibly, each contributes to the other, in a virtuous cycle. Whatever the causal details may be, working for either (reduced violence or women's empowerment) would seem to go hand-in-hand with working for the other.

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This is part 4 of 5 of "Feminist Theology"
Next: Part 5: "Feminism and the Roots of All Problems"
Previous: Part 3: "Slaying the 'Master Narrative' Dragon"
Beginning: Part 1: "I Was a Teenage Feminist"

Slaying the "Master Narrative" Dragon

The same words that help and empower might also disempower. Feminist theologians have, in fact, made it a key point that words do fail us. The Western religious traditions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – are religions “of the book.” That is, they are based on particular texts. In these traditions, authority derives from certain words, and ultimately from two underlying ideas:

• There is a fixed canon – that certain texts have the authority of scripture, and all others are permanently excluded.
• There is – though we fallible humans may disagree about what it is – one definitive and correct interpretation of these authoritative texts.

A crucial point of feminist theology has been that the very expectation that words will stay put in their meaning, and that words won’t fail us, has been a problem for us. Authority must be de-centered, they say. No finite text can save us.

Liberation of both women and men depends upon opening up creative possibilities of meaning. We must make the sources of authority open ended. Bring in new texts from other world traditions. Let us write new stories. Let us make new interpretations of the old ones. Let the language which speaks to us, which has power for us, which is our scripture, be infinite and not closed off.

The same words that liberate can also oppress. What matters is context. What matters is intent and purpose. There is no grand narrative that will always give everyone their due. Any story becomes oppressive if it becomes fixed, canonical.

Consider the 2001 children’s story, Petronella, by Jay Williams. Here’s a synopsis:

Princess Petronella, unwilling to wait around for some Prince to come for her, decided to go out and find her own. Deep in the woods she came upon an old man who told her about the house of Albion the Enchantress – and about a golden ring that could break Albion’s enchantments. Petronella proceeded to Albion’s house, where she saw a young man sitting in a lawn chair on the front lawn who identified himself as Prince Ferdinand of Firebrand. Petronella had found a Prince, and found him self-absorbed and unimpressive. When Enchantress Albion appeared, Petronella told her, “I’ve come to see if you have any work for me.” Albion set Petronella to work taking care of a kennel of dogs, after which, Petronella asked for, and received, payment of a golden ring. The next day Petronella pulled Ferdinand from his room, and the two made their escape on horseback. Soon they heard Albion in pursuit behind. Petronella threw the golden ring to the ground, and when Albion stepped over it, the ring became a trap that bound her tightly. Petronella offered to release Albion if she promised to let the prince go free. Albion replied that Ferdinand was never a captive. “I am glad to be rid of him! He came to visit for a week and never left.” “Then why were you chasing us?” asked Petronella. “I just wanted to get to know you better,” said Albion. In the end, Petronella and Albion leave Ferdinand to fend for himself, ride off together into the sun rise, and live happily ever after.

The twist on the traditional fairy tale is delightful. Free women get to do things their own way. The man gets his comeuppance -- and he is transformed all the way from boorish oaf to hapless irrelevance. If we had only that sort of story, then the message for men is that their role is to start off obnoxious and end up pointless. But, of course, we don’t have only that sort of story. Instead, we have a vast plurality of stories breaking down each others’ stereotypes.

The point is not to replace one “master narrative” with another, but to encourage the proliferation of diverse stories undermining the possibility of any “master narrative.”

Any canonized set of words will always fail us, so feminist theologians remind us to look beyond the words to the context. Any set of words will fail us, so feminists remind us to resist any closed canon. In the context of a culture in which our girls and women, much more commonly than our boys and men, are seen as derivative and dependent, then a story of a princess who is not dependent on a man is a useful corrective. The point isn’t meant to be universalized, for to universalize any story would be to enshrine its stereotypes. It’s not a universal story: instead, it’s a story offered to us where we are now. And by insisting that our authorities be open-ended, that there is always room for more stories, we allow the intrinsic lopsidedness of any given story to be counterbalanced by subsequent stories.

There’s no way to tell a nonlopsided story. Every story has its situated, particular point of view and cannot affect an objective, god’s-eye viewpoint. The pretense of objectivity has been oppressive. What we can do is keep telling more stories, compensating the limited perspective of one with diverse other, albeit also in their own way limited, perspectives. The instant that process stops, the instant we think we have a finite scripture, in that moment we give up on further liberation.

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This is part 3 of 5 of "Feminist Theology"
Next: Part 4: "Lynchpin to World Peace"
Previous: Part 2: "Whither Feminism?"
Beginning: Part 1: "I Was a Teenage Feminist"

Whither Feminism?

Not long ago, I was in a group of 40 or so adults, about half women and half men. Our group facilitator asked how many of the men identified themselves as feminists. I raised my hand. It occurred to me afterward that although I was willing to raise my hand as a feminist when asked, I had fallen out of the habit of calling myself a feminist out-loud when not asked. It doesn't seem as central to my identity as it once did.

The issues are still there, of course. We still haven’t passed an equal rights amendment. Discrimination and pay inequity and sexual harassment in the workplace are still going on.

The ranks of the most powerful – the CEOs and our Congressional representatives – continue to be overwhelmingly male. As of 2013, women hold 97 of the 535 seats in the US Congress. That’s 18.1 percent. It’s an incremental improvement over the last congress (16.6 percent), and certainly a very big difference from 1972 (2.8 percent). In state legislatures, women are up to 24 percent. Progress, yes, but still a long way from 50-50. Only 4.2 percent of Fortune 500 companies are headed by women.

Rights to reproductive choice are under assault and rolling back. As the Time magazine cover last month noted:

“Forty years ago, abortion-rights activists won an epic victory with Roe v. Wade. They’ve been losing ever since.” (2013 Jan 14)

Violence against women continues: two to four million women are battered by intimates every year in this country. Every day, four times a day, 1,400 times a year, a woman dies in this country as a result of domestic violence. It’s still more the rule than the exception that girls in our culture grow up learning to measure their worth from their sexual attractiveness to males – while boys grow up learning to measure their worth from what they do.

Yet I find, looking at myself, that the label “feminist” has gradually, gradually come to seem less important. It is one more word, and getting a handle on what justice and liberation looks like for women (and men) is hard to lay out with words. It seems less clear than it did 20 or 40 years ago what this label ‘feminist’ means. Words fail us. So many claims and practices have gone under the name of feminism, that it is hard to say just what it is all about.

Consider that in that same year of Ms. Magazine’s inauguration, 1972, Pope Paul VI said that “true women’s liberation” does not lie in

“formalistic or materialistic equality with the other sex, but in the recognition of that specific thing in the feminine personality – the vocation of a woman to become a mother.”

“Boo, hiss to the Pope,” my 13-year-old self said. Feminism as I understood it in the 70s was indeed precisely about formalistic and materialistic equality and the obliteration of the idea that there was any such “specific thing in the feminine personality” or a “vocation of a woman to become a mother.”

Then, in the 80s and 90s, I began noticing women writers who sought to value the feminine by recognizing a special connection to creation through motherhood – through an innate psychology that comes with the capacity for pregnancy and childbirth, even if they aren’t actual mothers. The ecofeminists, for instance, connected patriarchy with environmental degradation, and called upon a woman-centered view, because of its connection to nurturing and motherhood, to save the planet.

I was confused. I so wanted to be on the side of assertive and articulate women, but I was confused. What exactly was the difference between what these feminists were now saying and what the deplorable Pope was saying back in ’72? Aren’t they both calling for recognition of the special qualities of the feminine personality, especially mothering?

The words fail us – because the same words that the Pope was using to undermine women’s empowerment were being used by these feminists to empower women. Words that glorify the feminine might be nostalgic for imposed limitations, hearkening back to times when women were kept in the background, out of positions of leadership. (I'm recalling Susan Brownmiller's 1984 book, Femininity, in which she defined "femininity" as "a nostalgic tradition of imposed limitations.") Or those words might be part of making the case that women’s experience, and even women's biology, do offer a grounding for a unique wisdom -- a wisdom that is needed not just within a circumscribed role for women, but in the public sphere.

Or, as many wives have been saying to many husbands – probably for centuries: “It’s not what you said, but how you said it.” And this has -- probably for centuries -- baffled husbands who can't quite grasp that the same words that disempower might, in a different context with a different tone, empower.

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This is part 2 of 5 of "Feminist Theology"
Next: Part 3: "Slaying the 'Master Narrative' Dragon"
Previous: Part 1: "I Was a Teenage Feminist"

I Was a Teenage Feminist

The living tradition Unitarian Universalists share draws on many sources, including:

Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.

I was 13-years-old once, and there was for me no more transcendent mystery or wonder than females. Frankly, males were pretty much a mystery, too, for that matter: in fact, two mysteries: I was a mystery to myself, and other males were a completely different mystery. These mysteries, however, lacked the transcendence of the wholly holy other: girls and women.

It was 1972, the year I was 13, and the first issue of Ms. Magazine hit the scene. My mother was a charter subscriber, and the issues arrived monthly, and there they were, lying on the living room coffee table, along with the Time magazine, and Atlantic, and Scientific American, and . . . Playboy, which, interestingly, also arrived in our mailbox with my mother’s name on the address sticker on the plain brown wrapper. To the best of my ability to tell, she liked the articles.

That year, 1972, my parents gave me a booklet about how reproduction works, and then left me alone to wrestle with the transcending mystery and wonder – with various clues (and red herrings) on constant display on the living room coffee table. Moved as I was to “an openness to the forces that create...life,” I was an regular reader of both Ms. and Playboy. There was indeed a wealth of material on that coffee table, and it wasn’t all consistent. Still, by the time I was 15, I was fairly well-informed about women, I suppose, for my age.

Of course, I hadn’t the foggiest notion how to actually talk to one. Such expertise as I had was purely theoretical.

I have identified myself as feminist ever since I was 13. I wore often my “Yes ERA” t-shirt – a gift from my mother -- until, after some years, it fell apart (along with the amendment it supported, alas). I was raised to believe in justice and equality – that really is a key part of the story. I imbibed and took to heart the views of writers like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, Susan Brownmiller, Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, Mary Daly. By the time I was in college, I was reading their books, not just their pieces in Ms.

All those words.

At the same time, I was a teenage boy with a teenage boy’s hormones, and as I reflect back I think also a part of the story was a desperate hope that if I could only sufficiently display that I was on women’s side, then one of them might be willing to be on my side. My quest was for a grand unified theory that would make sense of my own burgeoning sexuality while also aligning me with high ideals of justice. What I had was rather a mish-mash of incoherent yearnings, really. (I identified a lot with Cervantes’ character, Don Quixote. Think, "impossible dream.")

My teen-age feminism set the stage for my young adult feminism. On past age 30, when I was in graduate school and my own kids were in elementary school, I was not only a checkbook supporter of the National Organization for Women, but an active member of the local University of Virginia chapter, going to meetings and marches in between my classes and studies. Then, as an assistant professor of philosophy at Fisk University, I chaired the task force that designed and brought to implementation that University’s first women’s studies program. Feminism has been a large and meaningful part of my life. It's been a winding and unfolding journey, and what it means for me, and us, I'll begin to explore in the next Lake Chalice.

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This is part 1 of 5 of "Feminist Theology"
Next: Part 2: "Whither Feminism?"