An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation

Nyasha Junior

• Editorial: Westminster John Knox Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611646306
• Categoría: Teología y religión
• Categoría: Crítica e interpretación bíblicas

An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation provides a much-needed introduction to womanist approaches to biblical interpretation. It argues that womanist biblical interpretation is not simply a byproduct of feminist biblical interpretation but part of a distinctive tradition of African American women's engagement with biblical texts. While womanist biblical interpretation is relatively new in the development of academic biblical studies, African American women are not newcomers to biblical interpretation.

Written in an accessible style, this volume highlights the importance of both the Bible and race in the development of feminism and the emergence of womanism. It provides a history of feminist biblical interpretation and discusses the current state of womanist biblical interpretation as well as critical issues related to its development and future. Although some African American women identify themselves as "womanists, " the term, its usage, its features, and its connection to feminism remain widely misunderstood. This excellent textbook is perfect for helping to introduce readers to the development and applications of womanist biblical interpretation.

PART I

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Chapter 1

Three “Waves” of Feminism

“Feminism is only for white women.” “Alice Walker is the founder of womanism.” These are just some of the popular misconceptions regarding feminism and womanism that I encounter when I teach classes and when I read popular media. Although this book focuses on womanist biblical interpretation, some context regarding the factors that led to the development of black feminism and womanism is necessary. To locate the beginning of African American women’s consciousness of race and gender in 1983 with Alice Walker’s definition of womanism is to fundamentally misunderstand African American women’s history and agency. The issues raised by the term womanist began long before Walker offered her definition. African American women’s concerns regarding race and gender did not appear in the late twentieth century as a second- or third-wave corrective to the largely gender-focused efforts of white women activists. African American women have addressed issues of race and gender continually within their activism and scholarship. Facing racism and sexism, they have fought to incorporate issues of race within gender-focused efforts as well as issues of gender within race-based efforts. Yet the specific gender focus of much of the women’s rights activism and discourse is taken to refer to white women, and the framing of women’s concerns largely extends only to the concerns of relatively affluent white women. African American women are generally racialized but not gendered. That is, African American women are regarded as African Americans, while white women are treated as representative of all women. Furthermore, African American men are treated as representative of all African Americans.

This chapter reviews the basic narrative of the three so-called “waves” of feminism. It then disrupts that narrative by addressing some of the problems with the waves narrative. Without attempting a lengthy treatment of U.S. women’s history, it discusses some of the issues related to African American women’s activism and the interaction of race and gender as historical background for later chapters. This chapter is not an exhaustive review of U.S. women’s history or African American women’s history. Instead, this chapter shows that efforts for the advancement of women were not restricted only to white women, and it illustrates the importance of both race and gender in women’s activism as background for the more focused discussion of biblical interpretation in later chapters.

FEMINISM

As discussed in the introduction, while feminism is difficult to define, in general a feminist approach involves support for the equality of men and women and action directed toward the elimination of women’s subordination. Feminism in the United States is often described as having three waves or major time periods. These periods are called first-, second-, and third-wave feminism, and they extend roughly from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, the 1960s to the 1980s, and the 1980s into the twenty-first century, respectively. As we will discuss, the notion of waves is problematic, but it is important to be familiar with this terminology due to its frequent and continued use.

First-Wave Feminism

First-wave feminism is usually identified as the period from 1848 to 1920. In 1848, activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott assembled a convention at Seneca Falls, New York, to discuss women’s rights. The Seneca Falls Convention is often considered to be the start of the U.S. women’s rights movement.¹ The period of first-wave feminism is generally regarded as ending with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, which gave U.S. women the right to vote.

Second-Wave Feminism

A particular starting date for second-wave feminism is difficult to determine. One possible start date is 1963 due to the publication of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. While describing society’s encouragement of women to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers, Friedan claims that American women faced a profound dissatisfaction with their lives, which she calls “the problem that has no name.”² Her research included a sample of women who were Smith College graduates, so her findings were not generalizable to the entire population of U.S. women. Yet this book was one of many developments that brought attention to the particular issues and concerns of women during this period.

Another starting point could be the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. Its purpose was “to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.”³ Despite these potential starting dates, it was not until 1968 that Marsha Lear coined the phrase “the second feminist wave” in a New York Times Magazine article.⁴ No single organization had responsibility for advocating a specific second-wave feminist agenda. During this period, the term feminist was used as a personal identifier and as a descriptor of efforts by various groups, coalitions, and individuals to secure greater rights and protections for women.

Significant victories for U.S. women were achieved during this period. For example, women’s rights advocates secured the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which prohibited sex discrimination in payment of wages and worked to ensure the inclusion of sex discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although the Fourteenth Amendment provided for “equal protection,” the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Thus employers may not discriminate against job applicants or employees in hiring, firing, and promotion. Title VII also created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that serves to enforce federal nondiscrimination laws.

Women’s rights advocates also lobbied to obtain the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972. Title IX mandated nondiscrimination in academic programs receiving federal funds. While it is commonly perceived as providing greater opportunities for women in high school and college athletic programs, Title IX addressed inequality related to a variety of elements in education, including student services, academic programs, recruitment, employment, and other areas. Overall, these efforts increased awareness of the many limitations placed on women due to gender as well as marital or familial status.

Feminist efforts continue through our contemporary period, but some regard second-wave feminism as coming to an end with the failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1982. Suffragist Alice Paul drafted the first proposed amendment for equal rights in 1923 for the 75th anniversary of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. It specified that both men and women were entitled to equal rights under the U.S. Constitution. In 1972, the ERA was passed by Congress, but in 1982, even after a ratification deadline extension, the amendment died without the required ratifications from three-fifths or thirty-eight of the state legislatures. Some supporters continue to push for its ratification today. They contend that the U.S. Constitution does not provide adequately for the rights of both men and women and argue that the ERA is necessary to state explicitly a guarantee of equal constitutional rights. An end point of 1982 is of course artificial. Some would argue that despite these gains second-wave feminism has not ended because the struggle for women’s rights continues.

Third-Wave Feminism

Third-wave feminism is a term used for a wide range of feminist activism that seeks to distinguish itself from second-wave feminism. The term third wave became popular after the publication of a 1992 essay titled “Becoming the Third Wave” by writer Rebecca Walker, who is the daughter of Alice Walker.⁵ Rebecca Walker’s essay provided her response to the divisive U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for then–U. S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Following the retirement of Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1991, President George H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas as an associate justice. Following the leak of FBI interviews, Anita Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, was called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She claimed that Thomas had engaged in inappropriate behavior of a sexual nature toward her when they worked together from 1981 to 1983. The Senate voted 52 to 48 in favor of Thomas’s confirmation, but the televised hearings in which Thomas and Hill, both African Americans, were questioned by a committee of white men, created a national dialogue on issues of race, gender, and sexual harassment.⁶

For Rebecca Walker the confirmation hearings were not about determining if Thomas was guilty of sexual harassment but about “checking and redefining the extent of women’s credibility and power.”⁷ In speaking with her “peers,” she cautions, “Let Thomas’s confirmation serve to remind you, as it did me, that the fight is far from over.”⁸ Walker concludes the essay by declaring, “I am not a postfeminism feminist. I am the Third Wave.”⁹ Walker distances herself from previous generations of feminism and from postfeminism, which often implies a rejection of traditional feminist concerns.¹⁰

Third-wave feminism does not focus on any single issue related to women. It claims to embrace diversity and to address gender in conjunction with various factors such as race, gender, class, and sexuality. Furthermore, it includes diverse issues such as ecofeminism and sex positivity, which affirms sexuality as a healthy, positive element of adult relationships. There is no distinctive end to third-wave feminism as some would argue that it continues in our contemporary period.

COUNTER TO THE WAVE NARRATIVE

First Wave?

Despite its commonplace usage to periodize women’s rights activism, the term first-wave feminism is anachronistic. The term feminist does not appear in English until 1894 and was not widely used at that time.¹¹ Although early women are sometimes regarded as first-wave feminists, these activists did not refer to themselves as feminists. Nor did they use a single particular term or share a collective identity or aim. The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century efforts to improve the condition of women is known as first-wave feminism because women in later periods label it as such. Just as the film Rocky was not referred to as Rocky I until its sequel Rocky II existed, there was no notion of a first wave until the term second wave became popular. This retrospective labeling is the result of contemporary women grouping together early women reformers and identifying them as feminists or “proto-feminists” in order to link contemporary activism with that of earlier generations and create a broader history of feminism that extends from the nineteenth century through the present. Yet equating women’s activity in these different time periods with feminism may create the false impression that these women share significant similarities regarding their strategies and aims.

For many people today, notions of equal rights involve equal pay or antidiscrimination employment legislation. While contemporary efforts for women’s rights tend to focus on the de facto (not officially sanctioned) discrimination faced by women, in the past efforts focused largely on de jure (by law) inequities facing women. For example, in earlier periods, women were not granted the right to vote and were prevented from holding political office. Laws varied from state to state, but due to the common-law doctrine of coverture, once a woman married, her legal rights were subsumed under those of her husband. Thus a woman lost control of any property that she owned and any wages or income that she acquired. Also, she could not enter into contracts or initiate a lawsuit. Divorce was quite uncommon during this period, and women who wished to divorce faced significant difficulties in obtaining one. Although many men, including those in poverty, immigrants, Native Americans, and African Americans, were not granted the same legal, political, and economic rights as educated white men, there were particular restrictions for women, especially for affluent white women. While contemporary women continue to fight gender discrimination, they are not engaged in the same type of struggle against the widespread, legalized gender discrimination that...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Historical Background
• Part II Contemporary Scholarship
• Bibliography
• Index