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Some Questions and Comments for the Office of Women’s Advocacy on their Article, “Reflect on our foremothers’ feminism”

Since I do not know if there is more than one author I will refer to the author of this article as she.

Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton held theories “that indigenous women in early history held positions of respect and authority in egalitarian and women-centered societies that often worshiped a female deity, sometimes in combination with a male consort. …This matriarchal system was overthrown, Stanton contended, when ‘Christianity, putting the religious weapon into a man’s hand, made his conquest complete.”1 Quote by Sally Roesch Wagner, from her book, Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosuanee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists. This book is used as a good reference in the article “Reflect on our foremothers’ feminism” produced by the Office of Women’s Advocacy for Women’s History month.

Wagner is also the author of an article written for The American Atheist, entitled, “Christianity: Arch-Enemy of Freedom.” After ranting about Christianity, Wagner, referring to a nineteenth-century critic of the Church, Parker Pillsbury, writes that if he were alive today he would probably call for a warning on Bibles: “The contents of this document have been demonstrated to be dangerous to human freedom.”2

So why is the Office of Women’s Advocacy using Wagner as a good reference in their article “Reflect on our foremothers’ feminism” for Women’s History Month?

The gist of the Women’s Advocacy article is that as Western feminists strove to gain rights for women they ignored the needs and undervalued the experiences of “women of color” and the “poor and working class women.” It would appear that the Office of Women’s Advocacy is offering such a resource because it apparently provides a foundation for feminism in the experiences of women of color.

Don’t the Scriptures provide a more complete and acceptable foundation for all Christian women’s advocacy?

Why doesn’t the Office of Women’s Advocacy use the Scriptures for that resource and foundation?

In truth, the author of this feminist history article is offering radical theologies in what seems like an attempt to change the faith of those Christian women who are disadvantaged and poor and who belong to diverse ethnic groups, yet are very orthodox in their faith. This is a rather misguided and simplistic way of doing women’s history and tends toward the furtherance of fragmentation in the Presbyterian Church USA.

Because the author has not separated and identified the various early groups of women who worked for women’s rights, and she has not separated the early feminist movement from the feminist movement that began in the sixties, the facts are terribly jumbled. Additionally since the author has highlighted Wagner’s book she has failed to make a distinction between radical feminist theology which rejects Christianity and those women who do advocate for social justice but hold to a Reformed faith.

In her book Sisters in Spirit, Wagner refers to three early feminists, Gage, Stanton and Lucretia Mott. She insists that early feminist ideas of equality came from the Iroquois Native American women who had possessed exceptional equality within their tribes. Wagner insists the ideas of Native American equality were passed on to the women’s movement via Gage, Stanton and Mott. As stated above, the author of “Reflect on our foremothers’ feminism” uses Wagner’s book as proof that the concepts of early feminism came from women of color.

But the truth is there were three kinds of women who sought for equal rights and each of these groups based their understanding of equality on differing concepts. The Enlightenment feminist based her theory on reason and was a product of the Enlightenment understanding that education was the foundation of equality. Christian women such as Sarah Grimke and Josephine Butler who sought the right to preach, as well as other rights such as suffrage and abolition, found their foundations in the Scripture. And yes, the cultural feminist, led by such women as Gage and Stanton, found their foundations in women’s nature.3

Gage may have in fact used some ideas from the Iroquois women but that is beside the point. Basically her ideas were a rather occultic combination of romanticism and spiritualism.4 She has been identified as a theosophist by Wagner and like Theosophy’s founder, Madame Blavatsky, Gage hated Christianity.5 Gage’s religious views are not acceptable views for those women who embrace Christianity. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose foundations began in the Enlightenment, moved increasingly toward cultural feminism and as she did so became increasingly radical and even racist.

Historian Gary Dorrien records some of the racism in his book, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion 1805-1900. Feminist racism grew partly from a dispute about the vote for African American males. Some of the more radical feminists were insisting that women should get the vote ahead of the emancipated male slaves. Dorrien records some of the racist speeches and counter-racist speeches made at the last meeting of the American Equal Rights Association in 1869.

Stanton, referring to all of those who, in nineteenth-century America were considered outsiders, stated, “Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who cannot read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book, making laws for Lucretia Mott, Ernestine L. Rose, and Anna E. Dickinson [all leading feminists of the time].”

Stanton went on to ask, “Shall American statesmen , claiming to be liberal, so amend their constitutions as to make their wives and mothers the political inferiors of unlettered and unwashed ditch-diggers, bootblacks, butchers and barbers, fresh from the slave plantations of the South, and the effete civilizations of the Old World.” 6 This attitude was countered by the more conservative breakaway group: the “New England Suffrage Association.”

Dorrien points out that the New England feminists were also “more friendly to mainline Christianity, males, and the notion that the present hour ‘belonged to the Negro.”7 However, at the Equal Rights Convention it was Frederick Douglass, a tireless worker for women’s suffrage, who gave an impassioned speech for the sake of the African-American male vote:

I must say that I do not see how anyone can pretend that there is the same urgency in giving the ballot to woman as to the negro. With us, the matter is a question of life and death, at least in fifteen states of the Union. [This was the period of carpetbaggers and reconstruction in the South after the Civil War.] When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools, then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.8

As can be seen from the above, the radical wing of early feminism hardly consisted of those who empathized with their “colored” sisters. However, the radical feminism that arose in the sixties did involve mainly Caucasian women although it is questionable whether this excluded the under-privileged or poor since many of that era’s feminists found their foundations in a romantic socialism which included a lesbian culture.9 What is certain is that the feminism of the sixties evolved into a movement that did exclude those women, both rich and poor, Caucasian and all other ethnic groups who adhered to biblical orthodoxy in teaching and morals.

Unlike early feminism, the feminism of the sixties entered the Church via the secular world. The concept of each woman’s experience became the foundation for a radical feminism that eventually turned against all those who held to the authority of Scripture. Human experience became the standard that swept all theology before it. Rather than lifting up all ethnic peoples or cultures in an embrace of God’s saving act in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, radical feminist theology and radical feminist theologians began fragmenting theology while excluding orthodox women.

The article “Reflect on our foremothers’ feminism” in fact demonstrates this problem. The author recommends the feminist primers on Mujerista, Asian-American and Womanist theology found on the Women’s Ministry Area site. But the information in these books offers no biblical theology and simply leads to further fragmentation.

Pastor Tracee D. Hackel explains the problem in her article “Dialogue or Monologue?: The Relationship between Reformed Theology and Contemporary Theologies of Women.” Hackel writes:

If theology is nothing more than a record of human experiences then this fragmentation is no surprise; of course African-American, Hispanic, and Asian women are going to have different experiences. But why stop with only cultural and economic differences?

The reality of this position is that even if you assume a common object of experience, in this case ‘God’ or ‘the divine,’ there is no way to prove that one particular person’s, let alone one particular group’s, experience is an experience of the same thing as another’s. At the end of the day it is impossible for one person to have the same experiences as another. Not only does this lead to fragmentation and isolation, but can in fact set one group against the other, as is the case with the relationship between many contemporary theologies of women and Judaism.10

The attempt by radical feminist theologians to break their theology apart into various isolated theologies with only women’s experience as the foundation ends with the scapegoating of women who adhere to biblical authority and reject experience as a foundation. Such scapegoating becomes clear with the addition of the resource, “Report and Recommendations from the Women of Color Consultation,” added as a link in the article “Reflect on our Foremothers Feminism.”

Although there are a few good recommendations in the “Women of Color” resource, many recommendations are very troubling and the connection of one particular recommendation with this particular article on feminism is in fact chilling. Under “Recommends the following to event participants”: “Recognize that as women internalize oppression, we perpetuate patriarchal systems of power, enabling sexism. And if women’s resistance to change is part of the problem, then women’s support of each other is the solution.”

Under general recommendations referred to ACWC and ACREC this is put slightly differently, “Call for education that recognizes internalized oppression, where women perpetuate patriarchal systems of power, enabling sexism. If women’s resistance to change is part of the problem, then women’s support of each other is the solution.”11

My awareness of where these recommendations could lead comes from attending the NNPCW 2006 Leadership Event this past summer. In one workshop I experienced a confrontation with one older woman attending the event. She “mentioned the two new people for the Advocacy Committee for Women’s Concerns who had been nominated from the floor of the General Assembly and had won. She suggested that they were nominated by those men’s [meaning the renewal ministries] organizations! I told her that I was a part of the renewal networks as were many women pastors and elders. She replied that she didn’t mean they were all men but they had a masculine spirit!”12 This leads to several more questions.

Is “resistance to change” wrong when it entails orthodox women refusing to put other names beside or above Father, Son and Holy Spirit when speaking of the Trinity?

Does this mean that women who do not support abortion rights or who believe that the act of homosexual sex is unbiblical are perpetuating “patriarchal systems of power” and “enabling sexism?”

Are women who refuse to acknowledge radical feminist theology that rejects the unique Lordship of Jesus Christ and abhors the redemptive act of Jesus Christ on the cross, “internalizing oppression”?13

There is also in connection with women’s history month an article “Support women in leadership roles” with a link to “Presbyterians and Gender Justice, The Church and Advocacy for Women” by Sylvia Thorson-Smith. This is an article from Presbyterian Women’s magazine Horizons that lifts up the Re-Imagining Conference where a ritual and prayer was offered to Sophia and where the cross of Christ was disparaged. For an excellent article on Thorson-Smith’s article see “Foremother of Voices of Sophia Recounts History of Advocacy for Women in the PC (USA)" by Sylvia Dooling.

1 Sally Roesch Wagner, Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosuanee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists, (Summertown, Tennessee: Native Voices 2001), 50.

2 See www.americanatheist.org/win97-8/T2/archenemy.html.

3 See Viola Larson, “The Rise of Radical Feminism in Mainline Churches: A History: part one,” at Voices of Orthodox Women: http://www.vow.org/viewpoints/essays/06mar17-vlarson-rise_of_radical_feminism_part_1.html. and Viola Larson, An Exploration: Feminist Ethics and the Principles of Orthodox Christianity, thesis, 1994, California State University, Sacramento.

4 Viola Larson, “Early Feminism: Equality, Ethical Theory and Religion,” at Naming the Grace: http://www.naminggrace.org/id64.htm.

5 Sally Roesch Wagner, “Introduction,” to Woman, Church and State: The Original Expose of Male Collaboration Against the Female Sex, Matilda Joslyn Gage, reprint from 1893, (Watertown, Massachusetts: Persephone Press 1980) xxviii.

6 The Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, ed. Ellen Coral DuBois (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981), 348-55, quotes, 353, 354, 355 found in Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion 1805-1900, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press 2001), 230-231.

7 Ibid., in Dorrien, 229.

8 Ibid., 382, in Dorrien, 231.

9 For an overview of this period in feminism see, Viola Larson, “The Rise of Radical Feminism in the Mainline Churches: A History: part 2” Found at Voices of Orthodox Women: http://www.vow.org/viewpoints/essays/06apr16--vlarson-rise_of_radical_feminism_part_2.html.

10 Tracee D. Hackel, “Dialogue or Monologue? The Relationship between Reformed Theology and Contemporary Theologies of Women,” found at Voices of Orthodox Women: http://www.vow.org/pcusa/wmpa/00xxxxx-hackle-dialogue_or_monologue.html.

11 “Report and Recommendation from the Women of Color Consultation,” Atlanta Oct. 15-17 2004 A National Gathering of Racial Ethnic Women in the Presbyterian Church (USA) issued Dec 2005 5,18.

12 See http://www.vow.org/viewpoints/essays/06jul26-vlarson-2006_nnpcw_event.html.

13 For a list of books the Women’s Ministry Area recommends which advocates for this kind of theology see: http://www.pcusa.org/women/history-theology/theological-contributions.htm.

The Sexual Revolution or Raunch Culture: Isn’t There a Better Choice?

by
Viola Larson

Since I do not know if there is more than one author I will refer to the author of this article as she.

The Office of Women’s Advocacy, while celebrating Women’s History month, has placed an additional article on their site entitled, “Recognize the threat of ‘raunch culture.’” In the conclusion of the article the author writes, “Raunch culture does us all the disservice of epitomizing femininity and womanhood as sexiness and sexuality, then marketing it to our youth.” She is exactly right.

It’s too bad the author is writing strictly from a feminist position and not from a Christian position. The reason it’s too bad: the paper mainly focuses on the difference between the sexual revolution that began in the sixties and the raunch culture of the twenty-first century. Consequently, the author sees the moral problem as the difference between a mature woman’s right to choose her lifestyle and the manipulation of young girls by the media and patriarchy.

The problem is exacerbated by the author’s small amount of written text and many links to other articles and events, none of them biblical or Christian. For instance one link is connected to Wikipedia and an article posted there about the sexual revolution. The authors of the article on the sexual revolution at the Wikipedia site attempt to define, give a history of, and write about the roots of the revolution. For instance in the text of the definition is the statement:

It is clear that sexual behaviour did change radically for the vast majority of women, but only a generation after the "revolution" had begun. Women reaching sexual maturity after about 1984 have behaviours much more in common with the men of a generation earlier. Some had more partners (two to three times), starting at an earlier age (by three to five years), than women of the generation of the 1970s.

Within the text on the history of the sexual revolution is the statement:

The sexual revolution can be seen an outgrowth of a process in recent history. It was a development in the modern world which saw the significant loss of power by the values of a morality rooted in the Christian tradition and the rise of permissive societies, of attitudes that were accepting of greater sexual freedom and experimentation that spread all over the world and were captured in the phrase free love.1 (Italics the Wikipedia author’s)

Another link is connected to Newsweek’s article on raunchy culture which gives neither biblical nor moral arguments against such immorality but does offer some tasteless pictures.

The author for the Office of Women’s Advocacy writes, “… it is important to note key differences between the sexual revolution of late and the exploding phenomenon of raunchy culture.” Concluding, she explains that:

Raunch culture does us all the disservice of epitomizing femininity and womanhood as sexiness and sexuality, then marketing it to our youth. Feminism has opened the door for important conversations about women’s freedom of expression and personal fulfillment. Tweens and teen girls need to be equipped with skills to empower them to exercise their freedom of conscience.

The author in her final paragraph is at last generous with the Church. “There is room for a stronger voice” from her, she writes. (Bold mine) The Church has a “responsibility” she adds, including the need for girls to be taught leadership and to “hear what it means, and what it requires to be a woman of God.” But neither within the text of this article nor in the links provided is there any voice that holds up biblical standards. The choice seems to be only between mature choices about whether to, when to, or what kind of sex and sex that is forced on unsuspecting immature girls by the media and patriarchy.

There is within these texts no voice to point young girls to the care and holiness of the Father, the forgiving and saving grace of the Son or the comfort, strength and keeping power of the Holy Spirit.

1 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_revolution.