Once I perceived the truth of this, I began to see how subtly (and not so subtly) hierarchies were ingrained in church, family, marriage, workplaces, politics, and all kinds of systems of thought.
With men at the top (or at least with a sense of entitlement about being at top) and women below (or at least with a sense of belonging below), a way of relating was put into place based on dominance and dependence. The role of the one above was to dominate and oversee the ones below. The role of the one below was to answer to and depend on the one above. In addition, the one above learned how to protect his prestigious place at the top. He learned to stay up by keeping her down, that is, by insisting she be content with things as they are.
Theologian Anne E. Carr relates that this hierarchy issues forth in a whole series of “unequal power relations; God as father rules over the world, holy fathers rule over the church, clergy fathers over laity, males over females, husbands over wives and children, men over the created world.”43 The pattern even extends to our relationship to nature and how countries seek dominance over each other.
I was intrigued with an exercise Anne Wilson Schaef performed with mixed-gender groups.44 She asked them to list on one half of a sheet of paper the characteristics of God and on the other half the characteristics of humans. Invariably the list for God was: omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), omnipresent, and eternal. The list for humans typically read: childlike, sinful, weak, stupid, and mortal.
At this point the exercise got more interesting. On a different sheet of paper she asked the group to list characteristics of males on one half and females on the other. The consensus list for male was: intelligent, powerful, brave, good, strong. The list for female fell into this general pattern: emotional, weak, fearful, sinful, dependent.
When Wilson Schaef asked the group to set all four lists side by side, they were surprised but had to conclude that according to their perceptions, male is to female as God is to humans.
The Great Imbalance
One of the more destructive consequences this hierarchy sets in motion is a pattern of imbalanced valuing, in which the masculine is valued over the feminine.
That autumn as I looked at the world with new eyes, asked new questions, and thought new thoughts, I was also reading new books. While reading feminist culture critic Elizabeth Dodson Gray’s work, I was struck by her definition of patriarchy as “a culture that is slanted so that men are valued a lot and women are valued less; or in which men’s prestige is up and women’s prestige is down.”45 She followed her definition with a story about Margaret Mead. When Mead journeyed from tribe to tribe on her anthropological studies, she stumbled upon a discovery: It did not matter what work was done in a particular tribe but rather who did it. If weaving was done in one tribe by men, it was considered a high-prestige occupation. Twenty miles away, if weaving was done in a different tribe by women, it had low prestige.
The anecdote reminded me of a story a woman told about the time she tried to introduce a novel idea to a church committee where she was the only female member. She insisted the idea would save the church money. “It’s unreasonable,” she was told. “You just don’t understand the way the real world works.”
After she rotated off the committee, a new male member came on and presented the identical idea. It was resoundingly adopted. One wonders if perhaps it was not what was said but who said it.
HEAD OVER HEART I also began to notice that the imbalance of valuing was not confined to actual men and women. People also placed a greater value on men’s experience or things associated with the masculine than on women’s experience or things associated with the feminine.
A large amount of women’s experience has been concentrated in nurturing roles, in matters of relationship. As we evolved these skills, we even came to carry or reflect relational, nurturing values for the culture at large. Likewise, men’s traditional focus of experience in the public arena has conditioned them toward the values prized in that sphere—autonomy, reason, individuality, and competitiveness.
That women are connected with matters of “heart” and men with matters of “head” are distinctions entrenched in our culture, psyches, myths, and symbols. In fact, psychologists Jean Baker Miller, Carol Gilligan, and others have documented that certain differences do exist in the way men and women relate, know, and make moral choices. Gilligan found, for instance, that girls tend to relate from a web model, preferring interconnections and the centrality of relationships. Boys tend to relate from a hierarchal model that prefers autonomy, individualism, and competition.46
Some of these differences may be due to biology,47 but much of it has come through historical conditioning. My personal belief is that while differences exist, women and men both have an innate and equal ability to engage in the full range of human experiences. (Men can nurture and women can quest for autonomy.) Neither men nor women should be limited to a narrow category of what’s considered feminine if you’re female or masculine if you’re male. I also believe that men and women contain both “masculine” and “feminine” qualities and that the goal is to balance, blend, and honor both within the individual and the culture.
The point, however, is that women have been socialized toward certain choices and experiences, and these experiences need to be valued in a way that is not inferior to men’s experiences. Indeed, as I made my critique, the problem seemed to me not that there are differences but rather how we value these differences.
It seemed clear that patriarchy has valued rationality, independence, competitiveness, efficiency, stoicism, mechanical forms, and militarism—things traditionally associated with the “masculine.” Less valued are beingness, feeling, art, listening, intuition, nurturing, and attachment—things traditionally associated with the “feminine.”
As a patriarchal institution, Christianity has tended to value “masculine” attributes more than those connected with the “feminine.” Author Margaret Starbird put it succinctly: “Institutional Christianity, which has nurtured Western civilization for nearly two thousand years, may have been built over a gigantic flaw in doctrine—a theological ‘San Andreas Fault’: the denial of the feminine.”48
Often competitiveness, logic, objectivity, and matters of the head have found preeminence over concerns with inclusiveness, relatedness, or matters of the heart. I recognized the imbalance in the way dogma, theological rightness, triumph of the “Christian way,” oratorical sermons, church business, nationalism, individual pursuit, conversion figures, and breaking scripture down into its various hermeneutics have frequently been valued over feelings, tears, peace, gentleness, group consciousness, and gathering humanity together as a family.
I tried to picture a culture where the valuing was equal. In my wilder moments I imagined a society that paid child care workers, teachers, homeless advocates, poets, and bird-watchers as much as it paid professional football players, generals, and corporate CEOs. I tried to imagine a church where it mattered less what your beliefs and practices were and more how relationships were nurtured and healed. I tried to imagine a church that did not support its country’s wars as a matter of patriotic course and instead stood against the devastation and suffering they caused in people’s lives.
One day I spotted an elderly, white-haired woman wearing a T-shirt that read, “What if the military had to have bake sales to raise money and the PTA got the Pentagon budget?” I walked over and told her how wonderful it was, her wearing a shirt like that. She laughed and said, “Some people have called me subversive for wearing it. But I don’t care. One day we may owe our survival to subversive women.”
I decided maybe it was a good thing to be subversive when it comes to the heart.
One night as Ann and I watched a video of The Wizard of Oz, I realized that the Tin Man character, at least in the early part of the movie, seemed an apt symbol of patriarchal consciousness. He is a frozen figure, standing with his ax, his blade of power, in the air.
The story tells us he??
?s lost his heart. He’s lost the “juices” of life. Even his tears are frozen on his face. His ability to feel and relate at a deep empathetic level is gone.
Have you ever wondered how the Tin Man got into such a deplorable, frozen state? The book says the Tin Man was a woodsman whose ax became cursed, causing him to cut away his own body, piece by piece, including his heart, until he was no longer covered in warm flesh but encased in an armor of tin.
Through our lopsided valuing, we have come to labor under a “cursed ax,” under a patriarchal system that has cut away the body, including the heart, replacing it with technological tin. And like the Tin Man we find ourselves trapped in our own heartlessness.
SPIRIT OVER NATURE I also began to recognize another imbalance in the values that women and men carry for society. For thousands of years the “feminine” has been deeply associated with the body, flesh, sensuality, earth, and nature, while the “masculine” has been associated with spirit, heaven, and transcendence over nature. Actually men are no more connected to spirit than women, and women no more connected to nature than men. The perception may have arisen from women’s closeness to fertility, procreation, and the rhythms of nature. Women are tied to these cycles in a way men are not. Women go through the monthly cycle of menstruation, just as the moon goes through a monthly cycle of waxing and waning. Through pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing we grow life inside our bodies, deliver life through our bodies, and feed life from our bodies. It has also been left to women to care for other bodies, tending the young, sick, and dying.
For these reasons, perhaps, women have represented flesh and embodied the earthly, and in doing so we’ve come to be identified with nature. Conversely, nature is thought of as feminine. We speak of Mother Earth and virgin forests. The connection is even entwined in the roots of our language. The word mother comes from the Latin word mater, which means matter. Mother and matter are both the stuff out of which everything is composed.
As I contemplated this profound connection, once again it became apparent to me which of the two polarities—nature/earth or spirit/heaven—was more valued. Both women and earth have been abused, raped, and disregarded.
The man’s comment about my daughter in the drugstore—“That’s how I like to see a woman, on her knees”—is not fundamentally different from a comment I’ve heard attributed to Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of the age of reason. Purportedly he said that the earth was a harlot and must be controlled. In other words, “That’s how I like to see Mother Earth, on her knees.”
In its flight from and fear of the “feminine,” the church has failed to waken to its “ecological self”—a term author Joanna Macy uses to describe one who has conquered the personal ego and knows that she or he is not separate from anything else.
An awakened ecological self is someone like John Seed, director of the Rainforest Information Center, who says, “I try to remember that it’s not me, John Seed, trying to protect the rainforest. Rather I am part of the rainforest protecting myself.”49
This awakened self has been largely absent from the Christian tradition. In Christianity there is a deeply embedded separation between spirit and nature, a split apparent in this verse from Galatians 5:17: “The desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other . . .” (RSV).
Patriarchy has viewed the earth as a fallen creation and matter as inherently evil, and Christians have used and misused scriptures to drive the wedge deeper into the human psyche. “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If any one loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world . . . is not of the Father but is of the world” (1 John 2:15, RSV).
Consequently, in Christianity nature is not a primary revelation of the divine. Rivers, trees, and stones are not perceived as alive and permeated with spirit but rather as dead matter. The earth, then, becomes something to be conquered, subdued, observed, and studied. It becomes a big science project.
Because of all this, we began to think of ourselves as separate from and innately superior to the rest of the planet. We lost the ability to identify with it at deep empathetic levels.
In Christianity this is even further undermined by a sacred intent to transcend the material earth and the flesh of our bodies, as is suggested in a verse from James 1:27: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: . . . to keep oneself unstained from the world” (RSV).
Often the earth seems to function like a mere way station where we can grapple with our redemption before going “up there” to the realm of the Father, who is viewed as totally other than the earth and high above it.
Christianity’s unfortunate denial of matter (mother) also includes centuries of denial and hatred for the body with its cravings, instincts, and sexuality. In my early twenties, while at college in Texas, I went to church one Sunday and sat in the back row beside a woman who was holding a newborn baby in a pink bonnet. Halfway through the sermon, the baby got hungry. Babies do that. So the woman discreetly unbuttoned her dress and nursed the child beneath the bill of the pink bonnet. An usher noticed this, came over, and asked the woman to please leave. He was the picture of quiet indignance. He told her she could find a restroom down the hall. I can still remember the shame that spread over her face and the outraged scream the baby girl let out when the mother pulled her breast away.
Women with their incessant menstruation, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation have been too visceral for patriarchal religion. In the Bible, women involved in these womanly conditions were considered unclean and were separated from men. They had to go through purifications before being allowed near men or things religious. And since birth and menses were considered dirty, women were in constant need of being spiritualized and sanitized.
According to the attitude that sprang up, women could not be both holy and sexual. And as celibacy became a spiritual ideal in Christianity, men were more and more cast as spiritual and women as sexual. Woman’s role was seen as the temptress, the femme fatale, who lured “good” men into the evils of flesh.
Theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether sums it up when she says that Christianity became “a body-fleeing, world-negating spirituality” that “projects upon the female all its abhorrence, hostility and fear of the bodily powers from which it has arisen and from which it wishes to be independent.”50
Despair and Compassion
One day I was driving through town, my head full of the ideas and awareness I’d been gathering, when I saw a woman sitting on the steps of a business, her head in her hands. She wore a navy dress and brown coat, and she was crying. As I drove past her I, too, started to cry.
At first it made no sense that I was crying. I didn’t know this woman. Then I realized I was not crying for her or for myself. I was crying for women. I was crying for the vast imbalance, the heart that had been lost, the rejection of the earth and body, the oppression and diminishment of things considered feminine. It was a suffering with, a despair I felt on behalf of something much larger than myself.
I don’t know what it was about the woman that triggered my despair, but for weeks after that I went through a period of grief. This is the grief that comes when you leave the city limits of your own wound and step into the vastness of the whole feminine wound, which is ultimately a human wound.
Forming an honest feminist critique of our own faith tradition is not an easy thing to do. Betrayal of any kind is hard, but betrayal by one’s religion is excruciating. It makes you want to rage and weep. It deposits a powerful energy inside.
Eventually that energy will flow out as either hostility or love. The energy must and will find a form, a shape, in our lives. It is now, as we wade into the secret distress of the feminine and encounter the largeness of the wound, that we need to be very conscious and keep the despair we might feel from becoming channeled into bitterness. We have to work very hard to keep it flowing toward compassion.
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The Tamper-Proof Bottle
During those months when I was forming my feminist critique, I watched a friend struggle to open a tamper-proof bottle of medication. She gripped, pushed down, squeezed, and turned it many times without results. “You try,” she said.
So I gripped, pushed, squeezed, turned, grunted. But I couldn’t budge it either. “What’s wrong with this thing?” I said.
“It’s doing its job,” she replied. “Only it’s doing it a little too well.”
Later I couldn’t help but compare that bottle to Christianity’s rigid tradition concerning women.
The words tamper-proof and tradition have similar intents.
Tradition comes from the Latin traditio, which means a delivery. The Christian tradition is a delivery of opinions, dogmas, rites, practices, and customs from one generation to the next. That delivery is its job. The essential intent within tradition is its need to perpetuate itself, to keep delivering, to remain untampered with. I thought to myself, When it comes to tradition, the church is certainly doing its job, but perhaps it’s doing it a little too well.
Viewing tradition in this way, we can easily see why restricting women to narrowly defined and subordinate places reproduces itself, why change comes slowly or not at all or on the margins and not at the core.
Years earlier I’d taken a seminary course on church history, but nothing had been mentioned about its patriarchal underpinnings. Now I wanted to explore the tamper-proof traditions concerning women. Why hadn’t the church accepted women as equal participants? How had all of this come to be?
Searching for answers, I turned to theologians Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Phyllis Trible, Elaine Pagels, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Mary Daly, and other women who were voicing truths that had once been unsayable. In the evenings I sometimes read a paragraph to my husband, just to test his response.