Comments

April 30, 2008 at 10:55 am

(1) usconservatives says:

Linda Lowen, in her response to my column, “Hillary Clinton, ‘Sexism,’ and the Bible,” makes the following objections:

(1) She writes that I make “assumptions that gloss over the complexity of arguments and situations” that I regard “as black and white.” She also chastises me for allegedly failing to notice that “feminists, like conservatives, cannot be summarily lumped into one category, their beliefs labeled and then dismissed….”

I confess that I may very well be guilty, at least partially, of the first charge. However, there is one decisively exculpatory circumstance: the spatial restrictions permitted any columnist make it inescapable that he or she will oversimplify, in varying degrees, of course, any issue that is addressed.

Nevertheless, spatial limitations aside, I believe that Lowen’s charge against me is unfair, for I expressly acknowledge from the outset that feminism is a multi-faceted phenomenon. “Feminism admits of many variations, it is true….” However, there are indeed and can’t but be some points on which the views of feminists converge and by virtue of which they can distinguish the intellectual orientation to which they subscribe.

(2) Lowen says that I am incorrect when I ascribe to feminists the belief that “sexism” is a “grave moral disorder” as opposed to a mere a condition of society that has been improving over time” (emphasis mine). She concludes: “Thus, Kerwick’s ‘grave moral disorder’ argument makes a mountain out of a molehill.”

This is both ironic and disingenuous. The irony stems from the consideration that any feminist or feminist sympathizer would accuse anyone of making “a mountain out of a molehill” by referring to “sexism” as gravely immoral. The disingenuousness derives from the fact Lowen not only denies that feminists consider “sexism” seriously immoral, but immoral at all! Rather, she says that it is simply “a condition of society….” What kind of condition, I wonder, if not a moral condition?

Just the slightest familiarity with feminist literature reveals in no time that feminists, their differences with one another over details notwithstanding, are in emphatic agreement that “sexism” is profoundly immoral. There are two basic types of feminism, as far as I am aware: “liberal” or “equity” and “gender” or “radical.” The former holds that Western institutions should be preserved, but they must be considerably revised in order to insure women full equality as men. The latter, on the other hand, claim that our cultural institutions, as well as the assumptions by which they are informed, are incorrigibly “sexist”; nothing less than a radical overhaul of them is required if women are ever to be treated as the equals of men.

Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall are the editors of Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy. They write that “feminist philosophy has two sources—the feminist movement and traditional academic philosophy.” The first “has opened our eyes to the deep and varied ways in which the ideals and institutions of our culture oppress women.” The second elaborates upon “the insights and work of” the first as it “examine(s) and criticize(s) the assumptions and presuppositions of the ideals and institutions or our culture,” and culture that is overwhelmingly “androcentric.”

In her entry on “feminist philosophy” in the second edition of The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, feminist Rosemarie Tong specifies the “the goals of feminist social and political philosophy.” They are: “(1) to explain why women are suppressed, repressed, and/or oppressed in ways that men are not; and (2) to suggest morally desirable and politically feasible ways to give women the same justice, freedom, and equality that men have.”

Examples like these could be multiplied exponentially. Feminists are united in believing that women have and remain “oppressed” by an intensely, perennially oppressive “androcentric” culture. This notion theme is endemic to feminist literature.

(3) Lowen asserts that since biblical “attitudes towards women are a snapshot in time, based on prevailing social mores and conventions that were in place during the period of history it was written,” “simple common sense” dictates to “individuals of faith” that regardless of “whether or not the Bible is sexist,” to reject “its teachings because of gender-specific language in use at the time is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

It is correct that even if one believes that the Bible is “sexist,” one can still embrace the faith to which it belongs. Many a self-described feminist has not only done just that, but has actually dedicated their lives to the scholarly pursuit of Scripture. However, it is interesting to see how some of them have dealt with it.

In the introduction to their The Women’s Bible Commentary, editors Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe refer to “sexism” as a “sin.” Contributor Jane Schaberg, in her exposition of Luke, acknowledges that this gospel has “liberatory” elements for women, but she chooses to focus on its “oppressive dynamics.” She has a section in which she describes all of the Gospels as “androcentric,” and she says of Luke that is “praises the posture of female inferiority….” (emphasis mine). Jouette M. Bassler, in her analysis of I Corinthians, writes that Paul suggests that men are closer to the Godhead than women. “By stating that woman is (only) the reflection of man, Paul implies again her derivative and secondary status and then he confirms this by insisting…that woman was created from and for the sake of man, and not vice versa.”

I am curious as to how Clinton would approach the Bible.

(4) Lowen dismisses my ruminations as expressions of “panic.” Clinton’s position on “sexism” and the Bible is a “non-issue,” for not unlike “Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, and Jews” who have contended for the presidency and “who have felt it necessary to delineate how their personal belief structures would not affect their ability to govern a nation of diverse religious practices,” Clinton’s thoughts on the Bible are irrelevant to her competence as “leader of the free world.” In short, “it’s a non-issue.”

My column is the offspring of neither “panic” nor, to be quite truthful, even “concern.” Rather, considering the readiness with which she pounded on Obama for his culturally insensitive remarks concerning the religiosity of white Americans living outside of America’s metropolises, I just thought it would be interesting to find out how Clinton reconciles her professed commitments to feminism, with its cardinal belief that the religious and other cultural institutions of the West have historically “oppressed” women, and Christianity.

Lowen’s objection here is as misplaced as the others, and it is a standing denial of another key theme pervading feminist thought. Feminists insist, against the grain of the master tradition of Western philosophy, that the specific circumstances of the knowing subject are not only relevant to how and what the person knows, but actually constitutive of it. Again, in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Miranda Fricker says of “feminist epistemology” (epistemology is, literally, “the study of knowledge”), that “it investigates the relevance that the gender of the inquirer/knower has to epistemic practices….” She says that, from a feminist point of view, “philosophy is conceived as the product of historically and culturally situated (hence gendered) authors.”

The point here is that Clinton, insofar as she is a feminist, cannot adopt the line that Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish presidential contenders have taken, for it is a line that the feminist persuasion with which she identifies has expressly and inexhaustibly repudiated. That is, the sort of “objectivity” or “impartiality” that Lowen presumably believes Clinton can achieve as president, a “view from no where” that requires abstracting oneself from the contingent particularities that make one the person one is, this kind of “bracketing act,” is precisely what feminists declare is both impossible and undesirable. It is impossible because our histories, experiences, and values are inseparably bound to these individuating characteristics: they constitute who we are. It is undesirable, for in aspiring toward this sort of “objectivity,” Clinton and other women perpetuate their own “domination.” Allegedly “gender-neutral” standards, standards that are held to be “impartial” and “objective,” are nothing of the kind. They are, rather, “male norms” that, as such, further patriarchal interests. As Iris Marion Young says in her Justice and the Politics of Difference, the idea of “a universal humanity” that encourages us to aspire toward “objectivity” and “impartiality” is “culturally and experientially specific, and as long as women and other historically “oppressed” groups continue to believe in it, they are complicit in the perpetuation of their own oppression.

I don’t want to be too hard on Lowen. She isn’t clear as to what “sexism” is, it is true, but I very much doubt that anyone, much less those who spare no occasion for resorting to accusations of it, can give an account of “sexism” that is to everyone’s satisfaction, or maybe even their own satisfaction. Perhaps it is high time that, in addition to that honest dialogue on race that the Obamas of the world insist we have never actually had, we talk about “sexism,” feminism, and masculinity as well.