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Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
From Feminist
Interpretation of Scripture
Editor, Letty M. Russell
Westminster Press,
Philadelphia. 1985
Copyright Ch. 10, Elisabeth Schüssler
Fiorenza
I’m ceded - I’ve stopped being Theirs -
The
name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is
finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood,
and the string of spools,
I’ve finished threading - too
Baptized before, without the choice,
But this time,
consciously, of Grace
Unto supremest name
Called to my Full - The
Crescent dropped -
Existence’s whole Arc, filled up,
With one small
Diadem.
My second Ran - too small the first-
Crowned -
Crowing - on my Father’s breast -
A half unconscious Queen -
But
this time - Adequate - Erect,
With Will to choose, or to reject,
And I
choose, just a Crown.
- Emily Dickinson
Adrienne Rich has pointed out that this poem of Emily
Dickinson’s is a poem of great pride and self-confirmation, of
transcending the patriarchal condition, of movement from unconsciousness to
consciousness. She cautions us, however, not to give it a theological reading,
because Emily Dickinson “used the Christian metaphor far more than she let
it use her.”(1)
I have quoted both Dickinson and Rich because they
articulate at different levels the central challenge of a feminist biblical
hermeneutics. Feminist consciousness radically throws into question all
traditional religious names, texts, rituals, laws, and interpretative metaphors
because they all bear “our Father’s names.” With Carol Christ
(2) I would insist that the central spiritual and religious feminist quest is
the quest for women’s self-affirmation, survival, power, and
self-determination.
Some of us have therefore argued that as self-identified
women we cannot but leave behind patriarchal biblical religion and communities
and create a new feminist religion on the boundaries of patriarchal religion
and theology. Others claim biblical religion as an integral part of their own
historical identity and religious experience. The Jewish feminist Alice Bloch
articulates this claim well:
I take pride in my Jewish heritage, and I am tired of
hearing women dismiss Jewish identity as “oppressive” and
“patriarchal.” . . . Jewish identity is important to me, because
being Jewish is an integral part of myself; it’s my inheritance, my roots.
Christian women sometimes have a hard time understanding this, because
Christian identity is so much tied up with religious beliefs. It is possible to
be an ex-Catholic or an exBaptist, but it is really not possible to be an
ex-Jew.(3)
While agreeing with her insight that women’s personal
and religious self-identity is intertwined, I would maintain that Christian
self-identity is not just tied up with religious beliefs but is also a
communal-historical identity. Christian (and in my case Roman Catholic)
feminists also do not relinquish their biblical roots and heritage. As the
ekklesia of women, we claim the center of Christian faith and community
in a feminist process of transformation.
The Hermeneutical Center: Women-Church
The hermeneutical center of feminist biblical
interpretation is the women-church (ekklesia gynaikon), the movement of
self-identified women and women-identified men in biblical religion. The
ekklesia of women is part of the wider women’s movement in society
and in religion that conceives itself not just as a civil rights movement but
as a women’s liberation movement. Its goal is not simply the “full
humanity” of women, since humanity as we know it is male defined, but
women’s religious self-affirmation, power, and liberation from all
patriarchal alienation, marginalization, and oppression. The Greek term
ekklesia means the public gathering of free citizens who assemble in
order to determine their own and their children’s communal well-being. It
can be translated as the assembly, the synagogue, or the church of women. When
as a Christian I use the expression women-church, I do not use it as an
exclusionary(4) but as a political-oppositional term to patriarchy.
It thus becomes necessary to clarify here the way in which
I use patriarchy as an explanatory concept. I do not define it in a general
sense as a societal system in which men have power over women(5) but in the
classical sense as it was defined in Aristotelian philosophy. Just as feminism
is not just a worldview or perspective but a women’s movement for change,
so patriarchy is in my understanding not just ideological dualism or
androcentric world construction in language but a social, economic, and
political system of graded subjugations and oppressions. Therefore I do not
speak simply about male oppressors and female oppressed, or see all men over
and against all women. Patriarchy as a male pyramid specifies women’s
oppression in terms of the class, race, country, or religion of the men to whom
they “belong.”
Patriarchy as the basic descriptive model for feminist
analysis allows us to conceptualize not only sexism but also racism and
property-class relationships as basic structures of women’s oppression. In
a patriarchal society or religion, all women are bound into a system of male
privilege and domination, but impoverished Third World women constitute the
bottom of the oppressive patriarchal pyramid. Patriarchy cannot be toppled
except when the women who form the bottom of the patriarchal pyramid, triply
oppressed women, become liberated. All women’s oppression and liberation
is bound up with that of the colonialized and economically most exploited
women. This was already recognized by one of the earliest statements of the
radical women’s liberation movement: “Until every woman is free, no
woman is free.”(6) “Equality from below” must become the
liberative goal of women-church. In other words, as long as societal and
religious patriarchy exists, women are not “liberated” and must
struggle for survival and self-determination. Conversely, there is no one
feminist theory, religion, or group that can claim to be fully liberated.
Since a critical analysis of patriarchy allows us to
conceptualize the interaction of sexism, racism, classism, and militarist
colonialism, such a feminist interpretation of liberation is not in its
conception and goals white middle-class. All of us who are sufficiently
educated to participate in a hermeneutical or theological discussion do not
live our lives on the bottom of the patriarchal pyramid. Our experiences of
oppression and marginalization are very different, but as women we all live in
a society and culture that denies us our independence and selfdetermination.
My life and experience is quite different, for example,
from that of my mother. In 1944, during street fighting, she had to leave her
home with two small children and literally walk from Romania to a bombed-out
Germany, surviving from day to day, begging for food shelter, and clothing for
her children. Nevertheless, my own struggles for survival as a woman in a
clerical male profession have enabled me to understand more than my mother ever
did what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal society. A feminist analysis
of my own experience helps me realize that the baby given up for adoption could
have been mine, the peasant girl in Guatemala without a childhood could be my
daughter, the medieval woman burnt by the church as a witch could have been me,
the senile woman left for days without food could be my future.
I have therefore argued that feminist theology must
articulate its advocacy position not as an option for the oppressed but as the.
selfidentification of women in patriarchal society and religion, since all
women are socialized to identify with men.(7) The more we identify as women and
thereby overcome our patriarchal self-alienation, the more we will realize that
the separation between white and black women, middle-class and poor women,
native American and European women, Jewish and Christian women, Protestant and
Catholic women, lesbian and heterosexual women, nun-women and lay-women is, in
the words of Adrienne Rich, “a separation from ourselves.”(8)
Conversely, option for the most oppressed woman is an option for our women
selves. Such an option allows us “to find God in ourselves” and to
“love Her fiercely.”(9)
The locus or place of divine revelation and grace is
therefore not the Bible or the tradition of a patriarchal church but the
ekklesia of women and the lives of women who live the “option for
our women selves.” It is not simply “the experience” of women
but the experience of women (and all those oppressed) struggling for liberation
from patriarchal oppression .
The dream of freedom for oneself in a world in which all
women are free emerges from one’s own life experience in which one is not
free, precisely because one is a woman. The liberation of women is thus not an
abstract goal . . . but is the motive for that process. Individual freedom and
the freedom of all women are linked when one has reached the critical
consciousness that we are united first in our unfreedom.(10)
The patriarchal dehumanization and victimization of triply
oppressed women exhibits the full death-dealing powers of patriarchy, while
their struggles for liberation and courage to survive is the fullest experience
of God’s grace in our midst. A feminist critical theology of liberation
must therefore be particular and concrete. It must theologically explore
women’s particular experiences of marginalization, victimization, and
oppression. At the same time it has to articulate our individual and historical
experiences of liberation.
The God of Judith as well as the God of Jesus is Emmanuel,
God with us in our struggles for liberation, freedom, and wholeness. The
spiritual authority of women-church rests on this experience of grace in our
midst.
Feminist biblical interpretation must therefore challenge
the scriptural authority of patriarchal texts and explore how the Bible is used
as a weapon against women in our struggles for liberation. It also must explore
whether and how the Bible can become a resource in this struggle. A feminist
biblical interpretation is thus first of all a political task. It remains
mandatory because the Bible and its authority has been and is again today used
as a weapon against women struggling for liberation.
From its inception, feminist interpretation and concern
with scripture has been generated by the fact that the Bible was used to halt
the emancipation of women and slaves. Not only in the last century but also
today, the political Right laces its attacks against the feminist struggle for
women’s rights and freedoms in the political, economic, reproductive,
intellectual, and religious spheres with biblical quotations and appeals to
scriptural authority.(11) From countless pulpits and Sunday school classes,
such patriarchal attacks are proclaimed as the “word of God.”
Anti-ERA groups, the cultural Total Woman movement, and the Moral Majority
appeal to the teachings of the Bible on the American family and on creational
differences between the sexes supposedly resulting in a different societal and
ecclesial calling. At the same time, the political Right does not hesitate to
quote the Bible against shelters for battered women, for physical punishment of
children, against abortion even in cases of rape or child pregnancy, and
against women’s studies programs at state universities.(12)
At the same time the Bible has not served only to
legitimate the oppression of white women, slaves, native Americans, Jews, and
the poor. It has also provided authorization for women who rejected slavery,
colonial exploitation, anti-Semitism, and misogynism as unbiblical and against
God’s will. It has inspired countless women to speak out against
injustice, exploitation, and stereotyping and energized them to struggle
against poverty, unfreedom, and denigration. The Guatemalan Indian and
Christian revolutionary Rigoberta Menchu testifies to this:
In the community we began to reflect together on what the
Bible told us. The story of Judith, for example, impressed me very much: she
beheaded the king to save her people. We too understood that faced with the
violence of the rich, we have to respond with another kind of
violence.(13)
I propose elsewhere(14) that a feminist critical theology
of liberation should develop a multidimensional model of biblical
interpretation in order to assist women in their struggle for liberation. Such
a model must be a feminist-critical and a historical-concrete model. It must
not only show how individual biblical texts and writings functioned in their
historical-political settings but also pay increased attention to the
intersection and interplay of biblical texts with contemporary politics and
socialization. It should not search for a feminist formalized principle, a
universal perspective, or a historical liberating dynamics but should carefully
analyze how the Bible functions concretely in women’s struggle for
survival. Key elements in such a model, as far as I can see, are the following:
(i) suspicion rather than acceptance of biblical authority, (ii) critical
evaluation rather than correlation, (iii) interpretation through proclamation,
(iv) remembrance and historical reconstruction, and (v) interpretation through
celebration and ritual.
First: A feminist Christian apologetics presumes
that we can trust our lives to the “word of God” in the Bible and
that we should submit to its authority and liberating power. It therefore
insists that a hermeneutics of suspicion should only be applied to the history
of exegesis and contemporary interpretations. While a liberationtheological
interpretation affirms the liberating dynamics of the biblical texts, a
feminist critical hermeneutics of suspicion places a warning label on all
biblical texts: Caution! Could be dangerous to your health and survival.
Not only is scripture interpreted by a long line of men and proclaimed in
patriarchal churches, it is also authored by men, written in androcentric
language, reflective of religious male experience, selected and transmitted by
male religious leadership. Without question, the Bible is a male book. If Mary
Daly is right that here also “the medium is the message,”
self-identified women struggling for survival should avoid it like the plague.
The first and never-ending task of a hermeneutics of suspicion, therefore, is
to elaborate as much as possible the patriarchal, destructive aspects and
oppressive elements in the Bible. Such an interpretation must uncover not only
sexist biblical language but also the oppressive language of racism, anti
Judaism, exploitation, colonialism, and militarism. An interpretation of
suspicion must name the language of hate by its true name and not mystify it or
explain it away.
write off all women who find meaning in scripture as
unliberated and unfeminist, we have to use a hermeneutics of suspicion to
detect the antipatriarchal elements and functions of biblical texts, which are
obscured and made invisible by androcentric language and concepts. Moreover, we
have to acknowledge that not all biblical stories, traditions, and texts
reflect the experience of men in power or were written in order to legitimate
the patriarchal status quo.
Second: If the ekklesia of women has the
authority “to choose and to reject” biblical texts, we have to
develop a theological interpretive principle for feminist critical evaluation
rather than an interpretive principle and method of correlation. Such an
interpretation must sort through particular biblical texts and test out in a
process of critical analysis and evaluation how much their content and function
perpetrates and legitimates patriarchal structures, not only in their original
historical contexts but also in our contemporary situation. Conversely, all
biblical texts must be tested as to their feminist liberating content and
function in their historical and contemporary contexts. Such a feminist
hermeneutics of critical evaluation has to articulate criteria and principles
for evaluating particular texts, biblical books, traditions, or
interpretations. Such criteria or principles must be derived from a systematic
exploration of women’s experience of oppression and liberation.
Because of the importance of specific feminist analyses
and critical evaluations, I have argued that a feminist interpretation ought
not to reduce the richness of biblical texts and traditions to one particular
text or tradition, as the neoorthodox “canon within the canon” model
does. It also should not separate form and content and then formalize and
universalize them to a principle or dynamic, as the method of critical
correlation (Schillebeeckx, Tracy) or confrontation (Küng) does.(15)
Although Tillich had criticized Barth’s dialectical method, his
dialectical method of correlation" is still motivated by the apologetic intent
that engages in a critical dialogue of “yes and no” between
contemporary culture and biblical religion in order to end with an affirmative
“yes” to religion. Such a method of correlation, however, rests on
“the distinction between the unchanging content of the Christian message
and the changing forms of cultural expression.(16)
A feminist method of correlation adopts the same
distinction insofar as it separates the sociocritical prophetic-messianic
principle or dynamics from its concrete historical articulations and
deformations on the one hand and formalizes feminist experience and analysis on
the other, in such a way that it becomes a critical principle of
“affirmation and promotion of the full humanity of women.” It does so
in order to correlate both the prophetic-biblical and the feminist critical
principles with each other. As Rosemary Reuther has said in Chapter 9:
The Bible can be appropriated as a source of liberating
paradigms only if it can be seen that there is a correlation between the
feminist critical principle and that critical principle by which biblical
thought critiques itself and renews its vision as the authentic Word of God
over against corrupting and sinful deformations. It is my contention here that
there is such a correlation between biblical and feminist critical principles .
As alternative option I have proposed that biblical
feminists need not presume such a correlation or configuration, but
neverthelessin a process of critical evaluation we are able to find some
liberating paradigms and resources in biblical texts. This is the case not
because a correlation between feminist and biblical critical principles can be
presupposed but because the historical experience of wom en-church with the
Bible allows us to do so. Yet in order to find feminist biblical resources, we
have first to bring to bear the full force of the feminist critique upon
biblical texts and religion.
Third: Since today, as in the past, the political
Right fights its “holy war” against feminism under the banner of the
doctrinal paradigm of biblical interpretation, our defense must directly
address the question of the Word of God as proclaimed in scripture. (17) We
have therefore to develop a hermeneutics of proclamation that undercuts the
authority claims of patriarchal scriptural texts. As I have already suggested
in my contribution to The Liberating Word, feminist theology must first
of all denounce all texts and traditions that perpetrate and legitimate
oppressive patriarchal structures and ideologies. We no longer should proclaim
them as the “word of God” for contemporary communities and people if
we do not want to turn God into a God of oppression.
A careful feminist assessment of the selection and
reception of biblical texts for proclamation in the liturgy must therefore
precede an inclusive translation of them. Patriarchal texts should not be
allowed to remain in the lectionary but should be replaced by texts affirming
the discipleship of equals. An “inclusive translation” can only be
made of those lectionary texts which, in a critical feminist process of
evaluation, are identified as articulating a liberating vision for women
struggling for self-affirmation and wholeness, lest we are in danger of
covering up the patriarchal character of the Bible.
Such a hermeneutics of proclamation also must assess the
contemporary political context and psychological function of biblical
interpretations and texts. It must explore how even feminist-neutral or
feministpositive biblical texts can have an oppressive impact on the lives of
contemporary women, if they are used in order to inculcate misogynist attitudes
and patriarchal behavior. For instance, in our culture, in which women,
primarily, are socialized into sacrificing love and self-abnegation, the
biblical commandment of love and the proclamation of the cross can be
culturally misused to sustain voluntary service and the acceptance of sexual
violence. In exploring the interaction between biblical texts and societal
feminine values and behavior, we also have to pay attention to its religious
contexts. As Susan Thistlethwaite has pointed out in chapter 6, biblical texts
have a different meaning and authority for battered women rooted in different
ecclesial communities. Much more work needs to be done on the intersection of
the Bible with contemporary culture, politics, and society.
Fourth: Such a hermeneutics of proclamation must be
balanced by a hermeneutics of remembrance, which recovers all biblical
traditions and texts through a feminist historical reconstruction. Feminist
meaning is not only derived from the egalitarian-feminist surplus of
androcentric texts but is also to be found in and through androcentric texts
and patriarchal history. Rather than abandon the memory of our
foresisters’ sufferings, visions, and hopes in our patriarchal biblical
past, such a hermeneutics reclaims their sufferings, struggles, and victories
through the subversive power of the “remembered” past. Rather than
relinquish patriarchal biblical traditions, a hermeneutics of remembrance seeks
to develop a feminist critical method and historical model for moving beyond
the androcentric text to the history of women in biblical religion.
Such an interpretation recognizes methodologically that
androcentric language as generic conventional language makes women invisible by
subsuming us under linguistic masculine terms. It mentions women only when we
are exceptional or cause problems. To take androcentric biblical texts as
reflecting reality does not recognize the ideological, obfuscating character of
androcentric language. To reconstruct women’s participation in biblical
history, we therefore have to read the “women passages” as indicators
and clues that women were at the center of biblical life. In other words, if we
take the conventional ideological character of androcentric language seriously,
we can claim that women were leaders and full members in biblical religion
until proven otherwise. The burden of historical proof is shifted when we read
texts that speak about the leadership and presence of women, or those that are
injunctions to proper “feminine” behavior, not as descriptive and
comprehensive information but as the visible tip of an iceberg which for the
most part is submerged.
An interpretation through remembrance must articulate
theoretical models that can place women not on the periphery but at the center
of biblical community and history. In my book In Memory of Her, I have
proposed patriarchy as such a social-historical model for reconstructing early
Christian origins in a feminist perspective. While feminist theology usually
utilizes androcentric dualism as its basic exploratory concept for feminist
analysis and reconstruction, I propose that we use patriarchy as articulated in
Aristotelian philosophy as a basic explanatory concept for the reconstruction
of women’s history in Western society in general and in Christian history
in particular.
Androcentric dualism must then be understood as ideological
justification of patriarchal structures. It is articulated whenever
nonpatriarchal, egalitarian societal or religious possibilities exist or are at
least thinkable. This was the case in Athenian democracy, where it became
necessary to claim “different natures” for freeborn women and slave
women as well as men because of the democratic notion of citizenship.
Similarly, in early Christianity, misogynist texts and patriarchal injunctions
were generated because the discipleship of equals stood in tension with
Greco-Roman patriarchal structures. The gradual patriarchalization of the
church in the second and third centuries not only engendered the exclusion of
all women from ecclesial leadership but also eliminated the freedoms that slave
women had gained by joining the Christian movement.
Insofar as androcentric biblical texts are generated by the
tension between patriarchal societal and ecclesial structures and the vision
and praxis of the discipleship of equals, they allow us still a glimpse of
women’s engagement and leadership in the early Christian movement.
Although the scriptural canon preserves only remnants of the nonpatriarchal
early Christian ethos, these remnants allow us still to recognize that
patriarchal structures are not inherent to Christian community, although they
have become historically dominant. Therefore a feminist hermeneutics of
remembrance can reclaim early Christian history as our own history and
religious vision. Women-church has a long history and tradition, which can
claim the discipleship of equals as its scriptural roots. In sum, a feminist
hermeneutics of remembrance has to keep alive the memory of patriarchal
biblical oppression as well as the memory of the struggles and victories of
biblical women who acted in the power of the Spirit.
Interpretation through remembrance and historical
reconstruction must be supplemented by a hermeneutics of creative
ritualization. Such an interpretation allows women-church to enter the biblical
story with the help of historical imagination, artistic recreation, and
liturgical celebration. A method of creative actualization seeks to retell
biblical stories from a feminist perspective, to reformulate biblical visions
and injunctions in the perspective of the discipleship of equals, and to create
narrative amplifications of the feminist remnants that have survived in
biblical texts. In such a process of creative revisioning, womenchurch can
utilize all available means of artistic imagination, literary creativity,
music, and dance.
In legend and apocryphal writings, in liturgy and sacred
hymns, in feast days and liturgical cycles, the patriarchal church has
ritualized certain aspects and texts of the Bible as well as celebrated the
“founding fathers” of biblical religion. A feminist interpretation of
creative ritualization reclaims for women-church the same imaginative freedoms,
popular creativity, and liturgical powers. Women not only rewrite biblical
stories but also reformulate patriarchal prayers and create feminist rituals
for celebrating our foremothers. We rediscover in story and poetry, in drama
and dance, in song and liturgy our biblical foresisters’ sufferings and
victories. In ever-new images and symbols, feminist liturgies seek to rename
the God of the Bible and the biblical vision. We sing litanies of praise to our
foresisters and pray laments of mourning for the wasted lives of our
foremothers. Only by reclaiming our religious imagination and our ritual powers
of naming can women-church dream new dreams and see new visions. We do so,
however, in the full awareness that such creative feminist participation in the
biblical story and history must be won in and through a critical process of
evaluation.
In conclusion, what leads us to perceive biblical texts as
providing resources in the struggle for liberation from patriarchal oppression,
as well as models for the transformation of the patriarchal church, is not some
special canon of texts that can claim divine authority. Rather, it is the
experience of women themselves in their struggles for liberation. I have
therefore suggested that we understand the Bible as a structuring prototype of
women-church rather than as a definite archetype; as an open-ended paradigm
that sets experiences in motion and invites transformations. Rather than reduce
its pluriformity and richness to abstract principle or ontological immutable
archetype to be applied to and repeated in ever-new situations, I suggest the
notion of historical prototype open to its own transformation.
Such an understanding of the Bible as formative prototype
allows us to explore models and traditions of liberating praxis as well as of
patriarchal repression. It allows us to reclaim the whole Bible not as
normative but as an experiential enabling authority, as the legacy and heritage
of women-church. Such a notion of the Bible not as a mythic archetype but as a
historical prototype provides womenchurch with a sense of its own ongoing
history as well as Christian identity. It is able to acknowledge the dynamic
process of biblical resources, challenges, and new visions under the changing
conditions of the church’s cultural-historical situations.
In and through structural and creative transformation, the
Bible can become holy scripture for women-church. Insofar as the interpretive
model proposed here does not identify biblical revelation with androcentric
texts and patriarchal structures, it maintains that such revelation and
inspiration is found among the discipleship community of equals in the past and
the present. Insofar as the model proposed here locates revelation not in
biblical texts but in the experience of women struggling for liberation from
patriarchy, it requires that a feminist critical hermeneutics of liberation
read and actualize the Bible in the context of believing communities of women,
in the context of women-church.
Notes
1. Adrienne Rich, "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily
Dickinson(1975)," in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, Selected Prose 1966-1978
(W. W. Norton & Co., 1979), p. 172.
2. Carol P. Christ, "Why Women Need the Goddess:
Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections," in Carol P. Christ
and Judith Plaskow, eds., Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion
(Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 273-287.
3. Alice Bloch, "Scenes from the Life of a Jewish
Lesbian," in Susannah Heschel, ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader
(Schocken Books, 1983), p. 174.
4. In speaking about a feminist biblical interpretation,
I also do not want to imply that feminist Jewish and Christian biblical
interpretations are the same or must develop along the same lines. As Drorah
Setel has rightly pointed out, references to the "Judeo-Christian" tradition or
heritage ignore the significant inequalities in that relationship. However,
insofar as the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible is part of the Christian Bible, a
feminist Christian hermeneutics must deal with the Jewish Bible while a Jewish
feminist hermeneutics does not need to pay attention to the New Testament.
5. For definition and discussion of patriarchy, see, for
example, Heidi Hartmann, "Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex,"
in Elizabeth and Emily K. Abel, eds., The Signs Reader: Women, Gender, and
the Scholarship (University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 193-225.
6. "Redstockings: April 1969"; reprinted in Feminist
Revolution (Random House, 1975), p. 205.
7. See my "Toward a Feminist Biblical Hermeneutics," in
The Challenge of Liberation Theology, pp. 91-112, which was presented in
1979 at a conference sponsored by Chicago Divinity School.
8. Adrienne Rich, "Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism,
Fascism, Gynephobia (1978)," in On Lies . . . , p. 307.
9. Ntozake Shange's ending chorus is often quoted by
religious feminists. However, it must not be overlooked that such an
affirmation is only achieved in and through the experience and naming of
racist-sexist patriarchal oppressions. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered
Suicide/When the Rain-bow Is Enuf: A Choreopoem (Macmillan Publishing Co.,
1977).
10. Marcia Westkott, "Women's Studies as a Strategy for
Change: Between Criticism and Vision," in Gloria Bowles and Renate
Duelli-Klein, eds., Theories of Women's Studies (Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1983), p. 213.
11. For example, Shirley Rogers Radl, The Invisible
Woman: Target of the Religious New Right (Delta Books, 1983).
12. Betty Willis Brooks and Sharon L. Sievers, "The New
Right Challenges Women's Studies: The Long Beach Women's Studies Program," in
Charlotte Bunch and Sandra Pollack, eds., Learning Our Way: Essays in
Feminist Education (Crossing Press, 1983), pp. 78-88.
13. We Continue Forever: Sorrow and Strength of
Guatemalan Women (International Resource Exchange, 1983), p. 18.
14. See my collection of essays on feminist biblical
interpretation Bread Not Stone: Introduction to a Feminist Interpretation of
Scripture (Beacon Press, 1985).
15. See the overview and discussion of David Tracy,
"Particular Questions Within General Consensus," in Leonard Swidler, ed,,
Consensus in Theology? (Westminster Press, 1980), pp. 33-39.
16. See John P. Clayton, "Was ist falsch in der
Korrelationstheorie?", Neue Zeitschrift fur Systematishe Theologie
16:93-11! (1974), and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Foundational
Theology: Jesus and the Church (Crossroad, 1984), to whom I am indebted for
this reference.
17. Charlene Spretnack, "The Christian Right's 'Holy
War' Against Feminism," in The Politics of Women' s Spirituality
(Doubleday & Co., Anchor Books, 1982), pp. 470-496.
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