Philosopher Susan Sontag has said that women cannot liberate themselves without fighting for power. She comments,“[Women’s] liberation is not just about equality...It is about power. Women cannot be liberated without reducing the power of men.” Because Ms. Sontag possesses an outstanding intellect and expresses a view common to many opponents and proponents of feminism, it is worth our while to examine what is right and what s wrong about her assessment.
According to the philosophers of the women’s movement, the ultimate goal of women’s liberation is a non-exploitative, non-oppressive, non-coercive society. Stated positively, the goal of women’s liberation is a society based on mutuality rather than machismo. Machismo is the assumption that we prove our worth to others and ourselves by performance and achievement, by out doing others.
Mutuality, on the other hand, by assuming the spiritual worth of each individual and of the community as a whole, stresses cooperation rather than competition. In one-to-one relationships, mutuality assumes that either both persons win (reaching new intimacy as a result of working out their conflicts) or both persons lose (by the loss of intimacy that occurs when one person “wins” an argument). Thus it is true that the goal of women’s liberation is radically political; it entails a radical change in the attitudes and structuring of society.
But when Ms. Sontag says that women cannot be liberated without reducing the power of men, it sounds as if she is falling into the machismo assumptions of our society, in which it is assumed that some people must be the losers in order that other people may triumph. This is the assumption that the Lord Jesus Christ tirelessly tried to correct during the three years he wandered throughout the Galilean countryside combating the false assumptions of the patriarchal society into which he was born.
Repeatedly he taught that the proper use of power is to lift up the fallen, to bind up wounds, to serve, to give power to the powerless. But two thousand years later, this understanding as a means to servanthood seems to be just high-sounding political rhetoric. Few ordinary Americans give credence to it.
If Ms. Sontag is talking about the attainment of equal or superior power within the structures of western capitalism or communist bureaucracies as they are now constituted, then she is falling far short of the ultimate long-range goal of women’s liberation. This is nothing less that the creation of a just society based on mutuality rather than the exploitation of any person or group by any other person or group. It is this feminist drive toward human justice and mutuality that should properly call forth cooperation from the whole Christian community, which follows Christ most closely by identifying with society’s victims--be they victims of racism, economic exploitation, or sexism.
Here, too, mutuality operates: when we realize and preach the gospel’s praise for the world’s poor and power less, who by being excluded have learned their true needs before God, we benefit the world’s rich and powerful by revealing their spiritual poverty.
Currently, our social structure assumes a tremendous gap between power and caring: power over oneself and others is assigned to the public sphere, and caring is assigned to the private sphere. Since in the nuclear family men have traditionally been assigned to the public sphere and women to the private sphere, women have been socialized to believe they should sacrifice themselves to the good of the family, that caring should overcome the desire for autonomy and all need for power outside the home at all.
All too often, the husband goes forth to the public sphere where he fights to make a living in the dehumanizing realm of exploitative power. When he comes home, he expects his wife to put aside any needs of her own in order to give him the caring and the feeling of power he frequently lacks in the public arena. But by failing to respond to his wife’s full range of human needs and aspirations, by regarding her as constituted mainly to meet his own needs for recognition, he unwittingly contributes to the destructive tendencies of society as a whole.
It’s a vicious cycle: the husband is dehumanized by his work, then comes home and treats his wife in a dehumanizing fashion. Children who witness the exploitation of their mothers grow up thinking that exploitation is inevitable and natural. So another generation is produced thinking that some people inevitably must lose so that others may win.
The root problem of society is that it has resolutely ignored the teachings of Christ and the New Testament that mutual sharing and supportiveness is the only social order worth living in. The idea that only the home is for caring, and that women are to stay submissively in the home, has undergirded the de humanizing power-struggles of the larger society. Hence mutuality must begin in the home, but must not be confined to the home.
Because women have been exploited and have cooperated in their own exploitation, they must recognize their political responsibility to work for social change. And like feminists, Christians in general can no longer tolerate dehumanizing dichotomies between the personal and the political. The personal is political. The political is personal. To tolerate exploitation, even of oneself, is a political and corrupting act.
Does the American family provide a solid foundation for the political process in society? As American families are now constituted, the balance of power is determined through physical and economic leverage. American men still hold the economic advantage in most homes; and in most relationships, they also hold the greater physical strength. American women, placed at an economic and physical disadvantage, frequently try to get their way through seductive enticement and sly manipulation--and scores of books, many of them claiming to be Christian, have recently been published encouraging women to do exactly that.
Hence the American home provides training not for a political society which thrives on cooperation, but for dictatorship. As long as family power centers in the will of one person, such will be the case. Whether the dictatorship is benevolent or brutal is not the point. The home where one person’s will retains the ultimate power inevitably points to ward dictatorship rather than democracy.
What women’s liberation is working toward, and what Christian churches should be working toward, is a society in which coercion is renounced at every level--whether it be the subtle coercion of a commercial or of seductive charm, or the more overt coercion of economic or physical strong-arm tactics in homes and businesses, or the militaristic coercion of weaker nations by stronger ones. As long as American society is built on exploitative family relation ships rather than on genuine mutuality, how can we expect state and national governments to be anything other than exploitative?
If true mutuality would begin to pervade all aspects of life--economics, politics, professions, society in general--the sensitivities of the rulers and political leaders and shapers of the future would inevitably be affected. The ultimate goal is not that the males and females of this world may ignore each other’s wishes--rather, the goal is that they may learn to negotiate with each other and serve each other from a position of equal freedom, in an open, honest, cooperative, trusting, mutually respectful fashion.
Unfortunately, instead of rushing to welcome the feminist concern for mutuality, large segments of official Christendom and Judaism continue to use the Bible for repressive purposes. Generally speaking, official, organized religion continues to align itself with political conservatism. Although much has recently been written to demonstrate that the Bible teaches mutuality it must be admitted that organized Christianity has done little to correct such mistaken notions about the Bible’s actual meaning.
Despite the foot-dragging of organized religion, however, a growing number of Christians are joining their efforts toward human liberation under the standard of the Bible. For instance, in The Christian Revolutionary, Dale Brown points out that the Hebrew word for peace, shalom, is often used in the Bible as a synonym for salvation. He explains that the full meaning of shalom is not only peace, but also integrity, community, harmony, wholeness, social righteousness, and justice. Thus the word shalom has strongly political implications.
Although organized religion has tended to privatize the concept of salvation as if it were only a matter of the individual’s deliverance from eternal judgment, only a kind of “fire insurance,” the fact is that according to the Bible, salvation is both a private and a communal matter. I demonstrate my love for God by the way I treat my human brothers and sisters. Those who want to live according to biblical truth have a political responsibility to try to bring about the kingdom of God as much as possible and as soon as possible.
If Jesus could teach us to pray “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” then it is rank hypocrisy for us as individuals and for organized religion in general to continue to support the subjugation of women and hence the whole principle of subjugation. My point here is that by working for a non-coercive, non-exploitative society based on mutuality, women’s liberation aligns itself with the Bible rather than against it. Even if organized religion continues to throw its considerable political weight toward the preservation of the dehumanizing status quo, that is no reason for those who want to be truly biblical to hesitate in their efforts to bring about human justice.
Here and there small communities are springing up that are based on the concept of mutuality and the co-equal subjectivity of male and female. Instead of seeking intimacy in weekend encounter groups and in private leisure activities, these communities represent an effort to live in a truly human environment on a full-time basis. They exemplify the truth of Rosemary Ruether’s observation: “The true intimacy of dignified human beings should be the intimacy that goes on not in an escapist flight from the real world of alienated work and power but in the disciplined struggle of men and women together to criticize these false antitheses, to overthrow the walls between personal values and public culture and to build a new human world.” In these small communities, men share fully in the housework and parenting and women share fully in the economic and political power.
The formation of such communities is a deeply political act. In them, men are gaining contact with their physical roots and women are gaining intellectual and political stature. Such communities are subversive of the status quo. Likewise, every home that is based on mutuality rather than dominance and submission is subversive of the status quo.
Although women currently constitute 53% of the voting population in the United States, women hold only about 5½ % of the public offices in the nation, most of them at the lower levels of power. Low self-esteem, however, has caused many women to internalize their own oppression, and such women are the first to say that women prefer men to be the leaders, women want to be protected, real women prefer to be submissive, and all the familiar litany. On the other hand, in addition to the 53% female vote in this country, there is a small but growing percentage of men who are coming to see that feminist concerns are basic to the concern for human liberation and a just society for all of humanity.
Each time another human being learns that the idea of using another person primarily for one’s own advantage contributes to a militaristic and dehumanized society, and therefore refuses to use or be used, we move a fraction of an inch closer to a society of mutuality rather than machismo. Christ-like servanthood is possible only from a position of inner freedom as fostered by mutuality.
When this article appeared, Virginia Mollenkott was professor of English at William Paterson College in Wayne, New Jersey, and the author of Women, Men, and the Bible as well as a study kit of that book for groups, published by Abingdon Press.
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