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Feminism

Oct 31 2020
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Church History: What Do We Learn about Women in Public Ministry?

By Gender & Faith, Women No Comments

“It was the feminist teachings of the past few decades that first spurred Christians to try to argue for [women in public ministry]. Like it or not, the two schools of thought are intertwined.” – Christian blogger

“The role of women in church ministry was simply not a burning question until it asserted itself in recent decades in conjunction with the modern women’s movement” – Men and Women in Ministry: A Complementary Perspective,p. 20

When I took some doctoral courses in history, I read numerous primary documents which revealed that the question about women in public ministry in the church has been burning since long before the U.S. Women’s Movement. So, I set out to determine when it actually started.  

I thought maybe it began with the American and French Revolutions with the cry for individual rights. But then I read documents like the pamphlet that Margaret Fell Fox …

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Jul 10 2017
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On Feminism and Evangelicalism

By Gender & Faith, Justice, Life In The Body, Women No Comments

As part of my PhD research, I read Betty Friedan, heard Gloria Steinem in person, and spent a bunch of semesters exploring the history and teachings of feminism. And after I did so, I reached the conclusion that evangelicals in general need to pull back and regroup both in our representations of feminists and in our approach to reaching them.

Just as there is not one “Christianity” but many Christianities (e.g., Orthodox, Catholic, Anglo-Catholic, Protestant, Lutheran, Armenian, Calvinist), there are many feminisms (liberal, radical, Marxist, socialist, lesbian, biblical, difference feminists [we are women—viva le difference! from men] and sameness feminists [we’re the same except for biology]), and more.

Liberal feminists came out of the Equal Rights Movement. Betty Friedan was one of them. They are interested in equality, not to be confused with sameness. That is, they want the law to quit “seeing gender,” i.e., being biased against …

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Oct 19 2015
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Lean In ≠ Keep Others Down

By Gender & Faith, Women No Comments

Recently the NY Times ran an article titled “A Feminism Where Leaning In Means Leaning on Others.” The author, Gary Gutting, interviewed a feminist who was critical of Sheryl Sandberg and her approach to business in her book Lean In (reviewed on this site). The interviewee was Nancy Fraser, professor of philosophy and politics at The New School. She is the author of Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. Fraser said, “For me, feminism is not simply a matter of getting a smattering of individual women into positions of power and privilege within existing social hierarchies. It is rather about overcoming those hierarchies. This requires challenging the structural sources of gender domination in capitalist society—above all, the institutionalized separation of two supposedly distinct kinds of activity.”

First of all, this interchange provides a good example of how liberal feminists and radical feminists differ …

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