A Garland of Feminist Reflections: Forty Years of Religious Exploration

11. Is the (Hindu) Goddess a Feminist?

Is the (Hindu) Goddess a Feminist? Is the Goddess a feminist? That’s a good question. In my view, the only possible answer is, “It depends.” Initially, I want to suggest that it depends on two things. It depends on how the term feminist is defined. And it depends on who the Goddesses’ devotees are. Depending on how the term feminist is defined, various Hindu and Buddhist goddesses could be shown to be either feminists or nonfeminists in their traditional manifestations. But, in the long run, if the Goddesses’ devotees are feminists, then the Goddesses will either come to be seen as feminists or be abandoned by their feminist devotees. And if the Goddesses’ devotees are antifeminist or nonfeminist, then the Goddess will not be a feminist, whatever her appearance to outsiders who might find her appearance inspiring to their own feminism. Thus, the answer to this question lies, not in the imagery and mythology of the Goddess per se, but in a complex and subtle interaction between the Goddess and her devotees. I make these correlations between Goddesses and devotees because, as historians of religions, we know that, in the long run, Gods and Goddesses are created by devotees, though in the short run, any individual is formed in part by the images of Gods and Goddesses imbibed from the culture. As historians of religion, we know that divine imagery is not arbitrarily given by something outside human cultural creativity, and we know that divine imagery always bears some relationship to human culture, though that relationship is not as simple as the direct mirroring some expect. 189 chapter 11 Gross_Ch11 10/17/08 16:28 Page 189 Nevertheless, despite my emphasis on definitions, answering this question is not merely a matter of clever definitions. Important issues are at stake in the question of whether or not the Goddess is a feminist. Definitions of feminism turn on the point that, according to feminism , women are human beings in their own right. This contrasts with androcentric scholarship and patriarchal social forms, in which males are the only genuinely human subjects. In patriarchal societies, women are controlled by men and, at least theoretically, do not have selfdetermination . In androcentric scholarship, women are classified, analyzed , and, in general talked about as if they had no consciousness, no sense of self, and no ability to name reality. Thus, despite the many varieties of feminism and the many arguments within feminist theory, I am suggesting that feminism focuses on the humanity of women and searches for that which promotes and recognizes their humanity, though there is significant disagreement over what women need and want as human beings. Nevertheless, to focus on their humanity rather than to legislate for them and to theorize about them, as if women are no more human than the phenomenal world or the deities, is a massive conceptual leap from the way most of us were taught to think about women by our culture and by our academic mentors. Because Hindu society is at least nominally patriarchal and because much Hindu religious thought is androcentric, it would seem, at least superficially, that Hindu Goddesses have not done a good job of promoting the humanity of Hindu women. This could mean that the Goddesses are not feminists but are the creation of patriarchal males and serve their needs. Some would even argue that the Goddesses function to help maintain patriarchy by feeding women contrasting divine images of decent Goddesses who are submissively married versus frighteningly out of control, unmarried Goddesses. The message would be clear to women. Because independence makes females bloodthirsty and dangerous, women would imitate Sita rather than Kali, which indeed seems to be the case when one studies Hindu society anthropologically. Hindu women indeed do have a divine role model, unlike Christian, Jewish, and other monotheistic women, but it is easily arguable that the divine role model does not promote the kind of lifestyle choices for women that feminists want. Many Hindu women would respond that they don’t want those choices and take great comfort in having a divine role model with whom they can identify and who validates them. But, superficially at least, such a situation is not what Western feminists want from Goddesses. 190 Is the (Hindu) Goddess a Feminist? Gross_Ch11 10/17/08 16:28 Page 190 Indeed, many Christian feminists do not regard reimaging the divine as feminine as the central agenda...