Why Must Religious Tradition Be Reconciled with Feminism--Restorative, Radical, or Otherwise?: A Response to Tova Hartman

Tova Hartman begins with an unmodified assertion: "Feminism, in its many varieties, is inherently forward-looking; it calls for reform." Her embrace of this premise informs her discussion of what she calls "restorative feminism," which does not seek an outright break with tradition but seeks to redress the perversion of that tradition and restore it to a prelapsarian purity that endowed women with the rights and privileges that contemporary feminists claim as their due. But her project, as she has formulated it, never acknowledges and defends its governing premise—namely, that religious tradition must be "reformed" to accommodate the demands of feminism. It is a formulation that privileges feminism over "religious tradition." And Hartman apparently does not recognize that the tradition of "reform" she applauds has, at least since the time of Rousseau and Robespierre, sought to shred tradition's claims to legitimacy.

In principle, I have great sympathy for attempts to ground our thinking about women's contemporary situation in an engagement with tradition, provided that such attempts grant respect to tradition on its own terms. Since Hartman proceeds by indirection—she tells us what feminists other than herself have been arguing—it is difficult to be sure what her own position actually is and, consequently, to be sure that she will see criticisms of it as fair. She might have forestalled misunderstanding had she offered a definition of feminism. But her recurring and apparently favorable references to Carol Gilligan, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and other radical figures suggest that even if she does not align herself with them, she views them as leading representatives of feminist thought, and hence those to whom tradition should be held accountable. Does she want her invocation of these figures to suggest that we place Gilligan on a par with Freud, Melanie Klein, or D. W. Winnicott? Ruether on a par with Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), Karol Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II), or Hans Urs von Balthasar? Merlin Stone on a par with Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, or Thomas Pangle? These names are picked at random. My argument does not depend on them in particular, but it does turn on Hartman's apparent affinity for the more radical of contemporary feminists. If she invokes them only as protection against the predictable attacks—attacks by feminists averse to tradition as such—she fails to establish that distance between herself and them which would alert readers to the independence of her own thought.

Hartman wants to claim that "restorative feminism" does not seek to break with tradition—only to correct the abuses and distortions inflicted upon it. But then, she informs us, her interest does not lie in the truth of restorative feminists' charges. Her interest, which she qualifies by "in the context of this symposium," lies "in restorationists' rhetoric as a social phenomenon—a phenomenon, that is to say, with potential social effects." Unfortunately, she neglects to discuss these potential social effects, thereby intensifying her readers' confusion about her purpose or allegiance. Her reminder about the original meaning of revolution does not further clarify her views. Quoting the Oxford English Dictionary, she notes that revolution originally meant "the act of revolving—the process of making a complete movement or turn around a central point." The definition will come as no surprise to those who remember Ulysses' speech from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: "The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre / Observe degree, priority, and place." Without degree, however, all falls into chaos:

      O, when degree is shaked, Which is the ladder of all high designs, The enterprise is sick. How could communities, Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities, Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, The primogenity and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, But by degree, stand in authentic place? Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark, what discord follows. Each thing meets In mere oppugnancy.

Shakespeare here evokes the premises of a world in which revolution retains its original meaning of a planet's...