Toward One Freedom

The year was 1852, the place Akron, Ohio. The tension was thick at this women's rights convention, where clergy-led opposition denounced the equality of women by pointing to the sin of Eve and the masculinity of Jesus.

A tall, gaunt figure rose from a quiet corner and strode toward the platform. The audience recognized Sojourner Truth in the old face shaded by an awkward sunbonnet. A chorus of women's voices protested the presence of this former slave, fearing that the credibility of their cause would be undermined if onlookers thought women's rights were connected to the abolition of slavery. They shouted and hissed to prohibit her from speaking. But men were maligning her God, and Sojourner could not be kept silent. With poise, she thundered in her deep voice:

"...That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere...Nobody ever helped me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gave me any best place! And aren't I a woman?...

I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns and no man could ever head me--and aren't I a woman?

I have borne five children and seen them all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard--and aren't I a woman?...

Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with him!

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down, all alone--these together ought to be able to turn it back and get it rightside up again; and now that they're asking to do it, the men better let them."

It is ironic that, while Scripture was often quoted to support the inferiority of women, the impetus for the early women's rights movement came largely from evangelical Christians. Today we find a similar dichotomy: Scripture is quoted to support differing sides of the women's issue.

Ours is an age of high divorce rates and increasing domestic violence. New concern for the family and traditional values is surfacing. Politically conservative Christians are among the strongest voices embracing a "pro-family" stance, which has as its cornerstone traditional roles for women. We are offered on an evangelical platter such phenomena as Bill Gothard's hierarchy of male-female relationships and Marabel Morgan's Total Woman. In the interest of protecting the family, these offerings maintain that fulfillment for women lies in being homemakers and pleasure-givers for their husbands.

The major target of such thought today is the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Rev. Jerry Falwell calls ERA "a unisexual device to eliminate the God-given differences" between men and women. American Christian Cause, which with other groups is organizing to stop ERA ratification, is circulating postcards addressed to President Carter, linking ERA to "unisex restrooms... and other immoral implications."

At a recent observance of the Salvation Army's centennial, actress-singer Dale Evans Rogers called all women to reject feminism, which will "tear down all the moral standards we have known." She said women must be "modern-day Deborahs," with strong faith in God. At the conclusion of her speech, a life-size statue of William Booth, credited as the founder of the Salvation Army, was unveiled. One wonders how Deborah, an Old Testament prophetess and judge, and Catherine Booth, who shared the founding of the Salvation Army and was known by many to be a better speaker for the cause than her husband, would have reacted to Mrs. Rogers' speech.

The interpretations of Scripture upon which this position rests ignore Jesus' complete acceptance of women in a day when such acceptance was unheard of. Instead, its advocates point to Paul. Statements that he directed to specific churches at specific times about the role of women are made into broad theological principles. The clear leadership of women in the early church and Paul's support of them is overlooked. His word about the submission of women to their husbands is wrenched from its context of mutuality. It is interesting that those who would quote these passages from the epistles to justify male domination of women would not quote adjacent passages to condone slavery. To do either one is to distort the message of liberation that is the heart of the Scriptures.

In the face of such distortions, we must recapture the radical nature of our evangelical heritage on the issue of feminism and place ourselves in the forefront of change. To do so means to unshackle ourselves from the weight of centuries of patriarchy in the church.

The Old Testament records a time when wives were property, sons were preferred over daughters, women were considered periodically unclean, and polygamy and concubinage were condoned. Conditions had improved by New Testament times, but women were still considered inferior and were deprived of many rights. Today we find even greater improvement; and yet there are those who would still saddle us with narrow images of Eve as temptress and Mary as puritanical paradox of virginity and motherhood.

While women participate on many levels of the church's life, ordination is often seen as the central gauge of the progress of women in the church. A recent report by the National Council of Churches shows that women comprise 20 per cent of all seminarians; upon graduation they are generally placed in small, often rural parishes and receive an average salary which is $4,755 less than that of their male counterparts. And several denominations still refuse to ordain them.

I began my own quest for ordination four years ago and gave it up a year later. The denomination in which I was raised was all too eager to be the pioneer in swelling its ranks with women ministers, placing more value on my gender than on my faith and thoughts. I finally left it when I was told that if I ever wanted to be transferred to another area--a prospect that was likely since I grew up in a largely rural church conference and was interested in urban ministry--I could wait 10 years for a "special appointment" (men wait five) or marry a man in the area to which I wished to move.

The second denomination with which I had ties was uncertain as to whether it wanted to ordain women at all. But its ambivalence was less distasteful to me than the patronizing response I had encountered from the first. However, I finally became impatient and had to choose between fighting structures and doing ministry in an unordained way. For me, the fight ended there. But it goes on for others in many places.

We can be thankful that the groundwork for feminism was laid in the mid-19th century by Sojourner Truth and many like her, who spoke and wrote about women's rights, particularly suffrage. Feminism then lay dormant for awhile, erupting again a century later, this time largely in the secular sector. In both cases, a handful of women held the vision and were willing to make the sacrifices and bear the pain and ridicule that their beliefs brought upon them.

I was 9 years old when Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique appeared in the early 1960s, shattering myths and opening up new possibilities for women. It was written mostly about my mother and her generation. But for them, marriages and patterns were already set, children present and in the making. Only a minority of women were able to pay the price to make changes.

Mine is the "transition generation." We are the benefactors of the stir that was brewing even before we reached junior high. We do not suffer as many open wounds as women of our mothers' generation, but we inherit the scars. Like any in a period of social upheaval, we feel both the pain and hope of new awareness about ourselves. We trust that our struggles will insure new social, vocational, and intellectual freedom for our sons and daughters.

I confess that I have been a reluctant feminist. I remember reading in seminary with great relish all the information I could find on black and Latin American theologies of liberation--the "important" theologies of really oppressed people. I largely ignored feminist theology, although it was my professor's major focus.

It was too easy to accept the oppression of other people and not recognize my own. Perhaps there is something too painful in accepting our own weakness, something haughty in our desire to rescue others from theirs. Getting in touch with the oppression of women, however unimportant or removed it might once have seemed to us, is crucial to our understanding of ourselves.

We must understand our struggle on a personal level, facing the psychological and emotional dimensions of our upbringing. We must support each other in wrestling with our ambivalence about ourselves, our anger at our socialization, our desires to return to the stability of former roles, our mistakes when we step forward on shaky, new ground.

The myths that place men in "rational" boxes and women in "intuitive" ones must be challenged. We cannot deny the effect of our socialization, but we must acknowledge it simply for what it is--and not some God-ordained difference. Then we can work to develop skills we lack.

The personal freedom we find will make its way into our family structures. Children are precious gifts, and teaching and nurturing them are among the most important functions we can perform. Men should be free to share equally in the joy of our children's growth, while we allow women to pursue other vocations if they choose to. We will need flexibility and patience.

It is too easy to blame the disintegration of the family and moral values on the changing role of women while ignoring mobility, technology, materialism, alienation from authority structures, and other factors that have set the tone of the times. If we cannot forge an alternative vision that will lend stability to the family as well as offer wholeness for all of its members, we can only expect the society to heed our conservative brothers and sisters and further entrench itself in old patterns. We need to cling to the stability of God's faithfulness and liberation, not to our secure, former roles.

Grounding our identity in God will also lead some of us to choose singleness. This choice, traditionally for a man a sign of independence and for a woman inability to snare a husband, needs to be freed of stereotypes.

Our new self-awareness will compel us to work on the political level, building on progress already gained. New understandings and creativity are being infused into the society as women assume responsibility in areas which we have previously avoided or been kept out of. Moving toward vocations and family life unbound by role limitations will provide freedom for men as well as women. As we change our views of ourselves and our families, we will be restructuring institutions and living patterns. Part-time vocations, flexible work hours, and shared parenting must be considered with new openness. Communities of support will be valuable in these times.

There is much that we can benefit from in the secular feminist movement. Our Christian faith, however, will temper many feminist expressions of power. We cannot view the world as if it holds a limited amount of power, of which we are entitled a portion. This view will only create competition among oppressed groups.

For us, power means taking control of our own lives so that we can give them away. We must continue to look to Jesus as our example. Jesus' power was immersed in servanthood; his life was one of submission.

To women who have been raised to "be submitted" and have found that oppressive, who have felt that they were destined to be slaves to husband, house, and children, these words raise immediate resistance. We must first of all know Jesus as our liberator, who frees and empowers us to serve. The freedom he gives is the difference between servanthood and slavery.

We also know Jesus to be one who is identified with the suffering of all people. It is significant that most of the leaders of the early women's rights movement were strong abolitionists. These women understood their own oppression to be part of a greater fabric of injustice.

Sojourner Truth deeply knew the oppression of both her race and her sex. The lives of women and men for whom mere survival is a daily struggle and poverty a tormenting bondage must add perspective to our own search for fulfillment and wholeness.

Jesus Christ came as liberator of all, so let us walk together toward one freedom. Perhaps our greatest compliment will be for onlookers to accuse us, as they did Sojourner Truth, of mixing our concerns. Such a mixture will not dilute the strength of our commitments, but only make more potent our common struggle for liberation.

Joyce Hollyday was a member of the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.