A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Author:Kristin Kobes Du Mez [Mez, Kristin Kobes Du]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: history, United States, 19th Century, Religion, Christianity, Sexuality & Gender Studies
ISBN: 9780190205645
Google: TPzVBgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-11-15T00:31:11.454550+00:00

6

Redeeming Eve

IN ORDER TO free women to take hold of their redemption in Christ, Bushnell worked to dissociate conventional Victorian family arrangements from their presumed Christian roots. By redefining female virtue, Bushnell had undermined the linchpin of the Victorian cult of domesticity: the ideal of self-sacrificing womanhood. She then extended her critique of conventional gender relations by contesting the traditional patriarchal marriage relationship—and with it the doctrines of male headship and female submission—and by altogether dismissing the Victorian idealization of motherhood. And she abandoned the very notion of a separate “woman’s sphere.” Drawing on history, anthropology, science, and theology, Bushnell crafted innovative and often radical reinterpretations of traditional passages in order to offer women a new gospel, one that redefined virtue and vice, sin and salvation, and one that ultimately established a new social order.

In setting out to liberate women from traditional marriage, Bushnell parted ways with the vast majority of her Protestant contemporaries. Her critique of marriage did not conflict with her understanding of Christianity, however, since she based her critique on her revised creation narrative. Patriarchal marriage was not ordained by God, she insisted, but rather resulted from man’s rebellion against God. To make this case, she directed her readers to Genesis 2:24, where, immediately after separating Eve out of Adam, God had declared: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife.” In this “most interesting” interjection in the account of ancient history, Bushnell explained, God “directly and impressively” addressed humanity, and established the law of marriage. But she contended that by dictating a husband’s duty to his wife, not a wife’s to her husband, God had clearly ordained a matriarchal society, rather than a patriarchal one.1

In making this argument, Bushnell drew liberally on the work of a number of anthropologists who had posited the existence of a prehistoric matriarchy. She cited Johann Jakob Bachofen, for example, whose Das Mutterrecht (1861) first brought the notion of a prehistoric matriarchy from the mythical realm into historical and scientific studies, and J. F. McLennan, the leading exponent of matriarchy in the English world, along with E. B. Tylor, Edward Westermarck, James Fraser, John Lubbock, W. Robertson Smith, Herbert Spencer, and Henry Lewis Morgan.2 In using the term “matriarchate,” however, Bushnell made clear that she did not mean to imply the rule of women over men, as men had established over women; such societies occurred rarely, she noted, and only in small communities.3 Rather, by matriarchy she was referring simply to “the absence of an exclusive government by men,—the existence of that saner, righteous state, in which the governing privilege is invested in the competent, without regard to sex.”4 And she was convinced that the Bible provided ample evidence that God had intended such a state. Genesis 2:24 clearly revealed the divine establishment of both matrilocality (that husbands were to move into their wives’ homes upon marriage) and matriliny (laws of female kinship), customs instituted by God to safeguard women against abandonment or maltreatment at the hands of malicious or irresponsible husbands.

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