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Christian Feminism: From Restriction to Reconstruction
| Article
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10307 |
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Book World
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| Issue
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12 / 1986 |
4,509 Words |
| Author
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Lucy Mazareski
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ALL WE'RE MEANT TO BE
Biblical Feminism for Today
Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Nancy A. Hardesty
Nashville: Abingdon Press
272 pp. $12.95
WOMEN AND RELIGION IN AMERICA, VOLUME 3: 1900-1968
Rosemary Radford Ruether & Rosemary Skinner Keller,
Gen. Editors
San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers
409 pp. $26.95
In the mid-sixties, the appearance of Betty Friedan's best-selling Feminine Mystique opened the floodgates for a tide of books, articles, studies, and seminars on the topic of women. The continuing widespread interest generated and fed by such works reflects an urgent need in modern times for deep reflection on, and a new attitude toward, the role, place, and person of woman in contemporary society. Most of the voluminous work on the subject has been done by women themselves. Some of it has been strident and confrontational, and as such has repelled rather than attracted sympathy, or provided an excuse for ridicule or evasion of genuine dialogue. This stridency, however, is an understandable expression of a deeply felt sense of frustration and anger arising from a situation in which priorities, distinctions, opportunities, restrictions, and standards of superiority and inferiority have been exclusively drawn on the basis of concepts of masculinity and femininity. The collective judgment of centuries has told woman that her allegedly weak, passive, receptive, dependent and emotional feminine nature is inferior to that of the strong, active, initiating, independent and rational masculine nature. Few will contest the fact that since the beginning of recorded time nearly all cultures have been patriarchal and women have been strictly confined to clearly delineated subordinate places, in which opportunities for personal growth and development, achievement and leadership in public life have been greatly restricted or altogether denied them. Woman's "place" has traditionally been in the home, bearing and rearing children, locked out of the "real" world of men.
Contemporary psychology and the participation and leadership of women in virtually every area of life have gone a long way in demonstrating that men do not have a monopoly on what traditionally have been considered manly qualities, nor women on those considered womanly. Yet gender role stereotypes and notions of the inferiority of the female to the male remain deeply ingrained in the modern psyche.
In large part, gender division has been perpetuated in the West by the Judeo-Christian tradition, both in religion and the outside world. Its exclusively male imagery and idea of God, and its exclusive masculinity presumed in the traditional doctrine of God, ultimately led men to believe that the fullness of the divine image resides only or primarily in themselves, while women are secondarily made in the image of God and thus subordinate. This way of thinking has sustained and legitimized patriarchal institutional structures and interrelationships in which men alone, by virtue of their maleness as representative of God, may serve in positions of authority.
Some radical feminists, focusing solely
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