American Religious Liberalism

Seven: Spiritual Border-Crossings in the U.S. Women’s Rights Movement

s e v e n Spiritual Border-­Crossings in the U.S. Women’s Rights Movement Kat h i K e r n The assumption that woman is naturally and inevitably the inferior half of the race is found in every religion as soon as it crystallizes into dogma, but if we go far enough back we find that the esoteric teaching of all the ancient wisdom was that the Divine Feminine was that out of which all things were evolved or created. . . . In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says: ‘I am the Father and the Mother of the Universe.’ . . . If we could get men to understand the place of the Divine Feminine in the order of the universe, they would cease to think that by holding women in subjection in Church and State, they are helping the Creator to carry out the original plan. —Clara Colby, 1914 For Clara Colby, the long-­ time editor of the suffrage paper The Woman’s Tribune , an intervention was necessary. Men of the United States, who denied women their full equality, were mired in a Chris­ tian tradition that had muted its most radical message: the Divine Feminine. Colby, a spiritual seeker and a feminist, sought both ancient sources and new voices to counteract the reigning assumption that the subjection of women was of divine design. Her story raises the larger question: To what extent did religious liberalism provide a space for more cosmopolitan thinking in the early twentieth-­ century women ’s rights movement? From the work of scholars of the transnational ­women’s rights movement, we know that the Gilded Age and Progressive Era movement was shaped by the growth of international women’s or­ ga­ ni­ za­ tions and 162 Spiritual Border-Crossings 163 by the movement of people and ideas across national borders. In this essay, I explore one such exchange: Clara Colby’s immersion in the work of the early twentieth-­ century Bengali poet-­ philosopher Rabindranath Tagore.1 Like other religious liberals engaged in metaphysi­ cal “border-­ crossings,” Colby drew upon a discourse of “affirmative” or “romantic” Orientalism, whereby the insights of the “East” might counteract the spiritual poverty of the “West.” In particular, Colby mined the writings of Tagore to challenge the hegemony of West­ ern gender relations. In her effort to apply her reading of Tagore to the problems of a West­ern democracy, Colby took her place in a long line of ­Ameri­cans—­from Transcendentalists to Martin Luther King Jr.—who, in conversation with Indian writers, philosophers, and spiritual leaders, collaborated on essentializing a powerful, persistent idea of “Indian spirituality” and its potential to transform the West. These ideas were seductive to many Ameri­ cans, perhaps none more so than Ameri­ can women at the turn of the century. Clara Colby, then, can help us to understand both the nature of that collaboration and its appeal to Ameri­ can feminists of the early twentieth century.2 Clara Colby and the Context of Anglo-­Ameri­can Feminism As Anglo-­ Ameri­ can suffragists engaged in a transnational women’s move­ ment, encountering new ideas and accommodating and co-­ opting new religious prac­ tices, they responded with varying degrees of skepticism, am­ biva­ lence, and fervor. Clearly, many responded with what Edward Said has fam­ ously delineated as “Orientalism” and interpreted the “barbaric” religious practices of people around the world as prime evidence of the urgency of West­ ern im­ peri­ al­ ism. In the tradition of Orientalism, the East and the West emerge as polar opposites. An irrational, exotic, heathen East is set off by its countervailing opposite : the rational, familiar, Chris­tian West.3 Suffragists’ encounters with new religions provide rich opportunities to explore Orientalist discourse. Take, for example, Carrie Chapman Catt, the successor to Susan B. Anthony, a national and international feminist and an advocate of evolution, who carefully documented the “barbaric” practices of “Eastern” cultures in her 1912 world suffrage tour. Catt, like many European and Ameri­ can observers, trained her eye on the cultural practices that came to stand for what was “traditional” about Indian society: religion and gender relations.4 In Catt’s estimation, religion was a curious vestige of Indian culture, one that could be stimulated and improved, but 164 Kathi Kern probably not eliminated, by exposure to West­ ern civilization. She observed people bathing in the Ganges and remarked, “There are also some fools called holy men—too disgusting...