In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul says that women are to keep silent in church. Paul gave this advice to the Corinthians because--as he saw it--the first woman, Eve, was weak-minded and tempted her husband to sin. Although it is not clear if the Corinthians heeded Paul's counsel, certainly the American church took him literally. In the early history of this country, women were thought of as being servile or incompetent, and--as with children--they were to be seen and not heard when questions of religion were being discussed.
There was much in scripture to support such a view of women. At the time both the Old and New Testaments were being written, women were no more than property. If a woman proved to be infertile, she could be divorced with just a few spoken words.
The Scriptures also speak of God often using male terms. God is addressed as King, Father, Lord, Master. While God is supposed to be a spirit, the fact that God is addressed as a male seems to exclude a place for women as sharing in the imago dei. That is a point made explicit by the Apostle Paul when he writes to the Corinthians and tells them: "For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is in the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For man is not made from woman, but woman from man."
And if that were not enough to justify the subordination of women, the Scriptures seem to suggest that Eve is responsible for the coming of evil into the world. Adam succumbed to the allure of Eve and ate of the forbidden fruit. Drawing from this text, many within the Church have come to see women as a threat to the spirituality of men, seeking to lure him from his pursuit of sanctity with her sexuality.
Given such attitudes, it was no accident that the early Puritans banished Ann Hutchinson from their colony for counseling the women and men who came to her to make their own decisions spiritually, and labeled her a witch. Nor should it be surprising that such figures in church history as Martin Luther could view women as having little or no value. "Women are on earth to bear children," Luther wrote, "If they die in child-bearing, it matters not; that is all they are here to do." Even in the present, such views persist. Karl Barth--the great neo-orthodox theologian--expressed the same biased view of women as did Luther when he insisted that "women are otologically inferior to men."
The First Feminists
Despite their strength and persistence, there have been some within the American Church who have resisted and challenged these negative views of women. One of the first of these forerunners of feminism to appear on the national scene was Emma Willard. She founded Troy (NY) Female Seminary in 1821 to train and educate women. Another was Catherine Beecher who helped establish the Hartford (Conn.) Female Seminary in the nineteenth century.
Others made their major contribution to improving the position of women through the missionary movement. Although women were not allowed to make policy, they became intimately involved in the process of fund-raising. And a few--despite intense opposition--even became missionaries. The first was Charlotte H. White in 1815. She was followed by Betsy Stockton (who was born to a slave) who served as a missionary in Hawaii (then a foreign territory). In 1827, Cynthia Farrar became the first unmarried woman to serve as a missionary in India.
Still other women played major roles in the reform crusades that helped give rise to the benevolent empire. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony--both of whom were leaders of the temperance crusade and committed feminists--were deeply religious. Moreover, both would later play key roles in the struggle for suffrage.
But perhaps the most significant of the early feminists was Antoinette Louise Brown. In 1850, Brown--a Congregationalist--became the first woman to enter a theological seminary. And in 1853, she became the first woman to be ordained into the ministry.
Reaction
The reaction of the churches to this emerging feminism was surprisingly muted. Most were divided over the women's rights movement, and specifically on the suffrage. While almost all denominations continued to exclude women from power in the church's life, there was some support for giving women the right to vote. This was not rooted in any sense of equality, but came about as a byproduct of the temperance crusades. As Robert Handy puts it, "Supporters of prohibition generally favored the right of women to vote as a means of attaining their temperance goals." It is not surprising that once this goal was met, "the cause of women's suffrage lost momentum."
It would not be until "the early twentieth century" that women's suffrage would again enjoy the support of the Church. But even then, the force driving the Church's support for giving women the vote was not a sense of equity. Rather, according to Handy, it was rooted in the concern "of native born elites to retain their political predominance in a time of increasing immigration."
Feminism Takes Root
Feminism--as a mass movement--did not find fertile soil in which to put down roots until the civil rights movement of the sixties. As numbers of church women took part in the struggle against segregation, and sought freedom and justice for African-Americans, they became increasingly concerned about their own unequal treatment at the hands of society and the Church. As they examined the hierarchies of their denominations they saw a pervasive pattern of male domination in the leadership, and quite often they saw double standards of morality. Drawing on some of the same resources as advocates for a Black Theology of Liberation, women began to explore the prospects for their own theology of liberation.
These liberation efforts flourished in the seventies, and centered around two major issues: ordination and gender specific language. Ordination--per se--was not the crux of the problem in many denominations. Over the intervening years since women's suffrage, most of the major denominations had moved toward the ordination of women. Certain denominations--the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists--were among the first to open the ranks of the ministry to women, while Southern Baptists and Episcopalians were much more hesitant to do so. But even in the more progressive denominations, few women were called to prominent pulpits or positions of leadership. This willingness to invite women to the table, but not to serve them became a focal point for feminist anger. A second concern driving the new feminist perspective was language that revealed a gender bias. Feminists pointed out--correctly--that many of the pronouns in scripture that were traditionally rendered in the masculine were in fact generic, and gender neutral. Additionally, other words traditionally translated as "mankind," or "men," were also broader in application and could better be rendered as "people" or "persons."
The Feminist Use of Scripture
Feminist theologians and biblical scholars also pointed out the selectivity of earlier treatments of women in Scripture. Where Paul made use of the second creation story (the one with Adam and Eve found in Genesis 2:4ff.), to justify women being denied the teaching office in the church, Feminists pointed out that a different image of women is revealed in the first creation story in Genesis (Genesis 1:1-2:3). There the two--man and woman--are both created in the image of God and are viewed as equals.
Feminists also demonstrated how this selective treatment of women had shaped the way the Church read its sacred texts. Many passages in which women appear as examples of faith--stories about Deborah, Ruth, Mary and Martha, for instance,--were excluded from the common lectionary used in many churches, leaving people with a one sided view of women in scripture. Nor did it escape their notice that the many uses of feminine imagery for God in Scripture, are often ignored in the language of worship.
Faced with a Church and an understanding of Scripture heavily influenced by patriarchal views, Feminist theology--as did the emerging Black Theology of Liberation--built a new understanding of the Christian faith by appealing to the Jesus of Luke's gospel. In Luke, Jesus shows love and compassion for the oppressed and marginalized, and one of the primary groups that he focuses upon is women. The Jesus of Luke goes out of his way to treat women as equals, and spends much time in ministry to widows and prostitutes. It is in Luke's gospel, that Jesus--for instance--commends Mary, sister of Martha, for abandoning the traditional women's role to sit at his feet and become one of his disciples. It is Luke who reports that in addition to the twelve disciples, Jesus had many women who also followed him, and provided the means for his support.
Indeed, the priority given to the place of women is clear in Luke in both the beginning and end of the gospel. Only in Luke does one find the stories of Mary and Elizabeth, both of whom are key figures in the birth narratives. And at the tomb, it is the women who are the only disciples who do not abandon Jesus, and it is they who become the first persons to receive news of the resurrection from the angels. It is they who become the first proclaimers of the good news that Jesus has been raised from the dead.
But Luke is not the only book of Scripture where women play a prominent role as feminists have demonstrated. In Paul's letters--the same Paul who said women should be silent in church--that we learn that Priscilla was a missionary, and that a woman named Phoebe acts as a bishop (or pastor) in the early church (Romans 16:1-6). And in Galatians 3:28, Paul himself says that in the Kingdom of God there will be no distinctions between persons on the basis of sex, class, or nationality.
And yet--as Feminists make clear--despite such teachings, these texts have been filtered through a patriarchal society where men have been the arbiters of what is proclaimed by the Church. One consequence has been that much of what the church has proclaimed has reflected the male experience with the result that the feminine dimension of scripture has tended to be downplayed or ignored with disastrous results for women. Given this willingness to overlook the prominent roles played by women in the Scripture, few Feminists would be surprised to learn that when laws were needed 200 years ago to justify the enslavement of blacks, slaveholders simply took as their model the laws of the time that restricted the rights of women.
Feminists see their task, then, to be the recovery of these teachings of Jesus. He was, they contend, a feminist. Going against the grain of the patriarchal society into which he was born, he called all people--men and women, beggars and merchants, tax collectors and poor widows--to realize the image of God in themselves. Only when we do this do realize each of us is a whole person only when we claim both the feminine and masculine sides of our personhood. Men who are truly human are as nurturing and creative as women, and in like fashion women are invited to discover the aggressive and powerful dimension of their personality. When we discover and can celebrate the other in ourselves we can be truly liberated.
The Prominent Role Played by Women
The issues raised by Feminist theology are not unimportant for the life of the Church. Women tend to be far more religious than men. In the book, The Restructuring of American Religion,, Robert Wuthnow reports some rather striking statistics. According to Wuthnow, six percent of women say they have no religious faith compared to eleven percent of men. Forty six percent of women say they have attended a religious service in the past seven days compared to thirty five percent of men. Two thirds of women say they have read their Bible in the past month compared to two fifths of men. Fifty seven percent of women report giving a lot of thought to developing their faith, whereas only thirty seven percent of men report doing so. Seventeen percent more women say their relationship to God is very important than men, and fifteen percent more seek God's will through prayer.
There have been some to suggest that these differences may be because of the roles women play. Those roles tend to be that of mother, housekeeper, and guardian of traditional values which means they are remain marginal to the labor force or to the professional world. Therefore their affinity for religion may simply reflect their attachment to traditional family values. And yet, further study shows that as the roles of women change, these gender differences in terms of religious commitment persist even when women join the work force, or are college educated, and enter the professional world. That suggests these differences may be more deeply rooted than thought.
Today, nearly three quarters of women consider themselves church members. Half of women attend religious services once a week, and two thirds worship at least once a month. Three fourths still see religion as the most important influence in their life. Given such levels of support among women, the Church cannot help but listen to their concerns.
Backlash
In recent years, however, there has been a backlash against Feminism. As a movement, Feminism has tended to draw support from those women whose commitment to religion is the weakest: the young, the better educated, professional women. This has put them at odds with those with more traditionalistic values. Conservatives tend to see Feminism as being rooted in the counterculture--as being associated with sexual experimentation--or as being broadly sympathetic with abortion and permissive morality. They perceive Feminists as favoring homosexuality and being pro-choice rather than pro-life.
These conservatives tend to be part of the religious right, and their attacks on Feminism have led some women to see the church as hostile, instead of the comfortable place it once was. In far too many pulpits, the clergy have become like the late nineteenth preachers who decried women's suffrage once their votes were no longer needed. Concerned they're losing control of their flocks, they beat women over the head with sermons on Ephesians 5:22: "The Husband is the head of wife...wives obey your husbands." (For a better description of this backlash, see: Susan Faludi, Backlash: the Undeclared War Against American Women, pp. 232 ff.)
Feminism has acquired its greatest support from among mainline denominations. Generally speaking, the more liberal a denomination, and the more educated its members tend to be, the more likely it will be a supporter of feminism. Women are demanding change in the church, specifically where positions of leadership are concerned. This is particularly true in the area of ordination. Since the late forties support for ordaining women has been comparable to support for them joining other professions such as medicine. But progress toward incorporating them in the ranks of the clergy has been incredibly slow. It was the late seventies before they began to enter the clergy in any large numbers. From 1972-1980, enrollments in seminaries increased 223% Today, the majority of seminarians are women. In fact, more women in the ministry--proportionately--than in law or medicine. The result has been a lessening of gender specific language in liturgy and ritual, and many religious symbols and practices have been recast in more inclusive language.
And yet, even in denominations where the role of women is more readily accepted, many lay people are openly antagonistic to women in ministry. Many lay-people see the ordination of women as a denial of the authority of Scripture, as an abandonment of the Bible. As such, it opens the door to a moral and religious relativism. One woman seminarian at Duke was assigned a field education appointment where the church elected to house her in a farm shed that had been formerly used for keeping animals. Her experience suggests just how much further Feminism must go, and just how much it is needed.