By Rosemary Radford Ruether
This is a fantastic book. It reads as a collection of essays and arguments, in textbook style, thoroughly researched, to convict the world of its need for conversion toward justice and equality. It does not simply glean from modern day American Evangelicalism, but from historical Judaism, Christianity and Catholicism, a variety of peoples and races, various denominations, other religions and histories including a time when God was referred to in feminine terms as Goddess. And this book doesn’t simply speak of shifting the male perspective toward the equality of women, but shifting the entire world’s perspective toward ecological harmony. Ruether writes of challenging the ideologies not only of “sexism but of heterosexism.” In chapter five she writes of marginalized women:
Women are the oppressed of the oppressed. They are the bottom of the present social hierarchy and hence are seen, in a special way, as the last who will be first in the Kingdom of God.”
Toward the end of the book, Ruether looks at American-Indian beliefs and how “the human and the non-human” are all “one family of life.” So this book is not just about gender equality, it is about new ways of doing things in our world. Because large portions of our world have followed a white, masculine agenda for so long, we need to identify some of the traps we’ve fallen into—the less than healthy ways of being—and include diverse voices to create a new world.
In chapter four I learned a lot from Ruether’s explanation of androgyny, and how Gnosticism, has influenced Christian beliefs about gender and sexuality. Ruether explores how the teachings of Aristotle and Aquinas, and also Calvin, Barth and Luther, impacted church and theology. For example, the concept that woman is “misbegotten male” and the questioning of equality before the fall, let alone after the fall. Even historical egalitarian theologies have been known to elevate celibacy at the expense of viewing sexuality as a God-given gift to be expressed and enjoyed.
I appreciated the contrast between liberal feminism, socialist feminism and radical feminism, in chapter nine, and Ruether’s ideas for integration of all three. This chapter highlighted not only the difficulties of competing with men in the workplace, but also the fact that women have time and energy constraints because of the “double work burden” i.e. many women have a second job of looking after their household. In the nineties when this book was written,
Women work[ed] approximately four hours a day more than men in order to provide domestic services.”
My favorite chapter was chapter seven, which is titled “The consciousness of evil: the journeys of conversion.” This chapter delved into the concept of evil, the formation of tribes, and how we consider our tribe to be superior to every other tribe. Quoting from page 162,
The perception of the other as inferior, less capable of the good self, rationalizes exploitation of them… When one conquers the other, the ideology of superiority of the dominant group stifles and suppresses the corresponding sense of self of the other and becomes the dominant ideology for rationalizing the other group’s inferiority.”
Ruether goes on to contrast women being scapegoated as the original sinners to label sexism itself as more akin to “original sin.” The quote from this chapter that I couldn’t get out of my mind is that so many women are “one man away from welfare,” which makes it extremely difficult for women to struggle against sexual and gender oppression. It really needs to be a global shift.
The postscript section of the book was also extremely powerful but I won’t quote it here. Instead, I encourage everyone to read this book!