In his opening essay in this conversation, Gerald Hiestand poses the question: ‘Has Christianity been good for women?’ Drawing upon works such as Tom Holland’s Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, he argues that Christianity effected a sexual revolution, holding male sexual behaviour to account and according women a dignity and honour they had not formerly enjoyed. Phenomena such as the #MeToo movement, or women’s occupation of positions of power, are largely a consequence of Christianity’s influence: ‘The fact that today we have a female vice president, female supreme court justices, female business leaders, female doctors, female professors, and so forth—all bringing their unique female perspectives to these vital cultural roles—is downstream from Christianity.’
The term ‘feminism’ has a positive sense for Hiestand, as it does for thinkers like Louise Perry (who terms herself a ‘common sense feminist’), whom he draws upon. Although the term is most typically used to refer to an array of social, political, and intellectual movements over the last two hundred or so years, Hiestand uses the term rather more broadly, characterizing the expanding influence of Christianity upon societies’ treatment of and regard for women as ‘Christian Feminism’. While acknowledging the ambivalence or even suspicion that many Christians might feel towards the term, he believes that, insofar as feminism has championed ‘women’s dignity, respect, opportunities, political rights, protections, and flourishing’ its aims are laudable. ‘Women have made significant progress in all these areas over the past hundred years, and I take it as axiomatic that these gains have been consistent with Christian ideals.’
As Hiestand and many others employ it, ‘feminism’ is something of a hurrah term, connected to other hurrah terms like ‘dignity’, ‘freedom’, ‘rights’, ‘respect’, and ‘flourishing’. While many people have been firmly resistant or decidedly indifferent to women’s flourishing, few people in contemporary respectable discourse would claim to be opponents of a feminism so framed. This does not mean that such a ‘feminism’ is meaningless: it might name projects committed to advocacy for women’s interests (something like Leah Libresco Sargeant’s ‘Other Feminisms’ comes to mind). Yet for an argument like Hiestand’s, I fear that such a use of the term conveniently deflects attention from the tensions that have existed between Christianity and modern feminism and fails to reckon with just how highly contested the ‘good’ of women is.
Hiestand clearly recognizes the claim that Christianity has been good for women is not an uncontroversial one. Christian teachings regarding abortion, contraception, divorce, marriage, creational order, church office, sexual relations, and chastity, among other issues, are all frequently regarded as profoundly oppressive of women, or contrary to their good. In many contexts the Christian church and its teachings have represented the most prominent principled resistance, not merely to the Sexual Revolution, but to the leading forms of feminism throughout its modern history. For instance, while contemporary Christians might want to claim some credit for the victory of their cause, British Suffragettes treated churches as primary targets of their bombing and arson campaign due to the opposition their movement faced from that quarter. Such examples could be multiplied. It seems to me that an honest reckoning with the question Hiestand poses must take Christian anti-feminism much more seriously: why, if Christianity is so good for women, have conservative Christians more typically resisted feminism than pioneered it in the last century?
In analyzing Max Weber’s account of the role played by a Protestant work ethic in the rise of capitalism, Frederic Jameson coined the concept of the ‘vanishing mediator’.[1] A vanishing mediator is a transitional entity—a movement, a belief system, a force, an institution, etc.—that radical reconfigures a past society in a way that creates the conditions for a new, profoundly different, one. The mediator is ‘vanishing’ because, for the transition to the new social order to occur, it must be displaced or disappear. Much contemporary feminism could never have existed apart from the cultural patrimony of Christianity, for reasons such as those Hiestand outlines. In some cases, feminists might even acknowledge this fact, yet still regard Christianity as a mediator that needs to vanish. That so many of the movements most vocally committed to advocacy for women in the present day see Christianity as their leading opposition seems to demand explanation. While a strong case can be made that Christianity was needed to overcome ancient Roman sexual culture, what Hiestand needs to demonstrate is that Christianity has not simply run its course, needing to give way to a post-Christian feminist movement.
The Christian Feminism that Hiestand describes is one aimed at a progressive and liberal audience and it uses vocabulary that will resonate with such readers, terms such as ‘progress’, ‘equality’, ‘freedom’, ‘rights’, and ‘liberation’. His account of Christianization and the improvement of the situation of women has a whig history flavour to it, operating as an account of almost uninterrupted progress (excepting, perhaps, some recent hiccups): ‘1950 was better for women than 1850, which was better than 1750, which was better than 1650 and so forth.’ While it can be worthwhile to tailor one’s rhetoric to one’s audience, such terms are freighted with assumptions that will tend to obfuscate any closer examination of the question that Hiestand poses and dull the critiques of modernity and liberalism—and of much of the feminism that largely arises from them—that Christian voices have long presented.
An account of Christianity’s approach to women tailored for such an audience will likely be a very stunted one, especially if it is primarily designed to vindicate Christianity before the bar of liberal values. Liberalism imposes its measures upon the past and other societies, measures that can judge the lot of women by the degree to which they enjoyed the rights of autonomous individuals, exercised prominent public office, were interchangeable with men in the workplace, and were not subject to restrictions on the basis of their sex.
Writing about the experience of pious Muslim women in Egypt, Saba Mahmood has discussed liberal feminism’s inability adequately to perceive or articulate the agency enjoyed by women within a non-Western and non-liberal patriarchal society. Mahmood describes the way that Western feminists, perceiving agency in terms of liberal autonomy, struggle to perceive real forms of women’s agency in such a patriarchal society outside of conceptual frames such as that of ‘resistance’ and implicitly impose a prescriptive ‘teleology of progressive politics’ upon the societies that they study.[2] It is impossible to understand the agency of women within such societies if we view them in terms of a liberal anthropology of the sovereign individual.
Hiestand’s suggestion that the lot of women improved consistently throughout the centuries of Christian dominance in the West is also a tendentious one and, as with various of his other claims, raises the question of the standards by which such claims might confidently be made. The years from 1650 to 1950, for instance, involved a series of interconnected vast and disjunctive social transformations in the West, including, among many other things, the Scientific Revolution, the rise of capitalism, the Age of Imperialism, the Enlightenment, the Age of Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the market society, electrification, near universal literacy, antibiotics and other transformative developments in healthcare, mass urbanization, railways, automobiles, and planes, the invention of the telegraph and the phone, of the steam printing press, the radio, and the television, two world wars, and innumerable ideological and political developments in large measure catalyzed and precipitated by these upheavals. Each of these, in their own ways, altered the situation of women profoundly, along with the ‘ecologies’ of the complex social orders they inhabited. None of these developments and vast social upheavals were uncomplicated effects of Christianization, but presented Christian societies and their members with complex new social, ideological, and material realities to which they had to respond, resisting and adapting to them in various ways.
The history of feminism is in significant measure a history of responding to the immense social transformations of the past couple of centuries, transformations which almost entirely unraveled preexisting forms of society with their once-settled customs, norms, and patterns of life. The situation of women changed as the situation of humanity changed, with the obliteration of old lifeworlds and the emergence of a modern ecosystem to which they had to adapt. Feminism, in its various iterations, is overwhelmingly a modern and liberal movement. In responding to modernity, feminism has typically largely assumed its terms and the anthropological assumptions that undergird its various iterations can depart sharply from those of Christianity and other belief systems that are less accommodated to liberalism.
In his book Gender, Ivan Illich describes the shift from old subsistence societies characterized by the settled social polarities and interweaving of mutually-dependent men and women to a modern unisex order scoured of gender, yet disadvantaging women relative to men within a market society of sovereign individuals.[3] Illich insists upon the difference in kind between the (not uncommonly oppressive) asymmetries of the old subsistence societies of interdependence between the sexes and modern ‘sexism’, which renders men and women more directly commensurable, makes each individual a rival to the other sex in his or her economic pursuits, and unequally integrates men and women into the modern state, reducing the family and household to marginality. For moderns, ‘power’ tends to be spoken of as a ‘homogeneous force’, genderless, yet inequitably exercised by men and women.[4] However, Illich insists, subsistence societies cannot be evaluated according to the measure of equality in exercising a genderless ‘power’, but rather by how ‘balanced’ the ‘ambiguous complementarity’ in men and women’s interdependent enjoyment and exercise of agency relative to each other and the wider world is.[5] Evaluated in such a manner, what might otherwise seem utterly inequitable according to the anachronous and alien standards of the modern outsider to a social order, might be revealed to be balanced and good. For instance, Illich reminds moderns who instinctively give primacy to the public sphere and privilege more typically male activities and realms that ‘in a life-style centred on the household, the power that counts seems to be the power in the house.’[6]
Related points are made by Christopher Lasch in Women and the Common Life.[7] Lasch argues that Betty Friedan’s seminal work, The Feminine Mystique, ‘originated as a direct response, often a very self-conscious response, not to the age-old oppression of women, but to the suburbanization of the American soul.’[8] He suggests that the positioning of feminism against the grand abstraction of the ‘patriarchy’, an oppressive and ubiquitous order existing from time immemorial, only occurred at a later point. To use Illich’s terminology, instead of focusing upon the sexism of the new economic order, this sexism was read back into the past societies, presenting any polarity or division in male and female labour—or even social asymmetries between men and women—as indicative of deep injustice. Lasch writes:
All societies distinguish between women’s work and men’s work. Such distinctions are often invidious, serving to keep women in a subordinate status. It is only recently, however, that “woman’s place” has been defined in such a way as to exclude her from participation in the common life beyond the household.[9]
Lasch makes the provocative case that the progressive era between 1890 and 1920 constituted the high-water mark of women’s participation in the public world, which typically exceeded that of their husbands, who were more occupied with their private business affairs.[10] Such involvement diminished after women got the vote, as women’s formerly voluntary work was professionalized, politicized, and outsourced, and with the suburbanization of much American society.[11]
Christians must have an active concern for the flourishing of women in contemporary society, a society radically different from former ones. There is no timeless blueprint to be enacted, former idyll that might be repristinated, enduring utopia to be achieved, nor uncomplicated process of emancipation to be continued. Rather, we must prudently, attentively, and critically respond and adapt to the novel and rapidly changing conditions of modern society. This is a task for which both wisdom and a vision for a society in which men and women thrive together formed by Scripture will greatly help and orient us.
I believe that study of the history of such a concern for women’s flourishing will frequently demonstrate the goodness of Christianity, often in contrast to other religious, ideological, or political movements, as Hiestand has argued. However, we need to be clearer about the highly contested character of the ‘good’ of women within modern liberal society and the complexity, ambiguity, and unevenness of the historical developments that have brought us to this point. Taking Christianity’s anti-feminist, non-modern, and non-liberal teaching and history more seriously—without denying other aspects of its history and teaching that have weighed in different directions—will allow for a much more searching conversation and witness on these matters.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast.. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
NOTES
[1] Frederic Jameson, ‘The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structure in Max Weber’ (New German Critique, Winter 1973) 52-89.
[2] Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2012), 9
[3] Ivan Illich, Gender (London, Marion Boyars, 1983)
[4] Gender, 116
[5] Gender, 114-116
[6] Gender, 88-89
[7] Christopher Lasch, Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism (New York, W.W. Norton, 1997)
[8] Women and the Common Life, 94
[9] Women and the Common Life, 94
[10] Women and the Common Life, 96
[11] The anti-suffragist Mary Ward argued that, were women to be given the vote, they would lose the ‘moral high ground of non-partisanship’, which had served them so well in their earlier movements for social reform. Helen Andrews, ‘A Cause Lost—and Forgotten: Lessons from Mary Ward and the Women’s Anti-Suffragist Movement’ (The University Bookman, March 2015).
In his opening essay in this conversation, Gerald Hiestand poses the question: ‘Has Christianity been good for women?’ Drawing upon works such as Tom Holland’s Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, he argues that Christianity effected a sexual revolution, holding male sexual behaviour to account and according women a dignity and honour they had not formerly enjoyed. Phenomena such as the #MeToo movement, or women’s occupation of positions of power, are largely a consequence of Christianity’s influence: ‘The fact that today we have a female vice president, female supreme court justices, female business leaders, female doctors, female professors, and so forth—all bringing their unique female perspectives to these vital cultural roles—is downstream from Christianity.’
The term ‘feminism’ has a positive sense for Hiestand, as it does for thinkers like Louise Perry (who terms herself a ‘common sense feminist’), whom he draws upon. Although the term is most typically used to refer to an array of social, political, and intellectual movements over the last two hundred or so years, Hiestand uses the term rather more broadly, characterizing the expanding influence of Christianity upon societies’ treatment of and regard for women as ‘Christian Feminism’. While acknowledging the ambivalence or even suspicion that many Christians might feel towards the term, he believes that, insofar as feminism has championed ‘women’s dignity, respect, opportunities, political rights, protections, and flourishing’ its aims are laudable. ‘Women have made significant progress in all these areas over the past hundred years, and I take it as axiomatic that these gains have been consistent with Christian ideals.’
As Hiestand and many others employ it, ‘feminism’ is something of a hurrah term, connected to other hurrah terms like ‘dignity’, ‘freedom’, ‘rights’, ‘respect’, and ‘flourishing’. While many people have been firmly resistant or decidedly indifferent to women’s flourishing, few people in contemporary respectable discourse would claim to be opponents of a feminism so framed. This does not mean that such a ‘feminism’ is meaningless: it might name projects committed to advocacy for women’s interests (something like Leah Libresco Sargeant’s ‘Other Feminisms’ comes to mind). Yet for an argument like Hiestand’s, I fear that such a use of the term conveniently deflects attention from the tensions that have existed between Christianity and modern feminism and fails to reckon with just how highly contested the ‘good’ of women is.
Hiestand clearly recognizes the claim that Christianity has been good for women is not an uncontroversial one. Christian teachings regarding abortion, contraception, divorce, marriage, creational order, church office, sexual relations, and chastity, among other issues, are all frequently regarded as profoundly oppressive of women, or contrary to their good. In many contexts the Christian church and its teachings have represented the most prominent principled resistance, not merely to the Sexual Revolution, but to the leading forms of feminism throughout its modern history. For instance, while contemporary Christians might want to claim some credit for the victory of their cause, British Suffragettes treated churches as primary targets of their bombing and arson campaign due to the opposition their movement faced from that quarter. Such examples could be multiplied. It seems to me that an honest reckoning with the question Hiestand poses must take Christian anti-feminism much more seriously: why, if Christianity is so good for women, have conservative Christians more typically resisted feminism than pioneered it in the last century?
In analyzing Max Weber’s account of the role played by a Protestant work ethic in the rise of capitalism, Frederic Jameson coined the concept of the ‘vanishing mediator’.[1] A vanishing mediator is a transitional entity—a movement, a belief system, a force, an institution, etc.—that radical reconfigures a past society in a way that creates the conditions for a new, profoundly different, one. The mediator is ‘vanishing’ because, for the transition to the new social order to occur, it must be displaced or disappear. Much contemporary feminism could never have existed apart from the cultural patrimony of Christianity, for reasons such as those Hiestand outlines. In some cases, feminists might even acknowledge this fact, yet still regard Christianity as a mediator that needs to vanish. That so many of the movements most vocally committed to advocacy for women in the present day see Christianity as their leading opposition seems to demand explanation. While a strong case can be made that Christianity was needed to overcome ancient Roman sexual culture, what Hiestand needs to demonstrate is that Christianity has not simply run its course, needing to give way to a post-Christian feminist movement.
The Christian Feminism that Hiestand describes is one aimed at a progressive and liberal audience and it uses vocabulary that will resonate with such readers, terms such as ‘progress’, ‘equality’, ‘freedom’, ‘rights’, and ‘liberation’. His account of Christianization and the improvement of the situation of women has a whig history flavour to it, operating as an account of almost uninterrupted progress (excepting, perhaps, some recent hiccups): ‘1950 was better for women than 1850, which was better than 1750, which was better than 1650 and so forth.’ While it can be worthwhile to tailor one’s rhetoric to one’s audience, such terms are freighted with assumptions that will tend to obfuscate any closer examination of the question that Hiestand poses and dull the critiques of modernity and liberalism—and of much of the feminism that largely arises from them—that Christian voices have long presented.
An account of Christianity’s approach to women tailored for such an audience will likely be a very stunted one, especially if it is primarily designed to vindicate Christianity before the bar of liberal values. Liberalism imposes its measures upon the past and other societies, measures that can judge the lot of women by the degree to which they enjoyed the rights of autonomous individuals, exercised prominent public office, were interchangeable with men in the workplace, and were not subject to restrictions on the basis of their sex.
Writing about the experience of pious Muslim women in Egypt, Saba Mahmood has discussed liberal feminism’s inability adequately to perceive or articulate the agency enjoyed by women within a non-Western and non-liberal patriarchal society. Mahmood describes the way that Western feminists, perceiving agency in terms of liberal autonomy, struggle to perceive real forms of women’s agency in such a patriarchal society outside of conceptual frames such as that of ‘resistance’ and implicitly impose a prescriptive ‘teleology of progressive politics’ upon the societies that they study.[2] It is impossible to understand the agency of women within such societies if we view them in terms of a liberal anthropology of the sovereign individual.
Hiestand’s suggestion that the lot of women improved consistently throughout the centuries of Christian dominance in the West is also a tendentious one and, as with various of his other claims, raises the question of the standards by which such claims might confidently be made. The years from 1650 to 1950, for instance, involved a series of interconnected vast and disjunctive social transformations in the West, including, among many other things, the Scientific Revolution, the rise of capitalism, the Age of Imperialism, the Enlightenment, the Age of Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the market society, electrification, near universal literacy, antibiotics and other transformative developments in healthcare, mass urbanization, railways, automobiles, and planes, the invention of the telegraph and the phone, of the steam printing press, the radio, and the television, two world wars, and innumerable ideological and political developments in large measure catalyzed and precipitated by these upheavals. Each of these, in their own ways, altered the situation of women profoundly, along with the ‘ecologies’ of the complex social orders they inhabited. None of these developments and vast social upheavals were uncomplicated effects of Christianization, but presented Christian societies and their members with complex new social, ideological, and material realities to which they had to respond, resisting and adapting to them in various ways.
The history of feminism is in significant measure a history of responding to the immense social transformations of the past couple of centuries, transformations which almost entirely unraveled preexisting forms of society with their once-settled customs, norms, and patterns of life. The situation of women changed as the situation of humanity changed, with the obliteration of old lifeworlds and the emergence of a modern ecosystem to which they had to adapt. Feminism, in its various iterations, is overwhelmingly a modern and liberal movement. In responding to modernity, feminism has typically largely assumed its terms and the anthropological assumptions that undergird its various iterations can depart sharply from those of Christianity and other belief systems that are less accommodated to liberalism.
In his book Gender, Ivan Illich describes the shift from old subsistence societies characterized by the settled social polarities and interweaving of mutually-dependent men and women to a modern unisex order scoured of gender, yet disadvantaging women relative to men within a market society of sovereign individuals.[3] Illich insists upon the difference in kind between the (not uncommonly oppressive) asymmetries of the old subsistence societies of interdependence between the sexes and modern ‘sexism’, which renders men and women more directly commensurable, makes each individual a rival to the other sex in his or her economic pursuits, and unequally integrates men and women into the modern state, reducing the family and household to marginality. For moderns, ‘power’ tends to be spoken of as a ‘homogeneous force’, genderless, yet inequitably exercised by men and women.[4] However, Illich insists, subsistence societies cannot be evaluated according to the measure of equality in exercising a genderless ‘power’, but rather by how ‘balanced’ the ‘ambiguous complementarity’ in men and women’s interdependent enjoyment and exercise of agency relative to each other and the wider world is.[5] Evaluated in such a manner, what might otherwise seem utterly inequitable according to the anachronous and alien standards of the modern outsider to a social order, might be revealed to be balanced and good. For instance, Illich reminds moderns who instinctively give primacy to the public sphere and privilege more typically male activities and realms that ‘in a life-style centred on the household, the power that counts seems to be the power in the house.’[6]
Related points are made by Christopher Lasch in Women and the Common Life.[7] Lasch argues that Betty Friedan’s seminal work, The Feminine Mystique, ‘originated as a direct response, often a very self-conscious response, not to the age-old oppression of women, but to the suburbanization of the American soul.’[8] He suggests that the positioning of feminism against the grand abstraction of the ‘patriarchy’, an oppressive and ubiquitous order existing from time immemorial, only occurred at a later point. To use Illich’s terminology, instead of focusing upon the sexism of the new economic order, this sexism was read back into the past societies, presenting any polarity or division in male and female labour—or even social asymmetries between men and women—as indicative of deep injustice. Lasch writes:
All societies distinguish between women’s work and men’s work. Such distinctions are often invidious, serving to keep women in a subordinate status. It is only recently, however, that “woman’s place” has been defined in such a way as to exclude her from participation in the common life beyond the household.[9]
Lasch makes the provocative case that the progressive era between 1890 and 1920 constituted the high-water mark of women’s participation in the public world, which typically exceeded that of their husbands, who were more occupied with their private business affairs.[10] Such involvement diminished after women got the vote, as women’s formerly voluntary work was professionalized, politicized, and outsourced, and with the suburbanization of much American society.[11]
Christians must have an active concern for the flourishing of women in contemporary society, a society radically different from former ones. There is no timeless blueprint to be enacted, former idyll that might be repristinated, enduring utopia to be achieved, nor uncomplicated process of emancipation to be continued. Rather, we must prudently, attentively, and critically respond and adapt to the novel and rapidly changing conditions of modern society. This is a task for which both wisdom and a vision for a society in which men and women thrive together formed by Scripture will greatly help and orient us.
I believe that study of the history of such a concern for women’s flourishing will frequently demonstrate the goodness of Christianity, often in contrast to other religious, ideological, or political movements, as Hiestand has argued. However, we need to be clearer about the highly contested character of the ‘good’ of women within modern liberal society and the complexity, ambiguity, and unevenness of the historical developments that have brought us to this point. Taking Christianity’s anti-feminist, non-modern, and non-liberal teaching and history more seriously—without denying other aspects of its history and teaching that have weighed in different directions—will allow for a much more searching conversation and witness on these matters.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast.. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
NOTES
[1] Frederic Jameson, ‘The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structure in Max Weber’ (New German Critique, Winter 1973) 52-89.
[2] Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2012), 9
[3] Ivan Illich, Gender (London, Marion Boyars, 1983)
[4] Gender, 116
[5] Gender, 114-116
[6] Gender, 88-89
[7] Christopher Lasch, Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism (New York, W.W. Norton, 1997)
[8] Women and the Common Life, 94
[9] Women and the Common Life, 94
[10] Women and the Common Life, 96
[11] The anti-suffragist Mary Ward argued that, were women to be given the vote, they would lose the ‘moral high ground of non-partisanship’, which had served them so well in their earlier movements for social reform. Helen Andrews, ‘A Cause Lost—and Forgotten: Lessons from Mary Ward and the Women’s Anti-Suffragist Movement’ (The University Bookman, March 2015).
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