Faith and Feminism A Holy Alliance

Chapter 1: To Build a Dialogue Attempting to bridge secular and faith-based feminism is very important. Women of faith feel that the rights movement is anti-religion, and the rights activists haven't made enough effort to listen to and include the women of faith. The social justice movement needs both voices. We need to be able to move to the next step, of dialogue between the rights world and the religious world.-- Dorothy Q. Thomas In past decades, many of us have been aware of a gulf between faith-based and secular feminism. On one side were activists who found religion indispensable to their activism. On the other were activists who found religion outdated, superficial, or perhaps just irrelevant to their activism. While on a personal level, there was some interaction between these two groups, an occasional casual friendship, on the philosophical level, there was a barrier. If a feminist happened to refer to her spiritual life in "mixed company," she was likely to be met with an embarrassed silence. But if she talked exclusively from a secular point of view, she was using the lingua franca of the movement, and nobody would raise an eyebrow.Dorothy Q. Thomas, founding director of the Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Division and a 1998 MacArthur Fellow, has spoken eloquently about this division and the need for healing through dialogue. I agree with her. More women in the movement are looking for ways to reconnect and reintegrate secular and faith-based worldviews into a single, stronger feminism. In order to bridge the gulf, we need to consciously create opportunities to talk and to listen. Dialogue gives us a way to find common ground.In 1995, I found an opportunity to engage in dialogue with women about faith and feminism. In the spring of that year, I was preparing to attend the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China. It seemed to me that the conference was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear from women from all over the world about important issues in their personal and social lives.I decided to interview conference participants about their thoughts on religion and the women's movement, and developed a survey consisting of three open-ended questions. The questions were designed to encourage my interviewees to share their personal experiences regarding religion and feminism. Originally, I had hoped to interview women from all over the world, but as I thought about it, I focused only on women from the United States. I had a hunch, which was later confirmed, that women from other countries might not split their faith from their feminism the way we do in the United States. My questions to American women were simple. Was the social activism of secular women and faith-based women unified and coordinated? Did they experience a split between the two? And if so,whywas there a split? What should be done about it? I didn't know it then, but these questions became the impetus for this book.The results were striking.Allof the fifty women I interviewed said they felt a polarization. Not one of them thought that secular and faith-based feminists were working in coalition or in harmony with one another. As they talked about the reasons for the split, many said that while spiritual matters were important to them personally, organized religion had been no friend to women. The institutionalized church has been one of the fiercest opponents of women's social and political equality. One of the women I interviewed put it most graphically: "Of course feminists shy away from religion. There is blood on the cathedral steps." She was talking about the blood of women sacrificed because of the church's doctrinal traditions.She was right. The historical record of the church includes too many examples of women's oppression and too few documenting support for women's rights. I understand why feminists might want to standHunt, Helen is the author of 'Faith and Feminism A Holy Alliance', published 2004 under ISBN 9780743483728 and ISBN 0743483723.