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| 209 10 Feminist Theology Mary McClintock Fulkerson Historical Backdrop It was not until 1913 that “feminism” became a frequently used term in the United States. Originating in a French activist group in the 1880s, the label “feminist” migrated to the Americas through Britain. Until then, the activism of North American women had been identified as the “woman movement.” Frequently associated with 19th-century organizing for women’s suffrage, the “woman movement” included a host of other forms of activism , such as the public challenges of the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded access to all vocations for women and equity in politics and religion.1 With the term “feminist” in the 1920s, a new set of convictions emerged. Those called “feminists” continued to combine convictions about equal treatment with men with commitments to the special gifts of women. However, once these were linked with pushes for women’s sexual pleasure and freedom, the term “feminist” became a marker of a more radical agenda and named a much narrower population in the early decades of the 20th century.2 The 1960s saw an explosion of concern for women’s public agency, antidiscrimination in hiring laws, the wider rights of equal access, protection from sexual exploitation, and the problematic legacies of “separate spheres,”3 and the “feminist” label gained a larger referent group and public audience. Along with the legacy of the 19th-century woman movement, 20th-century influences ranged from the varieties of feminist activism in the 1920s, repercussions of white women’s access to the paid work force in World War II, and the so-called sexual freedom of the 1960s, to the civil rights and antiwar movements of those decades. The convergence of these energies helped spawn what has come to be called the “second wave” feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Betty Freidan’s famous Feminine Mystique of 1963 is considered a founding text of the movement. In that same year, the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt signaled 210 | Mary McClintock Fulkerson groundbreaking public acknowledgment of women’s problems.4 Along with these and other secular forces in the advancement of “women’s liberation,” as it was sometimes called, there were important religious influences. Listed in a chronology of events constituting the women’s liberation movement, for example, is the 1974 illegal ordination of eleven women as Episcopal priests.5 While the second wave is not typically narrated in relation to religion, the symbolic resources that fueled its activism and the hope for change inevitably had roots in faith traditions, as well as liberal democratic discourse. Religion had certainly been crucial to 19th-century activism. Historian Nancy Cott points out that, despite its restrictive gender conventions, Protestantism was an important force in the expansion of women’s sense of their “moral and social role” in the movement as women “apprehended Protestant teachings at a different angle from that intended by most ministers.”6 Women had long contested the patriarchal traditions within the Bible. Some even studied the original languages of scripture in order to correct some of the antiwoman interpretations.7 Convinced that Christianity had better things to offer than biblical prohibitions on women’s agency, Elizabeth Cady Stanton brought together a group of scholars to produce The Women’s Bible (1895), a monumental scholarly commentary on the passages in Christian scripture that denigrated women. More widespread sources of support from religion surfaced in the 20th century. The consciousness of many women, black and white, was significantly expanded by the civil rights movement, which was grounded in religious vision.8 Historian James J. Farrell tells of the religious convictions that shaped what he calls the “political personalism” that dominated the 1960s movements for change. An activism based on convictions of the value of all human beings, not all of political personalism was religious, but a significant part of it was generated by respect for God-sourced dignity thought to be owed all human beings.9 While it is difficult to say with precision which of these social forces in the wider culture directly affected the emergence of feminist theology, the religious imagination did matter for feminism. A different kind of challenge, however, emerges with the naming of significant agents in the movement. The narrative of second wave feminist activities has typically been told as a story of white women’s activism, with occasional invocations of African Americans such as Michelle Wallace, Audre Lorde, or Shirley Chisholm .10 This primarily...

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