JFSR: A Sober History

Introduction

On the occasion of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's seventieth birthday and in recognition of her contributions to JFSR, we decided to consider the legacy of the journal in a fresh light. Founding coeditor, board member, and Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc. (FSR) member Judith Plaskow, long-standing board member and FSR member Mary Hunt, and former managing editor and current board member Elizabeth Pritchard offer their own perspectives on JFSR as a case study in feminist institution-building and its implications. We offer critical reflections on the practice and process of this undertaking: its messiness, successes, and ongoing issues.

For the twentieth anniversary of JFSR, I spoke about its history in a celebratory mode, paying tribute to all the wonderful women who helped make the journal a reality over the course of its first two decades.¹ For this issue, I would like to pay closer attention to some of the difficulties and compromises involved in running the journal—especially in its first decade—with the hope of both clarifying some issues still facing JFSR and naming some of the challenges involved in much feminist grassroots institution-building.

As I mentioned in my comments at the twentieth anniversary celebration, Elisabeth and I had talked for many years about the importance of having a feminist journal in religion. We began to turn the fantasy into a reality, however, only when we found ourselves at a cocktail party at the 1982 American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature (AAR/SBL) annual meeting with the director of Scholars Press. It was our spontaneous decision to initiate a conversation with Conrad Cherry, and his openness to the idea of a feminist pay-as-you-go journal, that led us to start serious planning for a first issue. The foundation of the project—and I suspect this is true of most feminist institutions—was our excitement about and commitment to it and our willingness to put some money and an enormous amount of time into seeing it come to fruition. Because we were interested in the content of the journal rather than in the creation of infrastructure, we improvised the minimal structures that were essential to keeping JFSR alive. The necessity of focusing our time and energy on getting out each issue made it virtually impossible to attend to fund-raising or to hire a regular staff person, while the lack of such a person in turn limited our capacity to fund-raise and to do long-range planning. I don't say this critically, because had we focused on infrastructure, JFSR would likely never have come into existence, but it has had many implications for what we have been able to do.

For its first four years, the journal was located at Manhattan College. I had a somewhat reduced teaching load and an excellent work-study student who kept track of articles and corresponded with reviewers and authors, but the tasks of developing an orderly review process and editing articles took all our time and energy. Moving the journal to Harvard Divinity School in our fifth year represented a significant step in institutionalization in that Harvard offered a pool of graduate students who were knowledgeable about and committed to feminist work in religion and who could serve as managing editors rather than simply as student assistants. Their identification with and dedication to the journal have been critical to its development and maintenance, but still, they could work only limited hours, and the many tasks connected with putting out issues twice a year demanded their full attention.

Let me mention a couple of areas in which the absence of time and money—though intersecting with other factors—affected the shape of the journal from its beginnings. One of the questions that emerged quite early in our planning was whether the journal would have an international dimension. Because JFSR was the first academic feminist journal in religion, we wanted to be able to reach out beyond the North American context and solicit and accept articles from other areas of the world. The first issue, for example, included a "Living It Out" report that...