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The Struggle to Name Women's Experience: Assessment and Implications for Theological Construction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Ann O'Hara Graff
Ann O'Hara Graff*
Affiliation:
Loyola University of Chicago
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Abstract

Feminist theologians claim that women's experience is the key to both their critical and constructive theological endeavors. This article is first an effort to sort out the ways women's experience has been named and used for theological reflection particularly through the lens of gender constructs as these have been called to our attention in relation to social location, language, and the quest for human wholeness. Second, it explores the implications of this work on women's experience for constructive feminist theology.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , Fall 1993 , pp. 215 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1993

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References

1 Daly, Mary, The Church and the Second Sex (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).Google Scholar For a sense of women's contributions to religious life and thought in the nineteenth century, especially in the social reform and suffrage movement, see Ruether, Rosemary Radford and Keller, Rosemary Skinner, eds., Women and Religion in America, vol. 1: The Nineteenth Century: A Documentary History (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981).Google Scholar

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3 Ellen Leonard clarifies the connection between women's search for their own experience and the increasing attention theologians have given to the foundational role of experience for theology since the modernists. See her “Experience as a Source for Theology,” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 43 (1988): 44–61.Google Scholar

4 Since the work of this article is to grapple with the problem of naming women's experience, I begin here with the simplest formulation, borrowing from Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, ed. Griffin, David Ray and Sherburne, Donald W. (New York: Free Press, 1978), 145 and 190.Google Scholar

5 The damage done by the subordination and disparagement of others because of difference cannot be overstated. While this paper focuses on difference as a major clue to the appearance of particularity, in all its richness, politically we have not yet accepted difference as interesting and enriching. On the contrary, it continues to generate fear and anger that divide. We need to learn that difference need not entail better or worse, and it need not be divisive. It can be enjoyed.

6 I am thinking here, not only of the way feminist theologies have demonstrated that systematic attention to gender must be part of any fully responsible theological inquiry, historical or contemporary, but also of the way that cultural particularity raises questions about every aspect of Christian life and thought. This ranges from questions about the appropriateness of symbols and practices (rice for eucharist) to issues like the fittingness of native American traditions to serve as a foundational Old Testament as they appropriate the person and event of Jesus the Christ. See Charleston, Steve, “The Old Testament of Native America” in Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies from the Underside, ed. Thistlethwaite, Susan Brooks and Engel, Mary Potter (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), 49–61.Google Scholar

7 Angelou, Maya, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York: Bantam, 1969)Google Scholar During the course of this article I will advert to the experience of black women. I cannot pretend to speak for them; rather, I can only offer what I have learned from them, as I understand it, to illustrate what I take to be critical issues within the problem of naming women's experience.

8 See McDannell, Colleen, “Catholic Domesticity, 1860-1960” in American Catholic Women: A Historical Exploration, ed. Kennelly, Karen (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 48–80.Google Scholar

9 In a popular vein see Kolbenschlag, Madonna, Kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979)Google Scholar, and Kolbenschlag, Madonna, Lost in the Land of Oz (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988);Google Scholar for more sophisticated work see Keller, Catherine, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self (Boston: Beacon, 1986).Google Scholar

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23 Not only do psychologists operate with this assumption that feelings constitute information and clues to further information, philosophers and theologians have begun to insist on this as well. See Jaggar, Alison M., “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology” in Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, ed. Jaggar, Altson M. and Bordo, Susan R. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 145–71.Google Scholar

24 See, e.g., Hansen, Karen V. and Philipson, Ilene J., Women, Class and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

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26 Carr, Anne E., Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition and women's Experience (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 134–57;Google ScholarEugene, Toinette, “While Love Is Unfashionable: An Exploration of Black Spirituality and Sexuality” in Women's Consciousness, 121–41;Google Scholar and McFague, , Models of God, 157–80.Google Scholar

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28 McFague emphasizes these connections throughout Models. See also Christ, Carol P., “Rethinking Theology and Nature” in Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, ed. Christ, Carol P. and Plaskow, Judith (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 314–25.Google Scholar

29 Gilligan, Carol, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982);Google Scholar and Gilligan, Carol, Lyons, Nona P., and Hanmer, Trudy J., eds., Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

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32 This is also visible in the work of Fiorenza, cited above, as it is with Ruether, Rosemary Radford in many works, notably in Sexism and God-Talk (Boston: Beacon, 1983)Google Scholar and Woman-Church: Theology and Practice (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985);Google Scholar it is also a major focus in the work of James, and Whitehead, Evelyn, The Emerging Laity: Returning Leadership to the Community of Faith (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986).Google Scholar

33 E.g., see Dworkin, Andrea, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (New York: Harper & Row, 1976)Google Scholar, or Miller, Alice, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence, trans. Hildegard, and Hannum, Hunter (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984).Google Scholar

34 See, e.g., Rich, Adrienne, “Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, and Gynephobia” in her On Lies, Secrets and Silence (New York: Norton, 1979), 275–310.Google Scholar

35 Daly, Mary, Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1978).Google Scholar Elizabeth Johnson also cites the United Nations statistics that show that women as one half of the world's population do three quarters of the work, for one tenth of the income, and own one one hundredth of the world's land. Women comprise two thirds of the world's illiterate adults, and women and children are three fourths of the starving. See Johnson, , Consider Jesus (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 102.Google Scholar Thistlethwaite reminds us repeatedly in her works how often women are battered, raped, molested—every three minutes, every five minutes, every ten minutes. See her Sex, Race and God, 126-41, and “Every Two Minutes: Battered Women and Feminist Interpretation” in Weaving the Visions, 302-13.

36 Here I follow David Tracy's model of the theological enterprise. See Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury, 1975)Google Scholar for an extended statement. I retain full responsibility for the variations on the theme.

37 This is quite similar to the method employed in liberation theology, of which some take feminist theology to be a type. For a concise summary of liberation method and its similarity to feminist theology, see Johnson, , Consider Jesus, 83–88.Google Scholar

38 See Welch, Sharon D., Communities of Resistance and Solidarity: A Feminist Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985)Google Scholar, and A Feminist Ethic of Risk (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1989).Google Scholar

39 Grant, Jacquelyn, “Subjectification as a Requirement for Christological Construction” in Lift Every Voice, 201–14.Google Scholar