Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-pftt2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-22T09:37:25.726Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Widening the Sphere of Discourse: Reflections on the Feminist Perspective in Religious Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Mary Jo Weaver*
Affiliation:
Indiana University

Extract

This past February I spent a bracing weekend with two feminist pioneers in their own fields. Joan Huber is an old friend and early mentor, Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Ohio State, and a well-published feminist sociologist. Susan Gubar, my best friend at Indiana University for more than a decade, is a distinguished literary critic and co-author of landmark books like The Madwoman in the Attic, and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Both have changed the shape of their respective disciplines with their work on women and so carry impeccable feminist credentials. Susan and I went to Columbus to help Joan prepare for her March debate with Carol Gilligan.

Since I grew up next to Joan as a teenager, weekends with her are always wonderful for me because they combine all the comforts of home with all the things I could never do while growing up. When I go to Joan's house I eat wonderful meals, drink too much, abandon all my resolutions about smoking, stay up too late, and engage in fabulous conversation. Adding Susan to this cluster of stimulants tripled the pleasure, and the fact that it took us hours to get there and forced us to reread Gilligan did not dampen the occasion. I looked forward to the visit and secretly hoped that the conversation would do something to renew my flagging feminist spirit.

Type
Creative Teaching
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Mainstreaming: Feminist Research for Teaching Religious Studies, CTS Resources in Religion, 2 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985).Google Scholar

2 Schuster, Marilyn R. and Van Dyne, Susan R., eds., Women's Place in the Academy: Transforming the Liberal Arts Curriculum (Totowa, NJ: Rowan & Allanheld, 1985).Google Scholar For a look at some of the ways that feminist research has made an impact on the academy from within, see Farnham, Christie, ed., The Impact of Feminist Research in the Academy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

3 Asking for the Future,” The Women's Review of Books 6 (February 1989), 2122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 The Hand that Pushes the Rock,” The Women's Review of Books 6 (February 1989), 18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry (Winter 1981), reprinted in Showalter, Elaine, ed., The New Feminist Criticism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 243–70.Google Scholar

6 In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).Google Scholar

7 Most Vatican decrees against women's equal access to power in the church are based on theories of complementarity which are based on a binary gender system in which women are said to be either weaker and less human, or, paradoxically, stronger and more spiritual. See my New Catholic Women: A Contemporary Challenge to Traditional Religious Authority (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985).Google Scholar For a look at the ways in which “women's superiority” functioned to keep women underpaid and undereducated, see Conway, Jill K., “Politics, Pedagogy, and Gender” in Conway, Jill K., Bourque, Susan C. and Scott, Joan W., eds., Learning About Women (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), pp. 137–53.Google Scholar

8 Boston: Beacon, 1968.

9 Religion and Sexism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974);Google Scholar with McLaughlin, Eleanor Como, Women of Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979);Google Scholar and with Keller, Rosemary Skinner, Women and Religion in America, 3 vols. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981, 1983, and 1986).Google Scholar

10 “Placing Women in History: A 1975 Perspective,” originally published in Feminist Studies 3 (1975), 515CrossRefGoogle Scholar, revised and published in Carroll, Bernice, ed., Liberating Women's History: Theoretical and Critical Essays (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), pp. 357–67.Google Scholar

11 Contemporary Feminist Thought (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983).Google Scholar

12 Anson, Peter F., “Papal Enclosure for Nuns,” Cistercian Studies 3 (1968), 109-23, 189206.Google Scholar

13 Women's Religious Roles in Brazil: A History of Limitations,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 1 (1985), 4357.Google Scholar Myscofski noticed that the difference between women's confessed sins and those of men were highly dependent upon the range of ordinary activity for each gender.

14 No theorist of gender can avoid Freud; even those who do not cite his work explicitly are shaped by it in some way. For an introduction to his work in this area see “Female Sexuality” (1931) in Rieff, Philip, ed., Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Collier, 1963), pp. 194211.Google Scholar

15 See, e.g., Chodorow, Nancy, The Reproducfion of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).Google Scholar

16 For an illuminating appropriation of Freud by feminist critics, see Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan, No Man's Land: The War of the Words (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 165227.Google Scholar

17 The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Reiter, Rayna R., ed., Towards an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157210.Google Scholar

18 Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5 (1980), 631–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 See, e.g., Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols (Boston: Beacon, 1986)Google Scholar, and her brilliant analysis of gender in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).Google Scholar

20 Campbell has published numerous articles on heretofore obscure women like Maisie Ward, female evangelists in the 1930s and 1940s, and other important, but neglected figures. See, e.g., The Catholic Earth Mother: Dorothy Day and Women's Power in the Church,” Cross Currents 34 (1984), 270–82;Google ScholarPart Time Female Evangelists of the Thirties and Forties: The Rosary College Catholic Evidence Guild,” U. S. Catholic Historian 5 (1986), 371–84;Google ScholarGleanings of a Laywoman's Ministry: Maisie Ward as Preacher, Publisher and Social Activist,” The Month 258 (1987), 313–17;Google Scholar or “The Theology of the Mother-hearted God: Hannah Whitall Smith (1832-1911),” Signs (forthcoming, Fall 1989).

21 Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 299.Google Scholar

22 Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard's Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).Google Scholar

23 Trible, Phyllis, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981);Google ScholarFiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1984).Google Scholar

24 Boston: Beacon, 1987.

25 Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.

26 A Symbiotic Relationship,” The Women's Review of Books 6 (February 1989), 16.Google Scholar

27 Ambiguities in Identity Transformation: From Sugar and Spice to Professor,” Notre Dame Journal of Education 2 (1972), 338–47.Google Scholar