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VOW
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Voices
of Orthodox
Women
The Rise of Radical Feminism
in
Part 1 By Viola Larson
Recently, in a poignant letter written by an Episcopal vicar renouncing her vows, I read these words, “No one cares if my soul is sick, estranged from God and destined for the fire.” The vicar was not writing because she was renouncing faith in Christ nor because she no longer cared for the church of Jesus Christ, but rather because she feared that the institution she belonged to, the Episcopal Church, would so neglect not only her soul but the souls of others that they would die spiritually. In the same neglectful manner, in every mainline church, many in leadership in women’s organizations, seemingly, do not care if our souls are sick, estranged from God and destined for the fire. The history behind such leadership is one that few know or understand. Their advocacy, such as empowering the self and reproductive choice is based on concepts and ideas garnered from a century of feminist ideology. Their theology based on a century of feminist alternative spirituality is replacing the theology advocated by nineteenth century Christian women who were intent on aiding the other half of the Christian Church in proclaiming the gospel. In contrast to such women as Catherine Booth (1829-1890), a forceful preacher and wife of Salvation Army founder William Booth; Katharine Bushnell (1855-1946), author of God’s Word to Women and a medical missionary to China; and Louisa Woosley (1862-1952), the first ordained woman in any Presbyterian Church; who truly preached and upheld the gospel of Jesus Christ, contemporary women’s leadership often proclaims a dry ideological agenda devoid of biblical redemption. In its early beginnings the feminist movement was, to put it simply, a movement among women seeking equal rights; that included voting rights, equality in education, and positions of leadership in churches. For nineteenth century women the act of gaining rights was a startling new kind of ethic drawing diverse groups of women together. The names applied to the various movements and groups stretched from women abolitionists, leaders of the temperance movement to suffragettes. Most women in any of these movements were suffragettes, that is, most believed that women should be allowed to vote. Contemporary historians classify the positions of women seeking equal rights under the heading of feminists; however, it is doubtful that that was the name of choice at the time. Scholars list two main categories for those nineteenth century women seeking equality. Those who insisted on women’s rights on the basis of a rational philosophical position are seen as enlightenment feminists, and those who looked at women’s problems from a woman’s social and domestic perspective are considered cultural feminists. There are sub-titles under these headings such as liberal feminism under Enlightenment and romantic under cultural feminism. Another group of women found their identity in Christianity, and, among other rights, sought the right to preach and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is doubtful that feminism as we think of that term today would be considered acceptable to early Christian women who sought for the right to preach1. Most of those women seeking rights worked together in various causes related to the suffrage movement, such as abolition and temperance, and some of their ideas overlapped. But as the movement grew the ideas among the different types of rights advocates changed and because of this some of the groups grew farther and farther apart. In fact, at one point, the movement split into two rival groups who barely spoke to each other. One group, the American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Lucy Stone, Mary Livermore, and Julia Ward Howe, agreed to wait for the Afro-American male to receive the vote before pushing forward for women’s suffrage; the other group, the National American Woman Suffrage, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, was more radical in membership and insisted, in very racist terms, that the more intelligent white woman should be granted the vote before ignorant black men. 2 In the early movement the cultural feminists were philosophically essentialist, that is, gender was an essential part of who they were as humans. Indeed, the foundation of their feminism was women’s nature. Such a concept was in contrast to enlightenment feminists, such as Susan B. Anthony, whose good foundation was human dignity. Many of the cultural feminists became very religious, but their religious views were alternatives to Christianity. While some Christian women seeking some of the same rights as the cultural feminist, also shared one of their foundational concepts, that is, women’s nature is different from men’s nature, their biblical understanding prevented them from coming to the same kinds of conclusions held by the cultural feminists. Because their foundation was the authority of Scripture and the Lordship of Jesus Christ their activism was not centered in women’s experience but in what they believed was God given revelation. For instance, Katherine Bushnell, in her book, God’s Word to Women, wrote of her claim that women were called by God for ministry, “Our argument assumes that the Bible is all that it claims for itself. It is (1) Inspired, 2 Tim. 3:16; (2) Infallible, Isa. 40:8, and (3) Inviolable, John 10:35.”3 Unlike cultural feminists they sought to glorify God rather than empower the self. This divide has moved into the post-modern mainline church organizations. Contemporary feminism began with the same kind of distinctions as early feminism, with of course very modern ideas, but still with a growing divide between cultural feminism and Christianity. The cultural feminists can now be called, in many cases, radical feminists. At the same time, today, in many of the mainline churches the women’s organizations are filled, at the governing level, by those who in the past were seen as cultural feminists. Their religious views are now referred to as Christian feminism but it is not the same kind of Christianity that those early women seeking the right to preach held. Early nineteenth century Christian women seeking the right to minister the word and sacraments to others held views similar to twenty-first century Reformed or Evangelical women today. Among other rights they desired to teach and preach. Yet, none of their views about equality changed their views about the essentials of Christianity. For nineteenth century women in ministry, such as Louisa Woosley or Catherine Booth, the deity of Christ, the Trinity, understood as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and the atonement were foundational beliefs. And they based their views on what they considered to be the authority of Scripture. Today the divide among women in mainline churches is so great those who are in leadership and who are mainly related to early cultural feminists are in the process of destroying the traditions of faith that has existed among Christian women for two-thousand years. Women who hold to the essential tenets of the faith are ignored, unwelcome, unheralded and even maligned by cultural or radical feminists in their own churches. In fact, many in leadership, like some of the leadership of Israel at the time of Jesus, “build the tombs of the prophets” yet are descended from those who wished to, if not destroy, at least ignore the very gospel the women they are supposedly honoring preached. They do not write about the good news of Jesus Christ only about the women who so hungered to proclaim it. I will, in this paper, explore the differences between these two groups and look at some of the history and problems connected to this divide. I will mainly do this from a Presbyterian perspective since I belong to the Presbyterian Church USA. How did cultural feminism come to be called Christian feminism and why does its theology and ritual so often integrate pagan motifs, words, ideas and ritual? Why are most mainline women leaders and theologians so bent on disregarding the essentials of the faith? To understand this it is necessary to go back to the history of early cultural feminism. It is also necessary to look at the women’s spirituality movement in the United States during the midpoint and latter half of the twentieth century and how that movement affected not only the Wiccan groups coming to the United States from Britain but also women’s organizations in the mainline churches. I will in the next section focus on early cultural feminist’s concepts and phobias and how they relate to those who are in leadership in the Women’s Ministry Area, Presbyterian Women, and the Young Women’s Ministries which includes the National Network of Presbyterian College Women. Horizons, the Presbyterian Women’s magazine and its editors will be included in this comparison. Early Cultural Feminist Concepts Early cultural feminist religious ideas can be seen in the work of such women as Matilda Joslyn Gage. In 1893 she wrote, Woman Church & State: A Historical Account of the Status of Women Through the Christian Ages: With Reminiscences of the Matriarchate4.Gage’s book not only attempted to show how badly men had treated women but how badly Christianity had treated women. Gage offered her readers a religious alternative based on the nature of women. Gage believed in a natural goodness in women and that woman’s goodness would be the salvation of humanity. While rejecting the authority of the church she wrote, “It is through a recognition of the divine element of motherhood as not alone inhering in the great primal source of life but as extending throughout all creation, that it will become possible for the world, so buried in darkness, folly and superstition, to practice justice toward woman.”5 Another cultural feminist, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote, in 1923, His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers.6 Gilman was a social Darwinist with a twist. She lived during a time when many in the United States were enthralled with the idea of eugenics, that is, the idea that only those people who were fit should be allowed to have children. Many people are unaware that there was a time in the United States when thousands of people were sterilized because they had various disabilities or records of criminals in their families. Gilman, like her contemporary, the atheist, Margaret Sanger, did not agree with abortion but advocated sterilization. Gilman believed women possessed the correct characteristics for shaping humanity and that it was the responsibility of women to choose their mates for the sake of the proper development of humanity. Her theology was founded on her social Darwinism. The virtues of her religion included “social development,” which meant that adherents must see woman as “the race type and her natural impulses” as “more in accordance with the laws of growth than those of the male.”7 Elizabeth Cady Stanton tends to fit in both the cultural feminist and Enlightenment categories. She grew to hate Christianity and flirted with some very bizarre ideas including free love and racism. Some common themes among early cultural feminist were the goodness of human nature as seen in women’s nature, the oppression of women by most world religions especially Christianity, an ancient golden age when a matriarchal society existed and a time in the middle ages when male Christian leaders had burned millions of witches mainly because they were women who possessed some form of power. Matilda Joslyn Gage, who detested the Christian Church, is the person who was to give to contemporary radical feminism the understanding that nine million witches had been burned during the Middle Ages. She stated that number in her book Woman Church & State without any proper historical reason. Ronald Hutton, professor of History at the University of Bristol, and author of The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, points out that “the scale of her overestimate was breathtaking, especially as it was apparently undertaken on no rational basis whatsoever.”8 Mary Daly in her book, Beyond God the Father refers to 30, 000 to several million but in her book Gyn/Ecology: the Metaethics of Radical Feminism, she not only refers to her earlier statement but also refers to Gage’s number of nine million.9 Hutton, a Professor who leans toward paganism himself, explains that
the real truth about the reasons and numbers of the burning of witches
is historically different than what has been until recently understood
by both members of Wicca or radical/cultural feminists. Hutton states that,
“It has [been] established beyond any reasonable doubt that there was no
long-lasting or wide-ranging persecution of witches in early modern Europe,
trials which involved the charge being neither routine nor common in any
district.” Writing of the victims of such accusations, Hutton points out
that they were mostly “poor, marginalized, and anti-social, and where accusations
spread they mostly reflected tensions between neighbors in lower reaches
of society.” He states:
That cultural feminists, who are in leadership in the mainline churches, have not easily given up this accusation against the church and men in general can be seen by one of the articles on witchcraft in Dictionary of Feminist Theologies. Moshe Sluhovsky admits that, “where most denunciations took place, accusations had less to do with learned views of witchcraft than with local rivalries.” Yet, she goes on to write that women accusing other women “could be attributed to conformism in a patriarchal society, to competition among women for social standing within the community or to women’s prominent role as healers.”11 Women in leadership positions in the mainline women’s organizations continually refer to and extol the radical feminist writer Elizabeth A. Johnson. Johnson who wrote, She Who is, writes, “The innocent blood of women shed for this word [God], the burning of thousands of wise and independent women called witches, for example and the continuing injustice of subordination done to women in God’s name is only coming to light, and it is grave. Perhaps we should have done with the word God altogether.” She also writes, “A very public though by now suppressed chapter in the history of women’s affliction is the trial and execution of women accused of being witches by the inquisition. For reasons that had much to do with the threatened patriarchal dominance of spiritual and healing power, hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million women were annihilated in the name of God.” 12 Here Johnson cites the writer Mary Daly, and her book Gyn/Ecology: the Metaethics of Radical Feminism, who, remember, cited Gage. And so one of the myths of early cultural feminism continues to be held, as well as told over and over through the books that mainline women leaders find acceptable and recommend. Another radical feminist’s myth that Gage helped perpetrate was the belief that a golden age of a matriarchal society existed. This idea was perpetrated by many in the nineteenth century including Margaret Murray who wrote The Witch Cult in Western Europe in 1921. The idea of an early golden age with women in charge was melded to the idea that there had always existed a religion resembling witchcraft throughout the whole of the medieval ages and that these survivors of ancient paganism were the victims of the “burning times.” This myth was also melded with the belief that during pre-history most of humanity worshiped a female deity and this lasted until patriarchal warriors set up a male god in her place. Gage included this information in her book and that information has only recently been discredited by historians including Hutton and Cynthia Eller author of Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America. Nevertheless, women’s organizations in the mainline churches still push these ideas of an early matriarchal society which worshiped a goddess by pushing such books as The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd who writes of this supposedly ancient time, “The ancient Goddess cultures were probably not utopia, but still they appear to have been remarkably egalitarian and nonviolent. The feminine was honored, sexuality was sacred, and the cultures apparently supported no splits between nature and spirit.”13 And the National Network of Presbyterian College Women recommend the books WomanWord; WomanWisdom; WomanWitness by Miriam Therese Winter, who in her chapter on Sarah refers to Savina Teubal and her book Sarah the Priestess, and Teubal’s idea that the story of Abraham in Genesis is one tradition replacing another, that is, the story of Sarah and matriarchy. Winter writes, “The ‘Sarah tradition’ was part of a non-patriarchal system in which women were dominant, descent was matrilineal (traced through the mother), residence was matrilocal (in the mother’s homeland), and ultimogeniture (succession through the youngest child) not ultimogeniture (through the firstborn), was the norm.” She goes on to explain that, “The narratives of Genesis matriarchs reflect the earlier tradition’s struggle to survive, and clues to its strength and to Sarah’s importance can be found in the texts.”14 And so the myth of a pre-history matriarchal society continues in the pages read by those women who read the books recommended by those in leadership. Because accounts of a pagan religion, often referred to as witchcraft or Wicca, is the subject of much of the mythical history endorsed by radical feminism and since this history was originally written by nineteenth century occultists, words shaped by occultists often show up in supposedly Christian articles in mainline church magazines. For instance, Aleister Crowley was an occultist and a magician, whose contribution to the formation of nineteenth century British Witchcraft was an understanding of the goddess having a triple aspect related to the aspects of the moon. This view, very prevalent in Wicca today, sees the aspects as three supposed stages of woman's life. Leading occultists, including Crowley, named those three aspects maiden, mother and crone. Sometimes the crone aspect is referred to as a wise woman. Starhawk in a meditation on the crone aspect of the goddess writes, “The Crone is the Wise Woman, infinitely old.”15 That leadership in the women’s organization feed on such concepts can be seen by references to these terms in their materials. In the September/October 2004 Horizons the official magazine for Presbyterian women, in an article on possible ways of affirming girls who are becoming women, the author refers to older women as crones.16 A sample ten-week out-line for College Women on topics of interest to young women suggests on week ten that they might wish to invite a “‘Wise Woman Mentor’ who has been important to you throughout the semester/year/your life. Share what you have been doing with the Wise Woman and have her share her faith journey with you.” 17 It is probable that some women using these terms have no idea of their origin, but it is certain that some women have added such words to their vocabulary by way of a book extolling paganism or by participating in some kind of women’s spirituality group. So, the question is still unanswered, how did women, who in many ways
are indoctrinated by cultural or radical feminism, start replacing early
nineteenth century Christian women’s theology? The transformation mainly
began with several women’s movements from the sixties through the nineties
in the latter part of the twentieth century. In the next installment I
will look at the women’s spirituality movement in the United States in
the twentieth century and its impact on both Wicca groups and mainline
church women’s groups. I will also explore the various definitions of feminism
and how those definitions tend to confuse Christian women attempting to
be faithful Christians while yet staying involved in ministry.
___________ 1 Here, after much thought and research, I am changing my own perspective.
I have called all of these women feminists in both my Masters Thesis and
other articles, but given the changing meaning of that term and the fact
that it rarely shows up in early suffragette writings I have changed my
mind, I believe we need a new way of defining early Christian women who
fought for various human rights.
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