Harvard Divinity Bulletin - Gerda Lerner - Religion and the Creation of Feminist Consciousness

Gerda Lerner is the Robinson-Edwards Professor of History, Emerita, at the University of Wisconsin. A native of Austria, she escaped Nazi persecution in 1938 and fled to America, where she went on to become a political activist and noted scholar. In May 2002, Lerner became the first woman to receive the Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Historical Writing from the Society of American Historians. She reflects on her experiences in her most recent book, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography. The remarks printed here were presented in November 2002 at the Religion and the Feminist Movement conference, organized by the Women's Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School.

As we've listened today to one after another woman describe her journey, we have illustrated the tension that has been incorporated for women in religion. That is, that on the one hand, religion has been used as the ideological tool of patriarchy, to legitimize patriarchy and give it the gloss of being inevitable, natural, and God-given. On the other hand, religion has for millennia been the main arena for women's self-expression and self-definition and emancipation. This tension and the stories we've heard are very moving.

In the time allotted to me here, I can do no more than briefly survey the main issues in the long ideological struggle of women to gain equality and authority with men in their relationship with God and within the various religious establishments.

The basic three questions all the religions have had to answer are: "Who created life?," "Who brings evil into the world?," and "To whom do the gods speak?" Up to the second millennium before the Christian era, ancient Near Eastern societies answered these three basic questions of religion without making gender distinctions. Life was created by the great mother goddess. Evil came into the world through quarrels, or through the actions of gods and goddesses. And, men and women stood in the same relation to the mysterious forces represented by gods and goddesses, who were as likely to speak to priestesses as to priests.

In my book, The Creation of Patriarchy, I trace in detail how in many cultures in the ancient Near East the pantheon of gods and goddesses was supplanted by a single god. This transition took the form of changes in the creation myths, upgrading of a male god, usually the storm god or the war god, who becomes the chief god, and then the dethroning of the mother goddess. It also led to a later downgrading of the role of priestesses through their stricter regulations by the state.

These transitions in religious beliefs and practices took place contemporaneously with the rise of archaic states under strong kings. All archaic states in the ancient Near East underwent these developments under similar conditions, but not at the same time. It should be observed that the development toward monotheism or toward a dominant patriarchal god who replaced the great mother goddess, is universal once strong states are formed. These developments were accompanied by a stronger regulation of female sexuality and an increasing exclusion of women from public activity.

In the development of Western civilization, which is all I am dealing with here, it was Jewish monotheism that developed the metaphors of gender and the patriarchal worldview that would prove decisive. This is not to say that Jews invented or originated patriarchy; that system of social organization was already well established in many of the cultures of the ancient Near East at the time of the writing of the Pentateuch.

The Hebrew tribes in Canaan, whose lives are reflected in the Book of Genesis, lived in a priest-state society. Then the Twelve Tribes were united into a strong kingdom under King David in the tenth century. The writing of the Book of Genesis was initiated during his reign and spanned a period roughly from the tenth century to the fifth BCE. Without going into the details of the complex development of Hebrew patriarchal ideology, let me just sum up the end of that development.

By 586 BCE, the time of the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, and the beginning of the Jewish diaspora, Hebrew religion, law, and custom were firmly rooted in patriarchy. According to Hebrew belief, life was created by God and God, while not explicitly gendered and never physically depicted, was a kinglike figure whose male identity was never in doubt. Evil, the sin of disobedience, which resulted in the expulsion from Eden, was blamed on woman and on man.

The elaboration of that event into the Fall, and the charge of original sin leveled against Eve, was a Christian innovation. The Hebrew Genesis text was fairly neutral on the subject. It can even be argued that Adam's punishment was worse than Eve's, for in her the role of woman as mother, as chava, the giver of life, was exalted. Yet by the sixth century BCE, the covenant community, which had started out with some sort of gender equity, had become firmly male. God spoke to men; men spoke to God.

The revolutionary aspect of Jewish monotheism was its absolute faith in the one, invisible, ineffable God. Its rejection of ritual as proof of holiness and its demand instead on adherence to and the practice of ethical values; the great innovation of the synagogue as a place of religious assembly; and the reading of holy books by a sect of priests made Jewish religion mobile, exportable, and communal. These were the features that made Jewish survival possible. They also made challenges to these features during the diaspora infinitely more difficult than they would have been under less extreme survival conditions. Jews living for millennia among hostile strangers clung firmly to traditional beliefs and customs.

Christianity adopted the metaphors of gender in the Jewish biblical text, and then slowly modified them. In the period of consolidation of the Roman Catholic church and its formal institutionalization, the misogynist aspects of Christian theology were stressed, similar to the previous development of monotheistic interpretations among other Near Eastern groups and among Hebrews.

And I would add that if you were to do a history of the commentary on the Bible, both Hebrew and Christian, you would find that it gets ever more misogynist as time goes on. The text to begin with is patriarchal, and then it got interpreted in an even more patriarchal direction. The guilt of Eve for the Fall became elaborated and strengthened way beyond its origin in the biblical text. The depiction of God and the Trinity in church art clearly identified all aspects of God as male.

Gradually, the idea that women by their nature had a greater propensity for sin and sexual temptation than men took hold.

Patristic interpretation of the core texts of the Bible, chiefly by Origen and St. Augustine, gained acceptance—namely, that Adam and Eve's sin was transmitted from parent to child through concupiscence, which is part of the act of generation. Since original sin had already been blamed on Eve, all women were charged with a heavy load of guilt for the Fall and original sin. And gradually, as the medieval church became a stronger and stronger power, pitted against the secular power of emperor and kings, the power and range of activity of cloistered women was being more and more restricted. This is a pattern we can trace in the establishment of many non-Western religions as well: Institutionalization and worldly economic power have throughout history proven to be bad for women.

From the eleventh century forward, the core texts of the Bible were used by parents, priests, and the state to define the proper roles of women in society and to justify their subordination to men. The texts generally cited were Genesis, the Fall, and the dicta of St. Paul. These texts indoctrinated men and women to think that gender roles were God-given and therefore natural. Women were described as intellectually inferior; their gender restricted their role to the service of children and family. And finally, and most devastatingly, God did not speak to women. Women could speak to God only through the mediation of a priest.

The biblical core texts sat like huge boulders across the path women had to travel in order to define themselves as equals of men. But women did not submit quietly. For over a thousand years, individual women in every century found ways to reclaim their humanity and spiritual equality. Many of them found their way to emancipation through the ancient practice of mysticism. Mystics saw God as inherent in all of creation, accessible through love and unconditional devotion. The mystic's way of knowing and perceiving transcended national and religious boundaries. Practicing mystics can be found in all religions, and in most historical periods. The great twelfth-century mystics, Hildegard of Bingen and Elizabeth of Schoenau, were followed by the Beguine mystics, Marie of Oigniens, Hadewijch, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and the remarkable nuns of Helfta, whose mysticism flourished in the thirteenth century.

With the start of the Reformation there was a sharp decline of female saints, but female preachers making prophetic claims based on their visions continued to appear among Catholic and Protestant sectarians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In later centuries the mystic mode of selfassertion would appear in Protestant sectarian movements such as the nineteenth- century Shakers and the Spiritualists.

Female mystics insisted on their ability to speak to God and to be heard by God. Not only did God speak to them, but they also made their contemporaries believe that their ecstatic experience was real. Mystical practice and discipline enabled women to proceed to a more advanced feminist redefinition of religion when in their visions, dreams, and testimonies they asserted the female component of the Divine.

It was more difficult and hazardous for women than for men to make claims to mystical experiences and to sainthood. The faithful were much more likely to accept such claims from males who usually were priests or monks. Mystical claims by uncloistered women, or later, by Protestant women, frequently led to accusations of heresy or witchcraft.

One particularly telling example is the case of Anne Askew, daughter of a courtier of Henry VIII and well educated, who found herself gravely at risk when her uneducated Catholic husband cast her and her two children out, accusing her of heresy because of her membership in the Reformed church. Anne Askew demanded a divorce, which was not granted, and then lived alone and unprotected in London, moving in court circles. Officially accused of heresy, she wrote down the record of her own examinations before a religious court. It is a most unusual record, revealing Askew's courage and sharp wit, and her insistence on her right and ability to interpret scripture. When a bishop cited St. Paul against her, she said: "I answered him that I knew Paul's meaning as well as he, which is 1 Corinthian 14, that a woman ought not to speak in the congregation by way of teaching. And then I asked him how many women he had seen go into the pulpit and preach. He said he never saw none. Then I said, he ought to find no fault in poor women, except they had offended the Law."

Askew confidently assumed her right to interpret St. Paul and to argue fine points of meaning with a bishop.

When Margery Kempe, similarly accused, used a similar defense, namely that she was not preaching in a pulpit but merely teaching, she was vindicated by her accusers. Anne Askew was not that lucky. When the bishop pressed her "to make him an answer to his mind," she refused, saying, "God has given me the gift of knowledge but not of utterance."

The result of her refusals was catastrophic. She was put on the rack with the object of getting her to reveal the names of like-minded members of the nobility. She remained silent under severe torture and did not cry out "'til I was nigh dead." She was then freed from the rack and fainted. When she was revived, she "sat eleven long hours reasoning with my Lord Chancellor upon the bare floor." Such insistence on the right to reason with authority could end only one way. Anne Askew was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1546.

To demonstrate the universality of the mystical experience, it is interesting to compare this account with that of two nineteenth-century African American evangelists and to examine a Jewish mystic.

Julia Foote, the daughter of slaves but herself born free, was raised in New York state and later moved with her husband to New England, where she was denied permission to speak or preach. She persisted, however, and won many adherents to her doctrine of sanctification. Thirty years later she commented on these efforts to deny her authority to preach, as follows: "We are sometimes told that if a woman pretends to a divine call, she will be believed when she shows credentials from heaven, that is, when she works a miracle. If it be necessary to prove one's right to preach the Gospel, I ask of my brethren to show me their credentials, or I cannot believe in the proprietary of their ministry."

Again, following much earlier precedent, Julia Foote then cited the Bible in defense of women's right to preach. She quoted earlier prophets and especially Paul: "When Paul said, ‘Help those women who labor with me in the Gospel,' he certainly meant that they did more than pour out tea."

With this acerbic comment, this self-educated African American nineteenth-century evangelist joins the long line of Christian women who base their authority on teachers and preachers, on their mystical experiences, and on citations from the Bible.

Another example is Rebecca Jackson, who lived from 1785 to 1871 and was raised in Philadelphia where she cared for her siblings while her mother worked. As an African American woman she received no schooling. Her mother died when Rebecca was 13, and there is nothing known of her life until the beginning of her spiritual autobiography in 1830 at the age of 22. At that time, she was married to Samuel Jackson and they both lived with her older brother, Joseph, Rebecca taking care of his four children while working as a seamstress.

Although at first she doubted her visions, after a few miraculous occurrences Jackson more and more trusted her "inner voice," and convinced her family of its authenticity. God spoke to her in dreams and helped her conquer her illiteracy. She considered this a miracle. She convinced her husband that they must live a life of celibacy. This, by the way, is true for almost all female mystics. Before they can establish their credentials to themselves, they give up their sexual lives, and many of them convince their husbands. I don't know how you do that, but they did it.

After several years of severe discipline, Jackson began traveling and preaching. After a few visits to a Shaker community, she and several of her friends joined the sect, and Jackson quickly assumed the leadership role in the mostly white community. Jackson's visions now included female divine figures, and where formerly in her dreams she had been guided by a white male God figure, she now pictured a beautiful black-haired woman as her instructor in a dream. She also had a vision of Holy Mother Wisdom, and expressed her feminist revisionings as follows: "Oh, how I love thee, my mother. I did not know that I had a mother. She was with me, though I knew it not, but now I know her and she said I should do her work in this city, which is to make known the mother of the new creation of God. And none can come to God in the new birth but through Christ the Father and through Christ the Mother… And then I could also see how often I had been led, comforted, and counseled in time of trial by a tender mother and knowed it not."

Jackson primarily saw herself as a missionary to the African American community, and after she and a woman friend left the white Shaker community, they set up a society of African American Shakers in which both woman were Eldresses. The sisters lived together in a well-furnished big house, supporting themselves by day work, sewing, and doing laundry. The society survived 40 years after Jackson's death.

Now, an example of a Jewish woman who followed a mystical path. Hannah Rachel Werbemacher (c. 1815-92) was known as the Maid of Ludomir, after her hometown in Poland. She was taught in the home of her wealthy father and received a thorough religious education. She was betrothed at an early age to a young man she loved. Her mother died before the event took place, after which the young woman became very withdrawn. She experienced visions at the grave of her mother and fell seriously ill.

After her recovery, in a pattern reminiscent of that of many Christian mystics, she declared that she had been given a new soul in heaven. She then wore Tzitzis and Tallit and lay Tephillin, all attributes of religious practice reserved to men, and spent her time studying Torah and praying. Her betrothal was annulled.

After her father's death, Hannah Rachel built a house of study near her home, where every Sabbath she lectured and discoursed with the scholars who came to her house. She did so through the open door of an adjoining room so she might be unseen, as the custom required. She acquired a large following, and a special group of Chassidim formed around her, treating her as their leader.

At age 40 she married a Talmudic scholar, but the marriage was short-lived and ended in divorce. After her marriage, her influence waned and she immigrated to Palestine, where she again acquired a following as a spiritual leader. The similarity of her life story to that of some of the female Christian mystics is unmistakable and worth noticing.

These examples notwithstanding, the route of mysticism was not open to most women. In my book, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, I document over 700 years of feminist Bible criticism and of the redefinition of biblical texts. Women took up Bible criticism mostly because the Bible was the one text available to them. Their active critique and reinterpretation was a feminist act. Such an act assumes that the person engaging in reinterpretation considers herself fully authorized and capable of challenging expert theological authority.

It is amazing to see how woman after woman engaged in such criticism without reference to theological authorities and without apology. The same women who endlessly apologized for their audacity in writing or teaching, confidently corrected church fathers, popes, priests, and preachers. Usually they authored their own version of God's intent, not as the mystics did, on the basis of their revelation, but simply because they reasoned as they did and believed they had every right so to reason.

Long before organized groups of women challenged male authority the feminist Bible critics did just that. Without making any special claims for their right to preach or teach, women simply did both, appropriating the Bible and using it for their own purposes. I find it incredibly moving, but also totally painful, to hear women today tell of their own discovery of that same path, profoundly ignorant of the women's history before them that could have saved them years of pain and suffering.

The long trail of evidence of this process to be found in the work of most European women writers over many centuries is only the tip of the iceberg. For every woman who wrote in this manner, there must have been many, anonymous and unknown, who thought that way and taught their children that way.

Possibly the earliest known example of a woman's Bible commentary concerns one Helie in the second century CE, who wanted to remain "a consecrated virgin," and who argued with her mother and the judge to whom her parents had brought her. When the judge cited St. Paul, "It is better to marry than to burn," against her, Helie replied: "It is true that scripture says it is better to marry than burn, but not for everyone, that is not for holy virgins."

She pointed out that men are not bound by laws promulgated for women, and with that argument she won the right to stay a virgin and take Christ as her husband.

Let us now look at a few other examples of female Bible criticism. An early commentary comes from the pen of Christine de Pisan (1365-c.1430) the author of the first feminist book, City of the Ladies. Christine's Bible commentary is phrased with her usual assertive confidence: "There Adam slept, and God formed the body of woman from one of his ribs, signifying that she should stand at his side as a companion and never lie at his feet like a slave, and also that he should love her as his own flesh… I don't know if you have already noted this: she was created in the image of God. How can any mouth dare to slander the vessel which bears such noble imprint? … God created the soul and placed wholly similar souls, equally good and noble, in the feminine and masculine bodies. … [W]oman was made by the Supreme Craftsman. In what place was she created? In the Terrestrial Paradise. From what substance? Was it vile matter? No, it was the noblest substance which had ever been created, it was from the body of man from which God made woman."

This particular interpretation is echoed over and over again, that Adam was made from dirt, and Eve was made from flesh consecrated by God.

One of the learned women of the Renaissance is Isotta Nogarola (1418-1466) who engaged in an argument over biblical interpretation. It took the form of a dialogue in letters with a distinguished male humanist, the Venetian Ludovico Foscarini, over Adam or Eve's responsibility for the Fall. Ludovico argued that Eve was more guilty than Adam because she received the harsher punishment, caused Adam's sin, and acted out of pride. Isotta accepted Eve's greater weakness as a fact, and wrote as follows: "Where there is less intellect and less constancy, there is less sin, and Eve [lacked sense and constancy] and therefore sinned less. [Knowing her weakness], that crafty serpent began by tempting the woman, thinking the man, perhaps, invulnerable because of his constancy… Adam must also be judged more guilty than Eve because of his greater contempt for the command. For in Genesis 2 it appears that the Lord commanded Adam, not Eve."

These are very clever arguments. Then, at the end, it says that Adam was punished more seriously: "For God said to Adam, ‘to dust you shall return,' and not to Eve and death is the most terrible punishment that could be assigned."

Feminist Bible criticism increased and spread in the sixteenth- and seventeenth- century pamphlet debate concerning the nature and role of women. But by the end of the seventeenth century, women's authorization to prophesy received in the work of Mary Astell (1666-1731) a much more logical and rational explanation than had been given by her predecessors. Astell questioned the very authority of the patriarchal interpreters of scripture: "Scripture is not always on their Side who make Parade of it, and through their Skill in Languages, and the Tricks of the Schools, wrest its genuine Sense to their own Inventions… Because Women, without their own Fault, are kept in Ignorance of the Original, wanting Languages and other Helps to Criticizes on the Sacred Text, of which, they know no more, than Men are pleased to impart in their Translations."

She says women are deprived of the knowledge to interpret. This argument, which is here to my knowledge raised for the first time, would be used by latterday feminists such as Judith Sargent Murray, an American, in 1790. In the nineteenth century it reappeared in the writings of Sarah Grimké, the author of the first feminist book written by an American woman, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1836). Grimké considered the biblical texts sacred, but tainted by human frailty and error. She wrote: "My mind is entirely delivered from the superstitious reverence which is attached to the English version of the Bible. King James' translators certainly were not inspired. I therefore claim the original as my standard, believing that to have been inspired and I also claim to judge for myself what is the meaning of the inspired writers."

Sarah Grimké attacked discrimination against women in education, law, economic opportunities, and within the family. Her exposure of the sexual exploitation of women in marriage was particularly advanced for her time. She argued for women's equal access to the ministry and outlined in detail all the biblical passages authorizing women as teachers and prophets.

Grimké's analysis of St. Paul was historical and critical, and she pointed out every contradiction in the biblical account. She asked, if women were not allowed to preach or teach, why then were so many young women now employed as Sunday school teachers, ostensibly breaking the Pauline injunction, and yet, "warned not to overstep the bounds set for us by our brethren in another? Simply… because in the one case, we subserve their views and their interests, and act in subordination to them; whilst in the other, we come in contact with their interests and claim to be on an equality with them in… the ministry of the word."

In an earlier passage, she had summarized the most advanced part of her analysis, which would be reinvented many times over by future generations of feminists: "I mention [this]… only to prove that intellect is not sexed; that strength of mind is not sexed; and that our views about the duties of men and the duties of women, the sphere of men and the sphere of woman, are mere arbitrary opinions, differing in different ages and countries, and dependent solely on the will and judgment of erring mortals."

Here Sarah Grimké, reasoning by way of a close reading of the scriptural texts, and relying only on her own judgment and interpretations, defined the difference between sex and gender, and stated in terms which would not be so clearly stated again until late in the twentieth century: Gender is a culturally variable, arbitrary definition of behavior deemed appropriate to each of the sexes.

Feminist Bible criticism had reached a point where it led directly to a feminist worldview. It remained for feminist criticism to step entirely outside of the Christian worldview and to become skeptical, rational, even agnostic. This occurred in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In their Woman's Bible, they no longer accepted the sacred origin of the Bible or the authority of the churches. They saw religion itself as the oppressor of women. The book is a glossary on various biblical texts pertaining to women, written in an irreverent, common- sensical tone, inviting a skeptical reading of the text.

Sarah Grimké, in the opening paragraph of her pioneering work, published in 1838, had written: "In attempting to… give my views on the Province of Woman, I feel that I am venturing on nearly untrodden ground."

Untrodden ground? After more than a thousand years of feminist Bible criticism? Stanton and Gage expressed the same idea in introducing their work over 50 years later. In view of their monumental task of collecting the work of suffragists from every available source, the absence of any reference to the prior work of women in Bible criticism is particularly telling.

Stanton and her collaborators repeatedly stressed the uniqueness of their enterprise. This follows the familiar pattern of the invisibility of prior women's work to the women's successors. Over and over again, individual women criticized, then reinterpreted, the core biblical text, not knowing that other women before them had already done so. In fact, present-day feminist Bible criticism is going over the same territory, and using the very same, erroneous claim to originality.

Just as Stanton and Gage undertook the monumental task of writing The Woman's Bible in total ignorance of the similar work done by generations of predecessors, so do some current feminist critics consider them their earliest antecedents, and I have read that repeatedly, when in fact the tradition of feminist Bible criticism goes back to the second century CE.

This is no trivial point. I believe it marks the very essence of the different relationship of men and women to historical process. Isaac Newton, in a famous aphorism, said, "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," and he expressed the mold by which the thought of men was shaped in Western civilization.

Men created written history and benefited from the transmittal of knowledge of one generation to the other, so that each great thinker could "stand on the shoulders of giants," thereby advancing thought over that of previous generations with maximum efficiency. Women were denied knowledge of their history, thus each woman had to argue as though no woman before her had ever thought or written.

Women had to use their energy to reinvent the wheel over and over again, generation after generation.

Men argued with the "giants" that had preceded them; women argued against the oppressive weight of millennia of patriarchal thought, which denied them authority, even humanity. Since they could not ground their argument in the work of women before them, thinking women of each generation had to waste their time, energy, and talent on constructing their argument anew.

Yet they never abandoned their effort. Generation after generation, claiming religion as their own terrain, women thought their way around and out from under patriarchal thought. We owe them recognition of their effort, understanding of the constraints under which they labored, and a willingness to build upon and honor their thought.