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  • Virgins for Sale
  • Lisa M. Bitel
Rosemary Radford Ruether . Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. ix + 381 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-520-25005-5 (cl); 0-520-23146-5 (pb).
Deirdre Good , ed. Mariam, the Magdalen, and the Mother. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. xvii + 240 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-253-34533-2 (cl); 0-253-21751-2 (pb).
Linda B. Hall . Mary, Mother and Warrior: The Virgin in Spain and the Americas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. xiii + 366 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-292-70602-2 (cl); 0-292-70595-6 (pb).
Suzanne K. Kaufman . Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. viii + 255 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8014-4248-6 (cl).

The Virgin Mary has been turning up in all sorts of unexpected places recently, including a highway underpass in Chicago, a weeping statue in Sacramento, and a cheese sandwich auctioned on eBay. As of this writing, two more miraculous manifestations of the Blessed Mother are for sale on eBay: a cashew shaped in the image of Mary and the baby Jesus ($5), and a tree in South Dallas in whose bark an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe has grown ($5000). The Dallas family that owns the tree did not originally wish to sell it, but a constant parade of pilgrims has destroyed the family's privacy, including one night in December when five hundred believers and a mariachi band arrived.

The Virgin's popularity may seem like a sudden development, but the current style of Marian apparitions began in 1830 when Our Lady appeared to a twenty-four-year-old Parisian named Catherine Labouré. Since then, the Virgin has visited every continent except Antarctica, favoring western Europe and America with repeat visits. In the twentieth century alone, Mary has appeared in twenty-two visions officially sanctioned by the Catholic Church and another four-hundred-plus reported visions either rejected by church officials or still under investigation. Perhaps because of her ubiquity, not to mention the Vatican's refusal to ordain female leaders, Mary is the feminine face of modern Catholicism. [End Page 170]

Feminist approaches to the Virgin and the religions she represents are predictably diverse. Those feminists who decry patriarchal Catholicism have blamed her for the religion's mistakes. Radical theologian Mary Daly, for instance, argued in her 1968 The Church and the Second Sex that the Virgin promoted a passive, submissive, asexual, unattainable model meant to oppress women.1 More moderate observers, including theologian Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, have made Christianity more inclusive by ignoring the Virgin for more assertive female figures such as Mary Magdalen.2 Still others have rehabilitated Mary by inventing new symbolic meanings for her, as Rosemary Ruether did in Mary, Feminine Face of the Church (1978).3 Even the late pope John Paul II supposedly supported a new position for Mary as official co-redemptorix of humanity.4

One religious scholar who has lived through Mary's many changes, not to mention radical feminism's rise and fall, is Rosemary Ruether, author of several dozen volumes and almost countless articles on religion. Ruether's latest book, Goddesses and the Feminine Divine, is both a history of feminist debates about religion and a history of Western religion from a feminist point of view. She admits that her scholarly voice developed equally from journeys into ancient scriptures and travels with the American civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. The 1970s brought her to feminism and ecological activism, anthropology, and the study of goddess cultures. She recalls her early encounters with the chubby female statuettes of the Neolithic, then widely accepted as goddess or "Venus" figures. Her students were not only appalled at the fat, faceless, little pottery women who were all buttocks and breasts, but even more dismayed at the thought that people once worshipped them. The Venuses led Ruether to realize that the dream of ancient goddess-worshipping matriarchies was itself a historical product of nineteenth-century anthropology and political theory. She realized that "feminists have no perfect options from some past tradition" and that "a fully pro-womanist feminist...

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