Feminist is a loaded word.
Some women, mostly white and many well into middle age, claim the label proudly. Younger women are apt to shrug it off. Women of color say they need to translate it into language they understand. Some men call themselves feminist, while others spit out the word with epithets ranging from bra burning to baby killing. One thing’s for sure: the movement that goes by the name has transformed the lives of all of the above.
The feminist movement’s sources are the revolutionary upheaval of the late 18th-century and 19th-century struggles to extend political rights beyond white males with property. The contemporary version was launched in 1963 when Betty Friedan documented the malaise of post-war housewives in The Feminine Mystique. Friedan and her friends were well-educated, middle-class women, who wanted out of the kitchen and into the world of work and politics. Their watchword was equality. They won laws prohibiting discrimination in schools and jobs but lost the effort to write equal rights into the Constitution.
Their opponents raised silly arguments (unisex toilets?) but made a broader point: the status of women is social, not merely political, concern and messing with it would affect the family, the work force, the military—not to mention the church.
African American and Hispanic women argued from a different perspective. Winning equal rights to go to MIT or to become a corporate lawyer means nothing to the majority of women, they said. Their struggles are more basic: poverty, violence, racism, machismo, and neighborhoods that lack daycare, where the schools are failing and the children are not safe. A women’s movement worthy of the name, they insisted, must put these concerns at its center, so they created their own.
Feminist organizations have taken up some of these challenges, especially female violence, rape and day care. But much of their struggle has galvanized women who consider control over their bodies the most fundamental right; but it has alienated others, who interpret it to mean that feminism is inevitably anti-child and antifamily.
Are feminists anti-male? The more radical among them certainly are; they see men as the enemy and patriarchy as the ultimate evil that engenders in turn poverty, war and oppression. Others are less likely to say that men are inherently evil, but they are tempted to believe that women are somehow morally superior and that a society in which women were empowered would be more just and less the same thing: that when women had the vote, there would be no more war. The 20th century has not borne out that promise.
But there’s no doubt that feminism has already wrought a number of dramatic changes. Don’t just look at the Senate and the Supreme Court. Consider little girls growing up playing soccer and studying math. Listen to the scholars who unearth long-buried stories of women in history and scripture. Cherish the women who build communities in the bleakest inner cities. Watch the men who have learned new ways to be fathers and lovers. And worry, too, about how family will come through this upheaval and whether the church will ever take it seriously.
Has feminism helped women in the church?
By Diana L. Hayes, a professor emerita of theology at Georgetown University.
One of the most important movements of this century—because of its impact on both the Christian churches and Western society—has been the women’s liberation movement, in both its political and theological forms. With roots in earlier movements: abolition (19th century), suffrage (1920s), and civil rights (1960s), it witnesses the “coming to voice” of women of all races and ethnicities, and it comes as a decided shock to many, especially those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo in the halls of academia, the offices of the corporate world, or the sanctuaries of the Catholic church.
The women’s movement, however, is the natural result of a continuous struggle for the liberation that first came into the forefront in the aftermath of World War II. Freedoms and opportunities once achieved are rarely rescinded without a struggle, and today’s women have no intention of retreating from gains made. Their efforts to free themselves of stereotypical roles and characterizations to gain greater responsibility in all walks of life is in keeping with other liberation struggles around the globe where usually women have been the hardest “laborers in the vineyard” but have reaped far from equal rewards.
Within theological circles, especially the Roman Catholic Church, this movement has empowered women to recover their own voices and to speak for themselves from the depths of the anger, frustration, and love they have toward their church. As the literal backbone of the church—for women make up the majority of the faithful—they have called upon the church to renounce its demeaning patriarchal attitude toward them. Relying upon interpretations of sacred scripture, tradition, and church doctrine, which emerge from their own lived experiences as women, they are demanding greater participation at all levels, including that of the ordained priesthood. Their demands are supported by their theological scholarship, which reveals for the first time the critical roles that women have played since the early church. This knowledge, hitherto unknown and unacknowledged, for whatever reason, has given them the courage to speak out against the failings of the hierarchical and institutional church.
Women of color have also participated in the movement toward breaking the shackles that have enclaved women in the church for so long. Sadly, they have had to engage in a two-pronged assault against the racism and sexism of the church and the racism, conscious or unconscious, of the feminist movement that repeated the same mistakes in their attitude toward and lack of inclusion of women of color in their midst. Today, the womanist movement (that of women of color) and the feminist movement are engaged in much needed dialogue as they seek to present a joint assault upon religious institutions that attempt to proscribe their roles and delineate their responsibilities while they continue to recognize and overcome their own failings.
The women’s movement has given women of all races, and classes a locus theologicus from which they can continue to call the church to live up to its teachings of the equality and co-createdness of all God’s people with voices that cry to heaven and will not cease. It has also given women at all levels in the church an opportunity to be a voice in the church. It has enabled them, because of changes, such as inclusive language in the worship service, to see their place in the church as one becoming more valued.
Leadership roles for women, especially on the parish level, have multiplied, so today we see them not just as Eucharistic ministers but as liturgical assistants. Women are even serving as pastoral administrators, which means they are the “pastor” in all but name.
Are women especially moral?
By Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who taught history at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
When feminists suggest, as many do, that women are in some way morally superior to men, they are drawing upon the venerable tradition of separate spheres that assigned women to the home and men to the worlds of business and politics. Accordingly, women were naturally suited to raise children, tend to the ill, and generally provide an antidote to the competitive struggles of capitalism.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, women reformers frequently argued that they should bring the values of the domestic sphere into the public sphere to clean it up—to make it safe for women and children. And they sometimes called their efforts social housekeeping. There is, nonetheless, some irony in the uses to which these ideas have been put by contemporary feminism. For women’s moral superiority was normally taken to derive directly from their attentiveness to and empathy for the weak and vulnerable, which is to say from their traditional female roles.
Many women still cherish the notion that women have specific responsibilities to children and a special affinity for the claims of morality as against those of profit, for the claims of selflessness against those of self-promotion. Yet the driving force in contemporary feminism has been precisely to free women from those claims. Women, feminists reasonably claim, should be free to compete equally with men in the worlds of work and politics. Women should feel free to enjoy their sexuality, express their anger, and engage in the competition of power, prestige and profit.
And, in a world in which so many women do have to support themselves or contribute to a family income, they have an important point. They would further, again not unreasonably, argue that women have the same right as men to realize their talents and their ambitions. But, if they insist that women should be able to feel and behave the same as men, why they insist women will also continue to feel and behave differently from them remains puzzling.
Feminism began as primarily a revolt against male domination, but as women have begun to make substantial gains in the men’s world of work and politics, many have tended to feel wrenched between career and family. It is now less often men than children who stand in the way of women’s complete freedom, and it looks more and more as if the struggle for that freedom is taking the form of a revolt against children—and beyond children, against the moral works of society.
From many feminists’ perspective, the care of the weak and vulnerable was imposed upon women by men. They conclude that, to throw off male domination, women must throw off those responsibilities. They do not normally say that feminism means a revolt against morality, but it is difficult to see what remains, under the new conditions, of women’s traditional association with morality—for that morality, which had less to do with how one felt than with the work that one did and the sacrifices one made, was explicitly elaborated and valued as the direct antithesis of competitive individualism.
Women are as entitled as men to enjoy the benefits of unfettered individualism, but if that is what feminism stands for, it remains difficult to understand how women’s morality will differ from that of men whose immorality they are so ready to condemn.
Feminism has made me a better man
By Gregory F. Augustine Pierce, co-publisher of ACTA Publications in Chicago and author of Of Human Hands: A Reader in the Spirituality of Work.
The women’s movement has made me a better and happier man in many ways. Here are three of them:
1. I’m a lot better father to my 6-year-old daughter, Abigail. If it weren’t for the changes over the last 30 years in how men and women think about and relate to each other, I am sure that she and I would not be as close as we are
Because feminists successfully challenged the 1950’s stereotype of male-female relations, I have dealt much differently with Abby than I might have. For example, she and I can play dolls of Nintendo together with equal ease. We can either dance or roughhouse around the living room as the spirit moves us. We talk together, about anything under the sun, read books, draw, study arithmetic, even go shopping together. Abby plays both soccer and baseball with me—just like her brothers do. All this father-daughter togetherness has made Abby and me a lot closer than we would have been had I still viewed little girls as dainty little creatures somehow alien to the world of men and boys. The women’s movement has allowed Abby and me to become good friends, and that has made me very happy.
2. I am much happier in the workplace and, I think, a much better worker because of the changing roles of men and women there. I have spent many year working for female bosses; I have had several women as employees and colleagues; and for the last five years I have been partners in a business with a woman, Mary Bickley. These women have not only contributed to creating an enjoyable and stimulating work environment, but they have also helped me make a good living and have taught me much of what I know about business.
If the women’s movement had never taken place, many of these women might not have been in the work force at all—at least not in positions of authority and influence. I then would have had to spend my entire work life surrounded by men, which would have definitely been my loss and made me very unhappy.
3. The women’s movement has made me appreciate the critical role that women play in the church. I now understand that without women, the church would be a very strange institution, indeed. This has led me to conclude that the Catholic Church must ordain women if it is going to continue to be a fun, interesting, and effective organization.
Just as the presence and equality of women in my family and workplace has made me a better and happier father and worker, the leadership of women in my church has made me a happier and better Catholic.
For all this, I have the women’s movement to thank. Now, about all those diapers I’ve had to change and dishes I’ve had to wash . . .
This article was originally published in the June 1994 issue of U.S. Catholic.
Image: Flickr cc via Gustave Deghilage
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