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  • Restorative Feminism and Religious Tradition
  • Tova Hartman (bio)

Feminism, in its many varieties, is inherently forward-looking; it calls for reform. Is a feminism that hopes to redeem rather than reject traditional orders by definition a contradiction in terms? Is all retrospection retrograde? These are questions asked by feminist scholars and writers whose critique of dominant cultural patterns relies on archaeology (in the broadest sense) and on restoration. "Restorative feminism," as I will call it, does not seek an outright break with tradition; rather, it regards the present state of traditions as perversions of their original or natural forms, and it therefore seeks to restore those traditions to a primordial state before the fall. "One must not read life history under patriarchy as nature," Carol Gilligan says: restorative feminism begins from the assumption that what is perceived as order—"the world order"—tends to be a form of disorder, an aberration or degradation of what originally was projected.1 The restorative feminist digs for beginnings and wholesome early developments in order to ascertain when and how wrong turns were made.

Dreams of restoration are not unique to feminism, of course. They inform both the idea of Renaissance and of the Noble Savage, which have fueled the [End Page 89] engines of modern high culture; and there are many premodern precedents.2 Jewish prophetic and liturgical sources, for example, speak of a return in which "our days will be renewed as before"—the words allude to restoration of a condition unspecified but presupposed to be desirable. No one knows, in other words, what a restoration of the past, were such a thing possible, might entail; but in the cultural movement I am referring to, it is assumed that restoration would "correct" the present state of culture. Many religious traditions demand of their scholars that any new idea or innovative practice be justified in terms of old ideas and practices. The earlier the historical source to which an idea or practice can be traced, the greater the authority it possesses upon presentation. This approach to change may involve a complicated tracing of lineage through the ages or else, more simply, "I heard from thus-and-such in the name of so-and-so"—but in either case, the perception of the past as an enabling source of change is clear. Large-scale restorations tend to be messianic movements (of the kind outlined by Gershom Scholem) in which redemption is perceived to close a circle, and in which restorative changes are revolutionary in the etymologically truest sense.3 A revolution, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is "the act of revolving—the process of making a complete movement or turn around a central point."

There is of course wide disagreement about the means of uncovering traditions that are in abeyance. In particular, feminists disagree about how far down to dig, how far back to search, in order to find their primitive church, the uncorrupted past. Restorative feminists offer several approaches. There are those who see corruption as permeating the structures of social life as we now know it: this variety of feminist hopes to restore a state of affairs before those structures came into being. That state, if ever it existed, would be far in the past and is often said to antedate both monotheism and the patriarchal family—or at least to predate the successful representation of the patriarchal family as natural and universal. Adrienne Rich has found some Amazonian cultures compelling because they appear to show that in the distant past social order was very unlike ours now: "It began to be possible to imagine some universal earlier civilization in which mother-right, not father-right, prevailed; in which matrilineality and matrifocality played a part; in which women were active and admired participants in all of culture; and so to imagine a wholly different way for women to exist in the world."4

In contrast to Rich and others who regard much of history since the advent of monotheism as perverse, there are restorative feminists who, though in agreement [End Page 90] with Rich on various points, place themselves within one of the monotheistic traditions. Theorists of this type attempt to...

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