As the role of women in the society at large has changed, religion in America has responded to the changes in a number of ways. New professional roles in church and synagogue have been opened to women, including, in most mainline denominations, that of ordained clergy. Lay leadership positions as well are increasingly being filled by women. Along with these structural changes, a number of theological issues have been engendered, including the recovery of women's share of religious history, changing images of God and the church, and issues relating to sexual equality and justice. On the other hand, some religious groups have taken the lead in opposing women's assumption of more public roles and also movements to free women from the domestic role through, among other things, abortion, birth control, and divorce. These issues have been joined to larger movements over which religious groups and denominations have become polarized. They have also affected the churches' expectations of a large pool of female volunteer workers. Thus the general pattern of changing roles for women has changed the structure, both social and ideological, of American religion.
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References
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and Nancy Hardesty, Lucille Sider Dayton, and Donald Dayton, “Women in the Holiness Movement: Feminism in the Evangelical Movement,” in Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979).
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Ryan suggests three distinct patterns of gender system in America: (1) the integral position of women in the patriarchal household economy of the seventeenth century; (2) the segregated woman's sphere of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century; and (3) the more symmetrical but still unequal relationship of the sexes in the 1960s and 1970s. Barbara Welter described this cult of true womanhood in her Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976).
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3. Ryan, Womanhood in America, p. 119. This woman's rights movement began at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 and lasted until the granting of woman suffrage in 1920.
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4. Rosemary Skinner Keller, “Lay Women in the Protestant Tradition,” in Women and Religion in America: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), pp. 242-293. The entire volume is a useful resource.
5.
5. See Virginia Lieson Brereton and Christa Ressmeyer Klein, “American Women in Ministry: A History of Protestant Beginning Points,” in Women of Spirit, ed. Ruether and McLaughlin, and in Women in American Religion, ed. Janet Wilson James (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980); the statistic about the women's training schools is on p. 178 in James.
6.
6. These developments are discussed in Brereton and Klein, “American Women in Ministry,” pp. 178-186.
7.
7. The holiness evangelist Phoebe Palmer defended women's right to preach on the basis of the gift of the Spirit to the Church at Pentecost, with its promise that “your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.” She did not press for ordination for women, viewing the whole system of ordination as unscriptural. The term “prophetic charisms” is Rosemary Ruether's in her Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), p. 199. It should be noted that in some of the utopian and sectarian movements in the nineteenth century, women played major roles as founders, leaders, and theologians.
8.
8. Anna Howard Shaw was ordained in the Methodist Protestant church in 1880, and women were ordained in the United Brethren church in 1889 and 1984. Some Congregationalist, Unitarian, Baptist, and Disciples women were ordained early in the twentieth century. The Methodist church and the Presbyterian Church in the United States gave full clergy rights to women in the 1950s. Due to the domestic interlude of the 1950s, in which the housewife reigned over the suburbs, the 1950s was also a time when becoming a minister's wife was an accepted avenue to ministry for women.
9.
9. Jackson Carroll, Barbara Hargrove, and Adair Lummis, Women of the Cloth (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 102.
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10. The impact of immigration is given ample attention in Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972).
11.
11. See Mary Ewens, “The Leadership of Nuns in Immigrant Catholicism,” in Women and Religion in America, vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), pp. 101-149.
12.
Women of the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity share the desire to enter more fully into the decision-making structure of the churches, as illustrated in Survey of Greek Orthodox Women in Respect to Philoptochos Society (New York: National Office of the Greek Orthodox Ladies Philoptochos Society, 1981).
13.
13. See Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel, The Jewish Woman in America (New York: Dial Press, 1976).
14.
14. Norma Fain Pratt, “Transitions in Judaism: The Jewish American Woman through the 1930s,” in Women in American Religion, ed. James, p. 226.
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15. For the story of that struggle in one independent black denomination, see Jualynne Dodson, “Nineteenth-Century A.M.E. Preaching Woman: Cutting Edge of Women's Inclusion in Church Polity,” in Women in New Worlds, ed. Hilah F. Thomas and Rosemary Skinner Keller (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1981), pp. 276-289.
16.
16. Clotilde Falcón ˙Náñez, “Hispanic Clergy Wives,” in Women in New Worlds, ed. Thomas and Keller, pp. 161-177.
17.
The figure on Jewish women comes from June Sochen, Consecrate Every Day: The Public Lives of Jewish American Women 1880-1980 (New York: State University of New York Press, 1983), p. 1.
18.
18. See Carroll, Hargrove, and Lummis, eds., Women of the Cloth, chap. 7.
19.
19. See, for example, Katie Cannon, “Black Women and the Church,” in Face to Face: An Interreligious Bulletin, Special Issue on Women and the Religious Communities, 5: 30-32 (Spring 1978).
20.
20. Some of these patterns of support are documented in Carroll, Hargrove, and Lummis, eds., Women of the Cloth, chap. 6 and p. 102.
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21. Theology is not the only arena of theological studies to feel the impact of feminist analysis. Parallel developments have occurred in biblical studies, the historical fields of inquiry, history of religion, and ethics as women bring to bear their feminist perspective on these academic areas.
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22. While Jewish women have participated in large numbers in the women's movement, their presence in the theological discipline has not been as visible as that of their Christian counterparts. There are a variety of reasons for this, including the fact that Judaism has not had the same history of theology as a discipline as has Christianity. Increasingly, however, Jewish women are formulating a specific theological response to their experience as feminists whose religious and cultural heritage is Judaism.
23.
23. Suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton compiled, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, a controversial work entitled The Woman's Bible, originally published in two volumes in 1895 and 1896. In it she set forth all of the biblical verses pertaining to women and developed a series of feminist-inspired commentaries on these passages. Her convictions that religion played a profound role in the oppression of women and that women would not be free until the religious elements of subjugation had been recognized and transformed have reemerged more than 70 years later as central concerns of feminist theology.
24.
24. In 1960 theologian Valerie Saiving published an article entitled “The Human Situation: A Feminine View” in Journal of Religion, 40:11-112 (Apr. 1960). In this article Saiving suggested that central Christian understandings of sin and salvation emerged from and reflected male, not female, experience. She posited that sin interpreted as pride, and fulfilled human life understood in terms of self-sacrifice and self-giving, may adequately reflect the experience of men but do not describe accurately nor respond salvifically to the experience of women, who have been socialized to have little sense of self and who lack pride even in minimal terms. Saiving's insights that many theological positions flow from and reflect the theologian's own experience and that therefore theology carried out by males is not responsive to the condition of women have been developed as central themes of feminist theology.
25.
see also idem, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983).
26.
see also Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk.
27.
27. Letty M. Russell, Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), pp. 72 ff.
28.
28. Virginia Ramey Mallenkott, The Divine Feminine (New York: Crossroads, 1984).
29.
29. Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty, All We're Meant to Be (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1974).
30.
30. Sheila Collins, A Different Heaven and Earth (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1974).
31.
and also Marjorie Suchocki, God Christ Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1982).
32.
32. Carol P. Christ, “Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections,” in Womanspirit Rising, ed. Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 286.
33.
see also Susannah Heschel, ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist (New York: Schocken Books, 1983).
34.
Pauli Murray , “Black Theology and Feminist Theology: A Comparative View,”Anglican Theological Review, 60: 3-24 (Jan. 1978).
