Feminist Approaches to the Study of Religion
DARLENE JUSCHKA
This essay is a genealogy of feminism and feminist approaches to the study of religion.1 It is genealogical in the sense that I wish to speak to the development of feminist theorizing and its engagement in the work of feminists in the study of religion. To do this I first provide a processual narrative and locate the “events” of feminism (proposing series rather than unity) in the conditions of possibility that allowed for the acceptance of feminist “waves” one through three, as they are often times referred.2 The conditions of possibility are, as Michel Foucault wrote, “particular stages of [social] forces” that support, either positively or negatively, the discourse(s). In my development of a genealogy of feminism, I consider some successes but also important prohibitions in feminist discourses, and their manifestation in the feminist narratives generated in the study of religion.3 These prohibitions, or places where feminist voices sometimes cease, are important to make apparent if only to remind ourselves that feminists too have not arrived at the end of history.
WAVE ONE
Many years prior to the formation of women’s clubs and organizations in the nineteenth century were found the works of protofeminists like Christine de Pisan (1364–circa 1430), whose disputation against misogyny (The Book of the City of Ladies) was published in 1405. With the assistance of Ladies Reason, Virtue, and Justice, the text challenges dominant representation of women of the time.4 Locating her textual voice in the period’s authoritative narrative form, disputation, she challenged the normative and misogynistic view of the female/feminine.5 She was not, however, part of a larger group or movement seeking to change the “world” for women, and so her voice was silent for a time, but happily revivified in the narratives of feminists 550 years later.
By the mid-nineteenth century and into the twentieth, across Europe, North America, and Australia, in South America and the Middle East, groups of women sought to have the capacity to shape the worlds they found themselves living within. But barred from formal education, they were also blocked from taking up explicit public roles in civil, political, and social institutions. They could of course operate behind the scenes, or provide supporting roles, but they could not stand front and center. In order to change this social inequality, women’s organizations, presses, and the like were formed. In Egypt, for example, Islamic women founded organizations for the intellectual improvement of women such as the Society for the Advancement of Women, founded in 1908, and in 1914 the Intellectual Association of Egyptian Women emerged and included among its founders Huda Sha’rawi, the preeminent feminist leader of the 1920s and 1930s, and Mai Ziyada, a feminist intellectual and writer.
In the feminist struggle to bring those marked as female/feminine into what was thought of as human history, an identity, the “new woman” (largely white and of European descent), was proffered by early feminists. The figure of the “new woman” represented the female/feminine as autonomous, intelligent, and self-reliant; given the vote, the legal ability to own property, and access to education, the new women would, and did, develop a history of their own.6 Included with social rights were claims to the freedom to enjoy sexuality, seen in the Free-Love Movement with proponents such as the feminist anarchist Emma Goldman (1869–1940), and to develop a spirituality in the feminine as played out in the spiritualism movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.7 However, challenging female/feminine autonomy were many masculine-dominated social institutions, for example, Christianties, and the new woman was made to figure as a threat to current social organization; she was the “vamp” in need of subjugation, or the coldhearted or neglectful mother needing to regain her maternal instincts, the latter nicely represented by the character Mrs. Banks in the film Mary Poppins, released in 1964.8 Even Bram Stoker in Dracula (1897) contributed to the negative casting of the “new woman” as a threat not only to women, but to a normative, masculine-dominated social body.9 “She,” when independent, had been (in witch hunts) and would be again the vulnerable site where evil—in whatever form—finds its way into the social body.
Progress, the progress of society and the progress of “man,” informed most theories of the human species and nature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At this time progress and social Darwinism had been imaginatively linked, suggesting that “man’s” progress could be halted by his own lack of control—the lack of which could be seen in the fate of the poor, the lower classes, the subjugated peoples under colonialist empires, and the hysterical woman. The individual who leads a licentious life, the Christian physician and university professor John Cowan wrote in his popular book Science of a New Life (1869), “causes a great strain on his vitality—such a drain as required the whole life force of his system to supply.”10 Consequently a sexually “spendthrift” man (and in this equation onanistic boys) “does in part or in whole, weaken his nervous system … and dyspepsia, rheumatism, apoplexy, paralysis and a score of other diseases, assert their way.”11
In his ideology of the seed Cowan wrote that men who succumb to the allures of female sexuality without thought of conservation (or who, equally, are sexually active with men or by themselves) disorganize their brain tissue so that memory, perception, and reflective power are weakened, bringing about imbecility, indecision, and effeminacy, which ultimately ensavages and impoverishes men. Equally, such behavior meant these kind of men lacked vitality so that, Cowan wrote, his offspring “will be sickly, scrofulous, deformed, and die prematurely.”12
Interestingly, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an important first-wave Christian feminist, endorsed the text, writing in the preface: “I have read Dr. Cowan’s work, and made it my text-book in lectures, ‘to woman alone,’ for several years. As it is far easier to generate a race of happy, healthy men and women than to regenerate the disease and discordant humanity we now have, I heartily recommend the study of ‘The Science of a New Life’ to every mother in the land.”13
Stanton, like the other white feminists Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) and Nellie McClung (1873–1951), and like the British scientist, women’s rights activist, and founder of the first birth control clinic in England Marie Stopes (1880–1958), supported eugenics, a class- and race-based Euro-Western applied science of the time period. Although certainly not unanimously, this early movement’s discourses were shaped by racism, colonialism, and class, even as many suffragettes struggled against the ruthless tactics of governments and police, the like of which resulted at times in their physical harm.14
Operating in a paradigm of normative colonialism and colonization, white women, some as settlers and some as missionaries, traveling to the West, for “wild,” “open,” and “unsettled” spaces, were oblivious to its current human occupants, who were represented in their travel journals and diaries as part of the fauna of the “natural world,” eminently dangerous but equally exploitable. In Montana, indigenous peoples, the Blackfoot, Pegan, and Siksika, among other linguistic and cultural groups, were represented as the threat to settlers, that is, to “humans,” much like other large mammals. In the frontier expressions of “Indian country” and “bear country” we see a conceptual and linguistic link that makes apparent the locating of indigenous peoples as part of the space of “nature” and outside of civilization. On the Canadian side of the border, equally problematic, the tendency was to also locate indigenous peoples in nature, but less as a threat and more as absence from that which is perceived as human.15
The efforts of white feminists of wave one tended to be shaped by racism and colonialism, and so it was often up to feminists marked by race and colonization to speak to these issues and to make apparent that more than just gender/sex was used as a tool of oppression. Anna Cooper, born a slave but dying a free black woman with three degrees, one being a PhD from the Sorbonne in Paris, wrote, “The colored woman of today occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country.… She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both.”16
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) of the North American Woman Suffrage Association produced with a committee of women The Women’s Bible in 1895 and 1898, writing in the preface, “The object is to revise only those texts and chapters directly referring to women, and those also in which women are made prominent by exclusion.”17 The effort was to reclaim this text for those Christians marked as female/feminine, but the “woman” imagined was white, of European descent, and middle and upper class so that those marked by gender/sex and colonization, race, class, and sexuality were not part of this imagined community of women.
Wave one of feminism developed in the context of Enlightenment ideals, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of unions, and the abolitionist movement, and operated in tandem with the notion of societal progress: indeed, many saw feminism as a necessary outcome of this imagined progress. These early feminists operated within the knowledge of the time, and although at times they called it into question, they tended to stay within its parameters. However, within the nineteenth-century spiritualism movement, although some continued to adhere to conservative ideas about women, many supported the feminist movement and indeed it has been argued that spiritualism was a significant site for the development and communication of feminist critical engagement with the masculine-oriented hegemonies of wave one.18
WAVE TWO
Feminism did not disappear after wave one; rather, when the First World War began in 1914, feminists decided this was as good a place as any to show their masculine-oriented and -dominated governments and social systems that they too were soldiers and therefore able citizens. Some women enlisted—some as women and some disguised as men—and as the war dragged on women necessarily took up work defined as masculine in munitions factories, maintained infrastructures, and acted on the ground in defense capacities, ensuring the safety of neighborhoods. In these activities women demonstrated themselves to be citizens, and in many Euro-Western locations they achieved the vote by 1920, although often countries dominated by Catholicism tended to be later in giving women the vote, for example, the vote was given federally in Canada in 1920, but not until 1940 in Quebec, and in Spain it was given in 1931 and in Italy in 1945.
Between the wars, some women, more often than not those with resources, continued to struggle for women’s rights. In 1929 in Canada the “famous five,” Nellie McClung among them, won the right of personhood for women so that women could participate in the political and legal overseeing of the social body. Margaret Sanger continued her struggle for women’s access to birth control, specifically the pill by the 1940s, the use of which was made legal for married women in the United Kingdom and Canada in 1961 and the United States in 1965. Feminists were working hard, but the conditions that created their concerns regarding reproductive justice, violence against women, and the continued social and economic inequality of those marked as female/feminine did not allow for a significant public hearing. Feminists like McClung and Sanger drew attention to these injustices, and indeed made gains for women, but the gains (for white-settler women) were sporadic and infrequent between and shortly after the world wars.
However, by the 1960s the conditions of the possibility for feminist discourses to make sense came into play and the feminist movement was off for its second large effort. Sharing the stage with wave two, and indeed with marked crossover, were the Civil Rights (beginning in 1955) and anti–Vietnam War movements (beginning in 1964) in United States, the student uprising in 1968 in France, decolonization around the globe and the establishment of human rights over and above citizenship rights, the Cultural Revolution in China (beginning in 1966), and the American Indian movement in the United States (with members in Canada), which began in 1968. The conditions for the possibility of these movements were the increase of communication technology, postmodernity (also known as late capitalism), the Vietnam War, the Cold War and escalating nuclear armament, globalization, and neocolonialism.
Second-wave feminism in its early manifestation sent a clarion call to all women to challenge the social conditions that oppressed the female/feminine. As feminism of wave one drew on the ideas of equality and rights that inflected the social movements of the time, wave two drew on the ideas of oppression and liberation. Those marked as female/feminine supposedly had equal rights with those marked as male/masculine. However, they continued to be locked out of many professions and were paid significantly less money for their labor, which then meant their continued dependence on male relatives; violence against the female/feminine either was considered normative or was something “she” brought on herself; and they were held accountable for reproduction but lacked the rights and resources to be responsible. Equally, even as the rights of those marked as female/feminine were severely limited in masculine hegemonies, the female/feminine, her body and sexuality, continued to be represented as problematic and too often as the site/source of potential and sometimes realized social disease.
In the face of the negative and too often misogynistic representations of the female/feminine, feminists in the practice of or study of systems of belief and practice set about rereading, reconceiving, and rewriting canonical texts, much as was being done in history, science, literature, philosophy—all locations where knowledge is produced. The late 1960s marked the beginning of the production of the work of feminists in the Academy such as Mary Daly, who wrote The Church and the Second Sex (1968), which was a challenge to the ruling masculine hegemony of the Catholic Church.19 Judith Plaskow published Women and Religion (1974) and later Standing Again at Sinai (1991), both of which challenged patriarchal texts and patriarchal readings of texts.20 In this effort their intent included bringing to the forefront the female/feminine and bringing her doings to the historical texts of humankind. To read against the grain of the patriarchal text and see women again, a feminist hermeneutics, a term coined by Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza in her text In Memory of Her (1983), was employed to challenge representations and figurations of the female/feminine as problematic due to sin, sexuality, rationality, the female body, and so forth in canonical texts and their subsequent interpretations.21
This effort to reread, rethink, and then rewrite occupied feminists in all disciplines well into the 1980s (and continues now), although throughout this period of time, particularly in the 1970s, it became very clear that women as a homogenous group were the master’s tool that feminists had unthinkingly adopted. White, elite, heterosexual, and first world feminists were challenged for their blindness to the social dimensions of the categories of race, class, sexuality, and geopolitical location and their intersection with gender/sex. Black feminists in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada had been making significant contributions to feminist theorizing at the outset of wave two, but their works were often marginalized insofar as their studies were seen only to apply to the localized group of marked women (that is, marked by race, class, and the like) under study and not all women. Socially privileged feminists, then, even as they demanded that masculine hegemonies accept women’s knowledge as applicable to all humans, denied this to feminisms of color and of the third world and considered “theirs” a discourse too particular to represent the oppression of all women. The irony was not lost on marginalized feminists and indeed is a theme of the text This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa and published in 1982.22 This internal racism operated more or less without impingement throughout the 1970s in feminism, and equally could be found in most if not all academic disciplines. The normativity of racism and the view that antiracism and feminism were in competition haunted white feminism (liberal, radical, socialist, and Marxist), as they were understood at the time. Audre Lorde’s “Open Letter to Mary Daly,” responding to her Gynecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978) and the continued erasure of race, class, and geopolitical location therein, asks: “So the question arises in my mind, Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women? Do you ever read my words.”23 Written in 1979, and published in 1982, this letter indicted all feminists who had assumed that gender/sex was the preeminent category of oppression and exploitation—it wasn’t.
The 1980s and 1990s saw the continued production of feminist work, now enriched by the insights and keen observations of feminists who intersected gender/sex with other social categories of inequality such as race and colonization. At the outset of this period, however, sex, sexualities, and pornography had also become a site of contestation and indeed a struggle for power—the power to speak and say the feminist view of “good” sexuality (that is, erotic and nonoppressive) versus “bad” sexuality (that is, pornographic and oppressive).
Feminists, in large measure, divided into two groups: one group pushed for government intervention and the criminalization and eradication of pornography. Andrea Dworkin, Adrienne Rich, and Catharine McKinnon, among others, viewed the kind of sex and sexuality operative in masculine hegemonies as oppressive for those marked as female/feminine since she is “other” (alterity) to his “same” (ipseity) and therefore always carries negative value in a masculine hegemonic system.24 All heterosexual relations, then, and those homosexual relations that mimic heterosexual relations are relationships shaped by misogyny. Catharine McKinnon argued that “sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality” in her article “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory.”25 She, among others, argued that laws were required to protect women from rampant misogynistic heterosexuality: laws prohibiting rape, sexual harassment laws, and the criminalization or censorship of sexually explicit images called pornography. In Britain and Europe the divide between lesbian and heterosexual women increased with the presentation at a conference in 1978 of “Political Lesbianism: The Case Against Heterosexuality” by the Leeds Revolutionary Feminism Group, which implied that heterosexuality and feminism were incommensurable.26 While in France Monique Wittig published her article “The Straight Mind” and in it declared that lesbians were not “women” since they rejected heterosexual relations and subsequently lived outside of the “patriarchal class system.”27 Both of these positions implied that heterosexual women were either co-opted by masculine hegemonies (called patriarchy at this juncture) or were in collusion with it.
In the other camp were feminists who felt sexuality was already repressed and the free expression of sexuality by women was a good thing. In their view not all sexual images were pornographic and therefore effort must be made to distinguish between erotica and pornography, a possibility that Dworkin and McKinnon rejected. It was furthered argued that one person’s pornography was another person’s erotica and censorship itself was simply a tool of oppression regularly used against women, and indeed was a mechanism to control female sexuality, like reproduction and fornication laws throughout the nineteenth century up until the 1960s and the continued criminalization of sex work. Women have been prevented from experiencing different and alternative forms of sexuality as their sexuality has always been limited to reproduction. As Ann Ferguson wrote in her piece “The Feminist Sexuality Debates,” published in the preeminent feminist journal Signs:
These issues have come to a head recently in disagreements regarding radical feminists’ condemnation of pornography and sadomasochistic sexuality, particularly by such groups as Women against Pornography and Women against Violence against Women. Some of the spokeswomen for libertarian feminism are self-identified “S/M” lesbian feminists who argue that the moralism of the radical feminists stigmatizes sexual minorities such as butch/femme couples, sadomasochists, and man/boy lovers, thereby legitimizing “vanilla sex” lesbians and at the same time encouraging a return to a narrow, conservative, “feminine” vision of ideal sexuality.28
The debates were never resolved, and indeed would emerge again, but this time as a catalyst for the feminisms of wave three in the late 1990s, but more about that later.
Feminism in the study of religion participated in the endeavors of second-wave feminism and were similarly shaped and motivated. Many began to openly challenge their religious institutions, calling for the inclusion of women in leadership roles and the recognition of women as active participants in their respective systems of belief and practice. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Jacquelyn Grant, Rita Gross, Judith Plaskow, Susan Sered, and Yvonne Haddad, among many others, challenged canons and institutions and made significant contributions to the study of women in systems of belief and practice.29 But, as with wave one, race and geopolitical location too often acted as a determinant as to which feminist perspectives gained a hearing. Feminists in the study of religion, troubled that their feminism evinced an absence of attention to the privileges accorded to those deemed unmarked by race, class, geopolitical location, and sexuality, realized that they could not speak for all feminists, let along all humans marked as female/feminine. Therefore, by the mid- to late 1980s, instead of a disregard for feminist analyses coming from the margins, their work gained a hearing, and feminism in the study of systems of belief and practice was enriched.
Feminist spirituality- and goddess-centered systems of belief and practice emerged once again during wave two of feminism. The spiritualism linked to wave one was replaced with a feminist spirituality that focused on a Mother Goddess or Earth Goddess, a deity that tended to be singular, or a female deity operating in conjunction with a male deity, the latter either as an equal or as a subordinate. Wiccan groups and individuals began to articulate their own theological views, views that were strongly feminist insofar as the human and the divine, represented as in primary relationship, were both female/feminine. In the 1970s and 1980s feminist ritual, mythology, and symbolic ideation developed, providing texts like Barbara Walker’s The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (1983) and others written by Zsuzsanna Budapest, Riane Eisler, Merlin Stone, and Starhawk.30 However, the feminist spirituality movement had also been hedged in by unexamined privilege, and feminist spirituality and its expressions of ultimate truths were equally shaped by white privilege.
Sex, sexuality, and erotica, however, fared differently in feminist spirituality than they did among feminists studying and practicing mainstream systems of belief and practice. The breach in feminism of wave two on the subject of sexuality was subtly mirrored in the study of religion, so that the “sex-positive” and “censure-positive” split ran along the lines of feminist spirituality (and nonnormative systems of belief and practice such as Vudou) and more normative systems of belief and practice, respectively. Feminist spirituality had in general embraced sexuality in the majority of its manifestations: same-sex, sex-play including domination, multiple partners, ritual sex, and so forth, as long as no harm was not done. In a number of manifestations sexuality—seen as life-giving and affirming—was also linked directly to deity(ies).31 Interestingly, it is feminist spirituality that was brought into and embraced by wave three of feminism,32 a feminist movement that had diversified and consisted of feminisms, made up as it was of a number of emergent feminist epistemological locations influenced by postmodern, poststructural, and postcolonial theories and their accompanying tools of analysis.
WAVE THREE
The end of the Second World War saw the rise of global agreements such as the one signed at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 and institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both outcomes of this conference. These institutions were said to have been established to reduce poverty in what were called underdeveloped countries, under the sway of Keynesian economics and the Rostovian takeoff model.33 These events shaped the future to come and laid the groundwork for neoliberalism and resistance to it. This resistance was engendered by feminists in so-called underdeveloped countries and joined by Euro-Western feminists; once the latter got over the notion that they had to “save” other women from the horror of their lives, not having recognized that those living thoughtlessly in their so-called developed worlds had contributed to some of that horror. (The worlds were developed for the settlers but not for the indigenous peoples in colonized countries.) By the 1990s the full implications of so-called development and the rapacious nature of neo-Keynesian capitalism became clear. Feminists from multiple geographical locations and of differing cultures, languages, and systems of belief and practice engaged in discussions regarding how to stand against inhumane structural adjustment programs that had been lowered onto countries that were resource-rich but heavily in debt to global financial institutions. Feminists working internationally coming from China, India, Australia, and Africa—from numerous geographical locations—joined forces in an effort to challenge neoliberalism and its accompanying privatization of public services and to mitigate as best as possible the worst of its effects.
These efforts made very apparent to feminists that the category of women as single and unified was a problem and indeed had distorted feminist analyses and ensured they were partial at best. Needed was the recognition that racism, colonization, heterosexism, and other categorizing that ensured the delimitation of societal privilege intersected with gender/sex as Kimberlé Crenshaw had argued in her development of critical race and feminist intersectionality theories.34 The 1990s, although understood to mark the onset of a backlash against feminism, as Susan Faludi wrote in 1991, still marked a time of the growth and diversification for feminism. As younger people came into their adulthood, feminism of wave two didn’t resonate strongly for them. Faced with an increasing technological and consumer-oriented existence, young people began to shape their own movements, some of which came to represent wave three of feminism. Wave three rejected the fixity and homogenization of the category of “women” while it embraced postcolonial, poststructural, and queer theorizing. The addition of theoretical lenses meant the complexification of feminist analyses and resulted in the troubling of fixed categories, such as “the body,” which was analyzed as historically, culturally, and discursively constructed, as well as evincing multiple sexualities. Influenced by the work of Judith Butler, the French feminists Christine Delphy, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, and the postcolonial work of feminists like Gayatri Spivak, Pompa Banerjee, Aihwa Ong, and Gloria Anzaldúa, among many others, third-wave feminisms turned to cultural analysis, embracing difference, fluidity, and uncertainty.
Feminism in the study of systems of belief and practice demonstrated much of the same shifts as feminism in general. The late 1980s and 1990s saw an increase of texts published by feminists in non-Euro-Western locations; indeed, some like the American Letty Russell assisted in this process.35 Equally, there was the multiplication of feminist positions when standpoint feminist epistemology, which had dominated wave two, was augmented or replaced by insights from postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism.36 With the movement into the new millennium and under the influence of wave three, feminist analyses in the study of religion shifted and thematic analyses, comparative, genealogical, and cultural in orientation, emerged. Interesting and edifying texts that demonstrate this shift are Pompa Banerjee’s Burning Women (2003), which compares the narrative representation of witch burning in early modern Europe with widow burning in colonized India, showing how colonizers were blind to the similarities in practices; Todd Penner and Caroline Vander Stichele’s edited text Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses (2006), in which the discursive formations of gender and sexuality and their intersection in the ancient Greco-Roman Mediterranean world are examined; and Ellen Armour and Susan St. Ville’s Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler (2006).37 The enrichment of feminist analyses in the study of systems of belief and practice under the influence of wave three (which includes poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and queer theories) has been in evidence since the 1990s. Feminists in the study of religion have become even more careful and detailed in their analyses and in marking differences, and in so doing they are less prone to making sweeping generalizations about feminisms, peoples, and systems of belief and practice.
To conclude this genealogy, limited as it is, I want to say feminism is not dead. There is no end to history until there is an end to humanity, and therefore no end to injustice of one kind or another. Each generation is faced with injustice, however coded, and each must deal with it. In the new millennium we find reference to postfeminism and wave-four feminism; both share the tenets of wave three, such as the critical engagement with wave-two feminism, thematic analysis, cultural studies, and the recognition of difference. Wave four, like wave three, has made a place for feminist spirituality as a means to affirm bonds across borders, and has also included an engagement with and reverence for the earth and its inhabitants, something seen as early as wave two in the work of Rachel Carson or Vandana Shiva.38 Wave-four feminism has yet to be established in a robust way, and so its development by feminists in the study of religion is relatively new. However, instances of posthumanism shaping their work, seen in Kim Patton and Paul Waldau’s A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics (2006), speak to some of the new directions to come. Gaps continue to exist in feminist analyses because feminists, like all theorists, are bound by the social and historical conditions of their contexts.39 New conditions of possibilities, such as environmental degradation and robust environmental movements, increasing distrust of government, and a radical doubting of current institutionalized religious and social structures, have a way of ensuring that new discourses emerge, the outcomes of which have yet to be conjectured.
NOTES
1. In this essay “religion” acts as a collective noun for systems of belief and practice.
2. Because I tend not to see a deep divide between the “church and state” insofar as Christianity inflects Euro-Western democracies, the Christianities I reference in this chapter are sometimes implicit as they act to shape the norms, morals, rules, and regulations in accordance with central and core beliefs. In other instances I make references to specific systems of belief and practice.
3. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, 1st ed., ed. P. Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 83.
4. Pisan lived in the French court with her father until her marriage. She took up the pen in earnest upon her husband’s death, faced as she was with the necessity to support herself and children.
5. Disputation is a formalized method of debate in the Middle Ages of Europe wherein the effort was to uncover truth, often theological.
6. A. Richardson and C. Willis, eds., The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin de sie’cle Feminism (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
7. A. Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America (Boston: Beacon, 1989).
8. B. Dijkstra, Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). In the film Mrs. Banks is shown putting on a suffragette sash and leaving her children, intent on her own selfish ends, much as the capitalist Mr. Banks. When the family is “reunited” in the film, Mrs. Banks is shown dropping the sash in the umbrella stand.
9. B. Stoker and B. Allen, Dracula, ed. G. Stade (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005). Stoker’s female protagonists, Lucy and Mina, both dally with the identity of the new woman and find themselves at the business end of both tooth and stake. Lucy, the more inquisitive of the two, is the first to succumb, but Mina, who evinces a Christianity not present in Lucy, is saved by the ministrations of Christian symbols and text by her masculine keepers.
10. J. Cowan, The Science of a New Life (New York: Source Book Press, 1970), 120.
11. Ibid., 118.
12. Ibid., 119.
13. E. C. Stanton, The Women’s Bible: A Classic Feminist Perspective (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2002).
14. S. Rowbotham, A Century of Women (London: Penguin, 1999), 11–12.
15. S. McManus, The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 151, 154. Sheila McManus notes that the landscape of the “West” figured in multiple ways in the diaries and letters of early white-settler Christian women as they journeyed from the east to Montana, in the United States, and Alberta, in Canada. For example, Mary Douglas Gibson wrote of her journey from Minneapolis to Fort Benton in Montana in 1882, “Everything seemed strange and wild to me. I had never slept in a tent before, to say nothing of being in a country of Indians and wild animals,” while in Canada arriving in Calgary in 1883 Mary Inderwick wrote in her diary that “the town was very nice but it is a village of tents framed in Indians and Squaws in a plenty”; the first is a threat, the other a backdrop, as McCanus convincingly argues in her text.
16. G. Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage, 1972), 572–73.
17. Stanton, The Women’s Bible, 6.
18. Braude, Radical Spirits.
19. M. Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).
20. J. Plaskow, ed., Women and Religion: Papers of the Working Group on Women and Religion, 1972–73 (Missoula, Mont.: Scholar’s Press, 1974); J. Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).
21. E. Schüssler-Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroads, 1990).
22. C. Moraga and G. Anzaldùa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1982).
23. A. Lorde, “Open Letter to Mary Daly,” in ibid.; Mary Daly, Gynecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1978).
24. A. Dworkin, “Pornography,” in The Feminism and Visual Cultural Reader, ed. A. Jones (London: Routledge, 2003), 387–89; A. Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 631–60; C. McKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory,” Signs 7, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 514–44.
25. McKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State,” 533.
26. S. Jackson and S. Scott, eds., Feminism and Sexuality: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 14.
27. M. Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” Questions Féministes 1, no. 1 (1980): 103–11.
28. A. Ferguson, “Forum: The Feminist Sexuality Debates,” Signs 10, no. 1 (1984): 107.
29. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); J. Grant, White Woman’s Christ and Black Woman’s Jesus: Womanist Response (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989); R. Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai; S. S. Sered, Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated by Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Y. Haddad and E. Findley, eds., Women, Religion, and Social Change (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).
30. B. G. Walker, The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983); Z. Budapest, The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries: Feminist Witchcraft, Goddess Rituals, Spellcasting and Other Womanly Arts (Berkeley: Wingbow Press, 1989); R. Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (New York: Harper and Row, 1987); M. Stone, When God Was a Woman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978); Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics (Boston: Beacon, 1988).
31. M. Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today (Boston: Beacon, 1986).
32. See, for example, Chris Klassen’s edited text Feminist Spirituality: C. Klassen, ed., Feminist Spirituality: The Next Generation (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2009).
33. The Keynesian free market economic model was developed by J. M. Keynes (1883–1946), while the Rostovian takeoff model (traditional society, preconditions for takeoff, takeoff, drive to maturity, and age of mass consumption) was developed by W. W. Rostow (1916–2003). Both models shaped global interaction between countries and were central to the logic of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. See Gilbert Rist for an extended examination of the rise globalization and so-called development. G. Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (London: Zed, 2002).
34. K. Crenshaw, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: New Press, 1995).
35. L. Russell, ed., Inheriting Our Mothers’ Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Perspective (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1988).
36. There continue to be feminists who engaged differing systems of belief and practice, for example, Islam, using the tools of standpoint feminism, particularly when the concept of “women’s experience” is central to their analyses. Equally, in wave two there were feminists in the field who did not engage standpoint feminism, such as Mieke Bal, whose work operated in line with narrative analysis and its outcomes rather than treating characters in texts as historical persons with historical experiences. See, for example, M. Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) and Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera’s Death, trans. M. Gumpert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
37. P. Banerjee, Burning Women: Widows, Witches, and Early Modern European Travelers in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); T. Penner and C. Vander Stichele, eds., Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses (Leiden: Brill, 2006); E. Armour and S. M. St. Ville, eds., Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
38. R. Carson, Silent Spring (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1970); V. Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development (London: Zed, 1988).
39. P. Waldau and K. Patton, eds., A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).