The World Come of Age by Barger Lilian Calles

Author:Barger, Lilian Calles [Barger, Lilian Calles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

9

The Feminine Principle

CALLING MARGINALIZED GROUPS to political action required not only a new view of God’s relationship to the world but also a shared story. The rise of social history with marginalized groups at the center circulated a new awareness of oppression. With the aid of a secularized theology, the particular stories previously untold and borne by blacks, ethnic minorities, the poor, and women their struggle for freedom gained the perspective of a divine initiative. This chapter and the next demonstrate how liberationists across the hemisphere turned to narrative in the naming of oppression and in constructing a politically effective group identity. Under the sway of identity politics, the desire to validate a group’s solidarity—defined as neither sympathy nor feelings of social belonging but rather shared struggle against particular suffering—and redefining a universal new humanity appeared at odds. In the search for a narrative that took into account both the particular and the universal, women were no different from other marginalized groups.

The recognition of women as an oppressed group and the possibility of a liberating theo-politic depended on a great number of ideas and historical changes converging. White women, embedded within a community with dominant men and assumed as being without an independent history, complicated viewing them as an oppressed group. The new field of women’s history became a necessary first step. Otherwise, race and class privilege and the view of woman as a derivative of man threatened to make white women’s subjugation invisible. Women still needed a sacred story of their own.

Feminist liberation theology hinged on recognizing women vis-à-vis men, identifying them as the “Other,” and making a claim to equality—a historically tenuous position. Advocates in the nineteenth century had asserted the equality of men and women “before God” as a key teaching of Christianity. However, a long-held belief in difference as part of the divine order of creation made reaching functional equality arduous. The valuation of differences in a hierarchy of values served modern societal and capitalist goals.

Into the twentieth century, accelerated changes in women’s political, economic, and social status rewrote the narrative for women’s lives. Strides in science, social theory, and historiography began to loosen the cultural straitjacket, and the private place of women opened to recognize their political coming of age. A critical mass of newly educated women theologians moved with what Nancy Cott identified as the key claims of modern feminism: opposition to sex hierarchy, assumption of the social construction of woman’s subordination, and the identification of women as a social group—proposals that became radicalized in the women’s liberation movement. These societal and attitudinal shifts emboldened many to challenge one of the last remaining barriers in theological abstraction—sexism. 1

Sisterhood

The period between World War II and the 1970s exposed the foundations for a feminist theology and praxis. The French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), with the English translation available in 1953, provided a historical, philosophical, literary, and anthropological excavation of the status of modern women from childhood to old age. De Beauvoir

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