Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!bbn!usc!aero!rshapiro@bbn.com
From: rshapiro@bbn.com (Richard Shapiro)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: feminist spirituality
Message-ID: <42102@bbn.COM>
Date: 28 Jun 89 17:58:27 GMT
References: <1336@cattell.psych.upenn.edu>
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Reply-To: rshapiro@BBN.COM (Richard Shapiro)
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In article <1336@cattell.psych.upenn.edu> gretchen@cattell.psych.upenn.edu (Gretchen Chapman) writes:
>	I am involved in a Philadelphia-based group known as Sophia's House.
>We are interested in study and ritual centering on the figure of
>Sophia (or Wisdom) who is the most detailed feminine personification
>of the Divine in the Judeo-Christian scriptures.


I'm very disturbed by the notion of "feminine spirituality". I
deliberately do not say "feminist spirituality", because it seems to
me to be very profoundly anti-feminist. Here's why I think so. The
inevitable rationalization used by anti-feminists is that women are
"naturally" better suited to nurturing, family/household matters,
child care etc etc -- that the very *nature* of femininity underlies
the realities that feminists are trying to break out of. The crucial
step of feminism, one of them at least, was to point out that gender
is a purely social construct, that "feminine" and "masculine" are
socially and historically specific; in short that these are not
"natural" notions at all, however much they may seem to be so. The
kind of "eternal feminine" implied by "feminine spirituality" is just
the opposite of this. It's a return to transcendental gender,
supposedly valid for all times and places; and as such it undoes one
of the greatest advances of latter day feminism. It re-naturalizes the
concept "feminine" just as we're finally beginning to escape from the
ideology of "natural", as opposed to historical and social, gender.

Replacing the patriarchal notions of, for instance, Christianity, by
matriarchal ones does not seem to me to be a step in the direction of
feminism.  Just as we have to give up some comforting certainties
about our own sexual/gender indentities (all of us, male and female)
it may be that we have to give up on religions which attempt,
intentionally or not, to reinscribe those certainties and thus undo a
lot of hard, but essential, work. A feminized Christianity or Judaism
is not feminist.