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16 Our Heritage Is Our Power In Celebration of Wo/men’s History Month The Australian feminist Dale Spender published a book of more than eight hundred pages in the early 1980s entitled On Women of Ideas (and What Men Have Done to Them).1 She shows that in the last six hundred years or so feminist thought has emerged again and again and then has been submerged and forgotten so that every third or fourth generation has to start over again to reinvent the “feminist wheel.” For instance, throughout my almost twenty years of schooling I did not learn anything about the wo/men’s movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries except ridicule and derision. My nightmare continues to be that my great grandchildren will face the same experience again. For instance, as more and more first-generation feminists retire or die, in many cases we will not be replaced by other feminists, and the few academic positions that we have struggled so hard for will vanish again. Moreover, the historian Barbara Caine has shown that it is not just the dominant kyriarchal society and academy that foster the forgetting of feminist knowledge. Such forgetting frequently occurs with each new generation of feminists who find it hard to recognize the work of their foremothers and therefore feel compelled to distance themselves from the ideas of their predecessors in order to prove the novelty and creativity of their own ideas. I quote her: At the same time historians have to recognize that the frequent rejection of the term “feminism”—and of any sense of connection 1. This address was given at Gannon Center in Chicago, Illinois, in celebration of Wo/men’s History Month. 251 with earlier feminists—by women who have embraced the notion of female emancipation indicates that women find it hard to establish trans-generational links or to set themselves up as legitimating or authoritative figures for each other or for future generations.2 For that reason, celebratory undertakings such as Wo/men’s History Month serve the function of recognizing and acknowledging the historical significance of feminist work by creating a feminist intellectual tradition and heritage that is able to shape a more just future. Such events are a small gesture to ensure that “what she has done will be told in memory of her”—for our heritage is our power. Whereas Gustavo Guitiérrez is rightly credited for being the “father” of liberation the*logy, it is not clear who coined the expression “feminist the*logy” or “feminist studies in religion.”3 More research needs to be done here. To my knowledge, a feminist history of feminist studies in the*logy and religion still needs to be written, a history that takes into account not only the feminist struggles in the academy but also their intertwinement with feminist struggles in church and religion. We need to document our past in a feminist way in order to have a feminist future, and we need to do so by recognizing the intertwinement of feminist movements and struggles in society, the academy, and religious communities. Since we are celebrating feminist history month, I want to reflect on the roots of U.S. feminist biblical studies in the nineteenth century. The story of feminist biblical interpretation can be told in different ways. The Woman’s Bible (1895–99), edited by the Anglo-American Elizabeth Cady Stanton has always been an important starting point for contemporary feminist scholarship in religion beginning with the first sessions of the AAR (American Academy of Religion) Religion and Women section. Yet The Woman’s Bible was not the first or the only such feminist work. Grace Aguilar (1816-1847), a Sephardic British Jew, had published ca. 1830 a two-volume work, The Women of Israel, which predates The Woman’s Bible by more than six decades.4 For a symposium celebrating the centennial of The Woman’s Bible in 1995 in Vienna,5 Professor 2. Barbara Caine, “Women’s Studies, Feminist Traditions and the Problem of History,” in Transitions: New Australian Feminisms (ed. Barbara Caine, Rosemary Pringle; Sydney: Allen &Unwin, 1995), 3. 3. Whereas the work of Hedwig Meyer-Wilmes, Rebellion auf der Grenze: Ortsbestimmung feministischer Theologie (Frauenforum; Freiburg: Herder, 1990) provides a substantive intellectual historiography of the development of German feminist the*logy, such a work is lacking for North America, although American feminist the*logy has greatly influenced Germany and Europe. 252 | Empowering Memory and Movement [3.133.108.241] Project MUSE...

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