Today in Women's History

Who and what might we remember today?

It was March 24, 1826, when she was born to Hezekiah and Helen Leslie Joslyn.  Her father was a physician who homeschooled her in Greek, biology, and math.  Her mother supplemented her learning through intentional conversations with theologians, philosophers, and scientists, guests in their home.  They also sent her to Clinton New York Liberal Institute.  She met the love of her life, and they were married.  She deepened her interest in theology, continued to read the Bible in Greek, and taught herself Hebrew to further her interactions with the scriptures.  She and her husband were parents of four children.  She and her husband were white and free in the United States, and involving their children, they opened their home to runaway African American slaves, participating illegally in the underground railway.  She fought for temperance.  She began to fight for women's rights in America, especially the right to vote.  In1852, at age 26, she was the youngest invited speaker at the Third National Women's Rights Convention.  She was a historian, focusing on how the enslavement of black Africans and the oppression of women shared horrors and had many parallels.  She helped form the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA); she testified before the all-male Congress of the United States to protest it's limited democracy; she gave a speech entitled "The United States on Trial, Not Susan B. Anthony" in several U.S. cities (when Anthony, a woman, had been jailed for attempting to vote); and she took on the role as editor of the NWSA newspaper, National Citizen and Ballot Box.  Her own "articles covered such topics as the treatment of women prisoners, prostitution, the plight of Native Americans, and the role of Christianity in the oppression of women."  With Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she co-authored the History of Woman Suffrage in three volumes of more than 3,000 pages, and they co-edited The Women's Bible, a two-volume, internationally-collaborative commentary on the scriptures from a woman's perspective.  She authored an essay, "Who Planned the Tennessee Campaign of 1862?," to recover the lost recent history of Anna Ella Carroll, a woman, a tactician in the Civil War.  She wrote the book, Woman, Church, and State, to bring further attention to the abuses of women committed by the church and the government. Differences with others led to their excluding her from any work on the fourth volume of History of Woman Suffrage.  For that reason, historians today speculate that this first-wave feminist is not as well known as she might otherwise be.  She is Matilda Joslyn Gage.

Today is also the birthday of second-wave feminist Gloria Steinem.

Today is also the 100 year anniversary of the horrible Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.  Here's from answers.com -->

The worst factory fire in the history of New York City occurred on March 25, 1911, in the Asch building, where the Triangle Shirtwaist Company occupied the top three of ten floors. Five hundred women, mostly Jewish immigrants between thirteen and twenty-three years old, were employed there. The owners had locked the doors leading to the exits to keep the women at their sewing machines. In less than fifteen minutes, 146 women died. The event galvanized support for additional efforts to be made to increase safety in the workplace. It also garnered support for labor unions in the garment district, and in particular for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.

On the homefront today, I've had a wonderful email exchange with the president of one of the U.S. colleges that my daughter has been admitted to for the coming fall semester.  This president is a woman.  What's that matter today?  Well, she and my daughter comprise 51% of the American population, the female half of our society.  Haven't things been improving over the past 20 years, with a 13.5% increase in the number of women college presidents?  Yes.  But are 51% of the college presidents in America women?  No.  The most recent published survey shows that "23% of the U.S.’s regionally accredited institutions" have women presidents.  And how did these few women actually get to the top?  If you ask S. Georgia Nugent, president of Kenyon College, she'll tell you she's had to avoid petty arguments with men.  For example, in a Chronicle of Higher Education article out this morning, she remembers "when a man told her at a cocktail party that there were too many women at Kenyon College."  President Nugent explains, giving him the benefit of the doubt:  "He was apparently unaware that the national population is majority female as well."  So what did she do?  "I probably just refreshed his drink," she advised.  And so, today, things are still moving forward in women's history, our history, yours and mine together.

How Women Became [USA] Citizens (Hint: It Didn't Happen Overnight!)

It was only just a century ago when "the U.S. Supreme Court in 1910 denied damages to a wife injured by violent beatings on the grounds that to do so would undermine 'the peace of the household'." 

Many American women still alive today (at age 90 plus) were born before their mothers and grandmothers could vote.  "Still, deeply entrenched assumptions about gender roles were hard to overcome. Even when women finally won the vote in 1920, one of the most powerful arguments propelling them to victory was the claim that modern government, in assuming obligation for the education and socialization of children and for the general social welfare, had taken on traditional responsibilities of the household. For many Americans this became the compelling rationale for why women finally needed a voice in their own right."

Things don't happen overnight!  "We need to remember these developments. Public policy, we know, is largely path dependent. How we think and act today is often determined by a past we don't fully understand. This is particularly true for women who have for so long been denied fair recognition as historical actors. History is to the body politic as memory is to the individual, as veteran historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once observed. We need to keep our engagement with history lively, as we are bound to lose our way without it.

We need history to help us navigate our own troubled times. We especially need it now as we try to unravel the remnants of "coverture" that still constrain women's civil status and as we do so in the face of an intensifying backlash against women's equality.

The litany of injustices women still face in this country is by now familiar...."

read the rest, from Ellen Chesler, Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute

If Your Body's Sexed Female, Your Highest Political Places

Female Heads of State and Government

White House website highlights senior level female staff

Are We [in the USA] Ready for a Woman President [Yet]?

Female Heads of State and Government

[USA] White House website highlights senior level female staff

Are We [in the USA] Ready for a Woman President [Yet]?

'silly' American translated: herstory

At some point in my blogging, I want to begin focusing on points at which several Bible translators and bibliobloggers have downplayed if not downright denied the fact of much Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek wordplay in the Bible (of Jews and of Christians).  Today, I just want to look at how feminists have worked with wordplay and with (the consequences of) its translation.  You'll see how this comes back to Mary Daly just a bit.

Let me quote extensively from the German / Canadian writer Luise von Flotow and her essay, "Mutual Pun-ishment? Feminist Wordplay in Translation: Mary Daly in German," in Traductio: Essays on Punning and Translation, edited by Dirk Delabastita.   Biblicists might initially be more interested in the book's essay, "A Portion of Slippery Stones: Wordplay in Four Twentieth-Century Translations of the Hebrew Bible," by Anneke De Vries and Arian J.C. Verheij; however, von Flotow's chapter comes first, and with good reason: she gets at the critical issues more richly.

Here's von Flotow:

[Among Canadian feminists], translation came to be viewed as creative and cooperative interaction, rather than suspect and uncertain approximation.  And the challenge that wordplay translation presented was answered with 'polysemic' approaches in which the translator used unorthodox, multiple methods to deal with multiple meanings -- even mimetic translation of wordplay, which abandons the conventional striving for semantic equivalence in favour of interlingual formal association.  This, in turn, "violate[d] the current rule that a translation must not give the impression that it is a translation" (Godarad 1987:7), so that the Canadian academic-cum-translator became a reader/writer who was as liberated from the constraints of translation norms, as the writer she was translating was liberated from 'patriarchal' textual norms.

So why is the German version of Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology a form of pun-ishment, as critic Pusch claims, and as the hasty disbanding of the German reading circles may show?  If Anglo-American-Canadian feminist academics and critics have been able to integrate foreign wordplay into their critical practice..., why is this not possible with the German text?  (page 54)


....  One particularly salient example [of the German translator's failure] is her footnote to Daly's footnote on the term herstory.
      Daly does not approve of this term; she feels that the term herstory, a neologism for women's history, implies "a desire to parallel the record of men's achievements"....  Prehistory would be a better term to use.  [German translator] Wisselinck enlarges on this, placing her own explanation of Daly's comment before her own translation of Daly's footnote.  She begins by stating that the German language has not yet developed the new woman's language ("neue Frauensprache") that English has, and she speculates that German may lack the capacity to change.  She then goes on to explain that married anglophone couples like to use toothbrush glasses, towels and place mats with His and Hers labels.  It is from this practice, she implies, that the term herstory has been derived.
      The sudden appearance of such lowly domestic items as toothbrush glasses and place mats in conjunction with excuses about why the German language resists change is more than disconcerting; it trivializes the issue.  Anglo-American efforts to change language and thereby change gender awareness are undermined by parallels drawn to 'silly' American cultural artefacts and habits.  The German language appears in counterpoint as a solid constant, impervious to such trivialities [or even impervious to much change].  Though Daly herself disapproves of the herstory wordplay for political reasons, she does not degrade the term in the way the German translation, perhaps unwittingly, does....  (pages 59-60)


All translation of wordplay raises particular problems regarding the transfer of cultural knowledge and specific context-bound shades of meaning, besides the question of the unavoidable differences between semantic items and their range of meanings and connotations in different languages (e.g. Levine 1991; Delabastita 1994).  In addition, wordplay translation in feminist writing has raised issues of political solidarity between women across linguistic and cultural boundaries.  It in fact highlights problems originating in cultural and historical differences, similar to those aired on the occasions of international or 'supranational' women's congresses, where vastly differing economic and cultural groups try to reach understanding and agreement.

Reading Mary Daly in German

The wordplay that laces Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology, her classic of 'radical feminist' (now viewed as white-middle-class-educated-feminist) thought, made it a pleasure for me to read in English (perhaps because I, too, fit the white-middle-class-educated-anglophone category).  My first reading of the work in the summer of 1979 had me in stitches over her inventive impudence, her sarcasm and lack of respect for conventional American English and the culture that supports it, and over her unceasing and creative efforts to find ways to take the wind out of the complacent sails of 'patriarchal' language.  The book's main focus is on the historical victimization of women, and on the role filled by 'henchwomen' of patriarchy for this purpose....  For me, the wordplay was one of the more important aspects, providing respite and relaxation from an often disturbing context.
      The German translation of this work was completed by Erika Wisselinck shortly after its English publication.  (page 51)

---

Fortunately, von Flotow has made her entire chapter available right here, at her web site.  You can read how she details Wisselinck's three strategies and failures, as compared to wordplay methods and successes by French-English Canadian translators.

Mary Daly's Meta Definitions (and Meta Methods)

I'm imaging your response as you read my post's title.  Perhaps you're rolling your eyes (as my teenage daughter did this morning when -- upon my asking her again why she was has having to serve detention at her private Christian school -- she said, "I forgot to get my Bible out of my locker for Bible class, okay?").  Or maybe you're just a little intrigued (as my spouse and I are - upon being invited to a Seder this evening after just being invited to a "Lord's Supper" palm Sunday service yesterday).  Or could it be that you're laughing nervously (as the college students of my Vietnamese colleague snickered and shifted when trying to understand and to role play the scene of a U.S. film in which the characters do things not entirely appropriate in a Southeast Asian context)?

I really have intended to write my post here to reflect on Mary Daly's "meta" definitions and such methods.  Here's a little of what I think.

Who you think you are -- your self-reflective situation -- very much determines what you do with Mary Daly's writings, particularly her book Gyn/Ecology:  the Metaethics of Radical Feminism.  The fact is that such a book demands your response.  Yours.  You may, for example, decide that you need not to read it, or at least not again.  Or don't have time for it, unless someone nice invites you to read along.  Or, when reading it, you might see that you do not get it.  You might accuse it of making your eyes roll or of other things.

My particular interest (at least one of my interests in particular) is the subjectivities that Daly's "radical feminism" evokes and invokes.  How we -- you and I -- might be provoked 35 years later still is of interest.  I am bringing this up during your women's history month.  (I am suggesting that you are doing things, as I am, without necessarily even knowing what or why or how exactly.  But, I am also hopeful and optimistic that we can pay attention.  I don't believe for a second what the anonymous writer of the British Times speculates when he or she suggests that Daly's "initial challenge to established theological doctrines and emerging feminist movements may not appear radical today.")

With her own 1990 introduction to her book Gyn/Ecology, Daly is already writing a 15-year-old history of the writing of her book.  The history includes her most kind and her most critical readers and some of their responses.  Her brief history about her book also includes some of her "exigencies" for writing in the first place.  This is what Lloyd Bitzer, in developing his theory of rhetorical criticism, would call Daly's "rhetorical situation."  She did not write in 1975 in a vacuum; and she was not re-writing in 1990 in a vacuum; and now there's no abstract happy-world vacuum that she's written in, now that she's dead and you're still alive with me, we now part of her history (even if you, or I, ignore or yawn at what she's written and re-written).  Daly's brief history writing is a reflection on, a bringing up to date, the past problems.  And it's one of her reflections on some of the varied responses.  She is not herself alone, so it seems, intending to write the final, the perfect, the definitive, the "super" constructed, the true, the only, the authoritative response.  She is not intending to write anything at all like a definitive response.  However "radical" it comes across to you, it is therefore in some way open to your response.  If her writing is not radical, as you see it, at least it's fairly miraculous, I think, that you've continued reading this blog post on her (radical) writings thus far.

One of the most important statements of re-membering that Daly makes is this memory:

      My reversing of patriarchal reversals in Gyn/Ecology involved/ required functioning in what might be called "a subliminal mode."  This way of thinking/ writing probably would not have been possible for me if I had not spent years studying medieval theology and philosophy, and writing dissertations in these fields at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, the medieval city in which I lived and studied for seven years.  For there I learned to think and write in a theological/ philosophical language that could not say what I was trying to say.  So in my dissertations [both in philosophy and in theology] I was writing in code without realizing that I was doing this.
      ....  Having caught on in some deep way to the multileveled nature of discourse, I was enabled to reverse the process I had learned in Fribourg and decode patriarchal texts, thus exposing their hidden meanings. [pages xxvi-xxvii of the 1990, 15-year-retrospective introduction to her 1975 book.]

What I'd like you and me to re-read is that bit about "writing" that's "without realizing."  This is profound.  Daly is confessing that she has had to catch "on in some deep way to the multileveled nature of discourse."  Elsewhere, in the new Preface of her book, she explains the need to de-mystify some four very specific "male methods of mystification":  Erasure, Reversal, False polarization (i.e., male-defined feminism vs. male-defined sexism), and Divide and conquer.

And in the very next section of her Preface, she explains very clearly (or at least straightforwardly, so it seems) the title and then the subtitle of her book (i.e., Gyn/Ecology and then the Metaethics of Radical Feminism).  These are "a way of wrenching back some wordpower."  She gives the "Merriam-Webster" given definitions of "meta."  She re-views the inventors of (male) ethics, including Aristotle (who, I'm recalling, coined the term "ethics" by smashing together a common Greek word with an uncommon [feminine] suffix).  And she so begins un-erasing and re-versing and exposing the untruths of binarying and of the patriarchal con-questing.  Daly intends to reverse the "reversal."  Men, she sees, have through their history (of women) reversed many things.  Daly's project is akin to post-modernisms' de-conconstructions of constructs of power that come after her.  It's akin to that coined imperative of meta-noia [μετα-νοεῖτε] of the very Jewish Matthew's John-the-Baptist and his equally Jewish Jesus that comes before her.

Therefore -- well before Daly so carefully lets readers in on what she's doing as an intentional author with her title and her subtitle -- she has said this.  (Are you ready?  Am I?  Do we get the nuances here, the changes there, and the generative qualities of self-transformation and not only mere reformation?)

      I have coined the term metapatriarchal to describe the journey, because the prefix meta has multiple meanings.  It incorporates the idea of "postpatriarchal," for it means occurring later.  It puts patriarchy in the past without denying that its walls/ ruins and demons are still around.  Since meta also means "situated behind," it suggests that the direction of the journey is into the Background.  Another meaning of this prefix is "change in, transformation of."  This, of course, suggests the transforming power of the journey.  By this I do not mean that women's movement "reforms" patriarchy, but that it transforms our Selves.  Since meta means "beyond, transcending," it contains a built-in corrective to reductive notions of mere reformism. 
      This metapatriarchal process of encountering the unknown involves also a continual conversion of the previously unknown into the familiar.... (pages 7 - 8)

Open Words, Open Letter, Open Book

So the question arises in my mind, Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women?  Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us?  This is not a rhetorical question.

--Audre Lorde, "An Open Letter to Mary Daly," Sister outsider: essays and speeches

In sum, Daly claims that Lorde misunderstood her intent in Gyn/Ecology and contends that a public debate about this issue will serve no purpose.
      Respectfully, I disagree.  Without downplaying how personally painful this debate undoubtedly was for both women (as Rich says, such debates are meant to break our hearts), perhaps the rest of us can now benefit from the debate if we revision it [i.e., Rich's concept of revision from "When We Dead Awaken" (35)], using it [i.e., the debate] to imagine not who was right and who was wrong but rather how one moves from a rhetoric of dysfunctional silence to a rhetoric of listening.

--Krista Ratcliffe, Rhetorical listening: identification, gender, whiteness

      Explosions of Diversity do not happen without conflict, however.  One of the responses to Gyn/Ecology was a personal letter from Audre Lorde, which was sent to me in May 1979.  For deep and complex personal reasons I was unable to respond to this lengthy letter immediately.  However, when Lorde came to Boston to give a poetry reading that summer, I made a point of attending it and spoke with her briefly.  I told her that I would like to discuss her letter in person so that we would have an adequate opportunity to understand each other in the dialogue, and I suggested places where we might meet for a discussion. Our meeting did in fact take place at the Simone de Beauvoir conference in New York on September 29, 1979.  In the course of that hour-or-so-long meeting we discussed my book and her response.  I explained my positions clearly, or so I thought.  I pointed out, for example, in answer to Audre Lorde’s objection that I failed to name Black goddesses, that Gyn/Ecology is not a compendium of goddesses. Rather, it focuses primarily on myths and symbols which were direct sources of christian myth. Apparently Lorde was not satisfied, although she did not indicate this at the time. She later published and republished slightly altered versions of her original personal letter to me in This Bridge Called My Back and in Sister Outsider as an "Open Letter."
      It continues to be my judgment that public response in kind would not be a fruitful direction.  In my view Gyn/Ecology is itself an "Open Book."

--Mary Daly, from the 1990 introduction to Gyn/Ecology 

Writing this book is participating in a feminist process.  This is problematic.  For isn't a book by definition a "thing," an objectification of thinking/imagining/speaking?  Here is a book in my hands:  fixed, solid.  Perhaps--hopefully--its author no longer wholly agrees with it.  It is, at least partially, her past.  The dilemma of the living/verbing writer is real, but much of the problem resides in the way books are perceived.  If they are perceived/used/idolized as Sacred Texts (like the bible or the writings of chairman Mao), then of course the idolators are caught on a wheel that turns but does not move.

--Mary Daly, from the 1975 introduction to Gyn/Ecology

When I set it [i.e., the book Gyn/Ecology] free so it could be in the world, I did not see it as a work of perfection.  For some women it could be an Awakening shock, for others a Source of information, or a springboard from which they might Leap into their own A-mazing Searches, Words, Metaphors.
      Above all, I was acutely aware that I had not done or written everything.  I had not written the Last Word.  (Otherwise, how could I ever write again?)

--Mary Daly, from the 1990 introduction to Gyn/Ecology

In preparing to write this post, I re-read all of my favorite bloggers' obituarial responses to the death of Mary Daly.  Several patterns re-sound.  First, many thoughts are personal reflections, opportunities for each blog writer to reflect on her or his self identity (i.e., as an openly gay man who's never bothered reading Gyn/Ecology because of Daly's infamous transphobia; as a woman, a feminist, raised as a girl by a mother who was converted Catholic and strict, stricter than her father who was born Catholic; as a young woman, a fledgling woman studies scholar not so eager, just yet, to critique Daly for her obvious shortcomings; as a woman, a black woman, a transgendered black woman).  Second, most are grateful to Audre Lorde's critique of Daly as "full of privilege," white privilege and born-woman privilege.  Third, hardly any neglects marking Daly as transphobic.

What I didn't see when I wrote an earlier post, and when re-reading so many of my favorite bloggers posts, and before re-reading Gyn/Ecology in Boston last week is how Bonnie Mann starts her re-view of Daly's book. Mann begins:

"I began using Gyn/Ecology in my work with battered women because it is a book that faces the big Questions."

This is the true value of Daly's work, and I want to explain what I mean by "This."  I began this post on Gyn/Ecology with words, open words.  The "di-a/logue" or "de-bate" or "di-s/pute" with Daly can be, I think, "di-s/en-chant-ment" with ourselves.  This is not to say that we cannot blame much of who we are on The Patriarchy.

In other words, in less Dalyesque words perhaps, I'm trying to say that words have consequences of power.

The true value of Daly's work is for the battered woman, whether you are one or not.  You might be the batterer of a woman.  Why won't you cry, then, re-reading about the consequences of your power?  The culpability of re-covery and di-s/covery is very very personal, very individual.  You sit and read these words, of mine, in silence, or aloud.  You choose.


When I sat in Boston, reading, I cried.  You cannot know where these words met me, where inside me.  Gyn/Ecology reads, to me, like the Bible.  In other words, they (i.e., Daly's words) are not written to me, perhaps not even at me, although the latter is more likely since I am a man, heterosexed (and I am also white), a pinnacle part of that elite establishment of higher education of the world's superpower, America.  These words are now old, two decades old.  They open up to Lorde's critique, if you will, a debate not necessarily one you and I are so involved in.  And yet you hear yourself, don't you?  It's been two decades, twenty years now, and how far have we come, other than to put Mary Daly this year in a box (a pine box or others of our own construction)?  Let me re-read Daly's words, here, from her 15 years of reflection after first writing them the first time, lest you hear them somehow (and want, also, to change, want for change, open):

      In Gyn/Ecology I went beyond the scope of Beyond God the Father.  First, the analysis is not restricted to christianity but extends to the universality of patriarchal religion itself....  I wrote to expose the atrocities perpetrated against women under patriarchy on a planetary scale....
     Since Gyn/Ecology was published, the agents of patriarchal evil [some 15 years later] have invaded women and nature with more and more virulent attacks....
      To list a few of these "developments":  A ten-billion-dollar pornography industry has developed and continues to escalate; its images of the torture, murder, and dismemberment of women and girls are everywhere, "inspiring" more and more rapists and sex murderers to copy these images.  Women battering and incest are alarmingly widespread.  The reality of these horrors has always existed under patriarchy, but in recent years there has been an increase not only of information about them but also of the "practices" themselves.  There has been an upsurge of international trafficking in women.  Women of color are the primary victims of this atrocity as well as all other crimes.  The demand for child prostitutes is enormous, especially around military bases and as "tourist attractions."  The new reproductive technologies have developed at an alarming rate, taking on new forms that reduce women to subhuman "subjects" of experimentation.  The torture of animals in laboratories and in agribusiness beggars description.  And the Life-killers continue to kill the earth and its inhabitants. (pages xxiv - xxv)

Collective Memory Loss or Deliberate Suppression?

      [Martin] Luther's suggestion that Apollos is the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews has much to commend it.  Should this be the case, we would be indebted to Priscilla for many of the insights contained in that great document.
      Even more intriguing is the theory that Priscilla herself is the author of Hebrews (A. Harnack. A. S. Peake, O. Michel, R. Hoppin, among others).
      It is not inconceivable that Priscilla had been commissioned by church leaders to address the issue of the relation of the two covenants.  As a Jewish leader who had been associated with the now-deceased apostle Paule during his teaching ministry, she would be uniquely qualified to write authoritatively on an issue that they had confronted together repeatedly in their ministries to Jewish-Gentile churches.  Because of the antifemale bias of the Judeo-Christian congregations, she may have been requested to write anonymously, with her identity known only by the local leaders who had given her the assignment.  In this manner she would be able to address the issue from her expertise as a scholar of Jewish background, under the cover of apostolic authority derived from her close association with the apostle Paul and other worthies of the apostolic church.
      In so doing, she may also have set a precedent for nonapostles such as Mark, James, and Jude, but especially for Luke, as he wrote the third Gospel and the book of Acts, both anonymous in the text but authoritative for the church on the strength of Luke's association with Paul.  This device of semi-anonymity would enable her to direct her exhortations to Christians wavering between the two covenants without her gender being an obstacle for the acceptance of her message by the tradition-bound Judaizing belivers.   This theory would help explain a number of baffling features of the epistle.
      a.  It could account for the absence of an authorial superscription and the conspiracy of anonymity that surrounded its authorship in the ancient church.  The lack of any firm data concerning the identity of the author in the extant writings of the church suggests a deliberate suppression more than a case of collective memory loss....
      b.  ....
      c.  ....
      d.  ....
      e.  ....
      f.   ....
      g.  ....  The same Priscilla who taught Apollos when he was already an eloquent man--well versed in Scripture, instructed in the way of the Lord, fervent in spirit, speaking and teaching accurately the things concerning Jesus (Acts 18:24-26)--could be the one who continues to nurture the life and thought of the church through this ageless portion of Scripture.

-- The above is an excerpt from a footnote from pages 248-250 of a book by Gilbert Bilezikian, Beyond Sex Roles: What the Bible Says about a Woman's Place in Church and Family.  The bold font above is my emphasis.

The multiple links within the excerpt above are to the same blogpost, by Rachel Marszalek, "Woman is a misbegotten male", the title of which, of course, is a quotation of Thomas Aquinas, who, of course, is quoting "the philosopher," who, of course, is Aristotle.  The first link I've made above is on Martin Luther, whom Marszalek quotes as saying, "Eve originally was more equally a partner with Adam, but because of sin the present woman is a far inferior creature. Because she is responsible for the Fall, woman is in a state of subjugation. The man rules the home and the world, wages war and tills the soil. The woman is like a nail driven into the wall, she sits at home."  We can only guess what Luther might have made of Apollos's apprenticeship under Priscilla.

I am not a conspiracy theorist.  I am, nonetheless, especially during women's history month, wondering how it is that so much of our histories foreground men and suppress and silence women in the shadows.  I thought it might be worth reconsidering the absence of a named author for the Jewish-Christian book, "Hebrews."

I'm prompted to keep the theory of Priscilla as a possible author in the foreground when, today, Michael F. Bird posts that "There has been interesting proposals on this topic [of 'The Authorship of Hebrews'] of late."  But Bird, in his subsequent and extensive interview with proposer Andrew Pitts, allows Pitts to gloss over the proposed possibility of the female author:

3. Could you summarize what it is about Hebrews that indicates that it is Pauline and what suggests that there is a Lucan hand involved?

We also find it difficult to imagine another person in early Christianity with the background necessary to produce such a composition. We don’t have enough information to make solid judgments regarding the abilities of many proposed authors (Barnabas, Pricilla, Apollos, etc.).

So, if you read what Pitts is saying today, in contrast with what Bilezikian is proposing, then once again none of the silence in history is really addressed.  Thus, it might again be time to look carefully at the text of Hebrews itself.  More than a year ago now, Wayne Leman got several looking at and discussing the question of Priscilla as an author, quoting blogger EricW's question:  "So, how strong or good is the argument that the masculine participle in Hebrews 11:32 by which the author refers to himself rules out female authorship?" (Note in the comments thread how author Ruth Hoppin answers:  "You asked if the participle in Heb. 11:32 rules out female authorship. Although this claim is often asserted, the answer is no, it doesn’t.").

Can the question of collective memory loss or deliberate suppression ever go away?

If Your Body's Sexed Female, Your Art Shows

Our first-born child is closing in on getting his B.A. in studio Art.  His portfolio earned him a scholarship to college, where he's continued to make and show new works and to win awards.  Nonetheless, like so many artists who want careers, he's done some work as an "art student" for free for patrons, and for some for a little bit of cash too.  There are these sexist phrases the art community uses for such:  "art slut" and "art whore" (or, if you're chic, "art prostitute").

Our youngest child has an equal interest and an equal ability in fine arts too.  And yet her body's sexed female, which gets us remembering during women's history month that it's more than just English phrases that are sexist in art.  Unless things change soon and much more, she will as an artist struggle more than her brother -- just because she's a woman.  Thankfully, the Guerrilla Girls have been working, since 1985, to show some art (industry) change that's needed with respect to women.

Take a look at "The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist" and ask with them "Do Women Have to be Naked to get into the Met. Museum?"

If Your Body's Sexed Female, Mind the Gap

Imagine the gap between the train door and the station platform being greater for you, if your body's sexed female, than for everybody else (i.e., for those whose bodies are sexed male).  Now, wouldn't that be absurd?

And yet, historically and currently, the gap between what a woman earns, because she's a woman, and what everybody else earns (i.e., men) is absurdly great.  Here's the latest:

No where among developed and developing nations has the gender wage gap been greater for women than in Korea (Catherine Rampell at Economix, HT Michael Kruse at Kruse Kronicle; go here for the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index with worldwide rankings).

Given John Hobbins's comments this week, I wonder why Korea. 

Hobbins has asserted that "Korean Christianity remains strongly complementarian [i.e., male is the leader over females] in the pulpit and the home: hardly surprising, given the compatibility of New Testament teaching with traditional Korean mores in that sense."  Hobbins is trying to argue that "complementarian" Christianity is "the primary cultural slope on which cultural change has occurred in South Korea."  He is attempting to debate the claim made by the Economist that, in Korea, it's been the "forces of modernity" that "first exacerbated [gender] prejudice--then overwhelmed it."  Hobbins cannot bring himself to acknowledge that "complementarian" Christianity is one of the forces of modernity.  (But it is.)  Hobbins likely won't bring himself to acknowledge the co-incidence between male-over-female cultural teachings and the persistent gender wage gap in Korea.

It's approaching a quarter of a century now since Korea passed its Equal Employment Opportunity Act, in 1988, which guaranteed protection by gender in employment, and still there's little improvement.  If you ask Koreans why, the answer typically is that it's the woman's choice.  But at least one Korean economist has compared "individual women’s rational choices" against "gendered devaluation and social closure"; and Dong-ju Lee concludes that "sex segregation" and "male chauvinism or social closure" have likely been "the most important mechanism[s] generating women’s low income and low economic status" in Korea since 1997.  As we all know, economic theories and speculations offer only so much in explaining co-incidence of societal attitudes and wage conditions.  (And yet, there remains this nagging suspicion of a causal co-incidence, as the person whose body's sexed female must continue to mind the gap between herself and everybody else.)

If Your Body's Sexed Female, "Who Do You Think You Are"

Have you caught the histories being written on NBC's new series from executive producer, Emmy Award winner, Lisa Kudrow?  It's called "Who Do You Think You Are":

The program is part documentary, part reality show — all with the added appeal of a little celebrity dish. Sarah Jessica Parker, running back Emmitt Smith, Brooke Shields and Susan Sarandon are among those who delve into their respective histories. Kudrow’s episode, the third of seven in the series, airs on March 19.

And women are written into personal and public history for the first time.

In the first episode, "Sarah [Jessica Parker]'s father's side of the family dates back to Eastern European Jewish, but there is a lot unknown about her mother's side."  Much of this then becomes known.

In the second episode, "Emmitt [Smith] wants to know how he connects to the motherland of Africa and what impact that has on who he is."  Julie and I watched this one Friday evening and were drawn to tears with Smith as he learns of his great, great, great, great grandmother Mariah Puryear and her unsung heroism.

Watch

If Your Body's Sexed Female, Make Front Page News

If Your Body's Sexed Female,
Your Front Page News
Flies Real High, if
66 years
later

Female aviators honored for service during WWII

By MARIA RECIO

Fort Worth Star-Telegram Mar. 10, 2010

"....  Still, they aren't a bitter bunch.

'All we ever ask is that our overlooked history not be a missing chapter in the history of the Air Force, in the history of World War II and, most of all, in the history of America,' said Deanie Parrish of Waco, [Texas,] who was chosen to speak for the WASPs at the ceremony and to receive the Congressional Gold Medal on behalf of all the fliers."

If Your Body's Sexed Female, Who's First in History How?

It's interesting how history is written this month.  Yes, this month in 2010.  What's written is making (sexed) history.  In some month some time from now, some of us or our grandchildren will look back and see how we've gendered our memory:

Via my iPhone, I get news feeds and some of those feeds include "history firsts."  On March 9, for example, I got these two items.

Notice in this first one below, there's mention of 19 males but only 3 females, if you include also the plastic doll "Barbie."  The history spans from 1454 to 2010.

http://www.answers.com/topic/tuesday-march-9-2010-from-today-s-highlights-archive

Now see in this second one here, written by a woman even to focus exclusively on women, the history is given month by month but only goes back to 1805 and never makes it forward past 1995.

http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/03/09/v-mobile/2026277/a-look-at-womens-history-milestones.html

I'm sure these "histories" are only random samples of other writings of history that are much better, much more accurate and fuller representations of people who are firsts in history.  But as my children increasingly get history bits through technologies like I'm trying to adopt, well I wonder.

One encouraging piece comes via the WhiteHouse App on my iPhone from US Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis.  Maybe its the stories more than the soundbites that will endure.  Here's Solis's first:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/03/09/values-behind-international-women-s-day-0

If Your Body's Sexed Female, Science Really?

I was going to post on what famous scientists (i.e., powerful males) have objectively observed about females.  You know, Aristotle the biologist wrote that females have fewer teeth than males, have the "virtue" more of obedience than of the normal (i.e., male) virtue of leadership, have a mutilated body as opposed to a naturally formed one (i.e., male), have no rational soul (as men have), and have no contribution to make to procreative biology (i.e., sperm, semen, and such) other than a bit of "matter."  You know, Sigmund Freud the psychologist wrote that females are "mutilated and must learn to accept deformity" (i.e., their lack, what he identifies as their "Penisneid").  You wonder with me then, about Simon Baron-Cohen the biological psychologist who writes about the essential hard-wire difference between females and males in the extreme brain.

But I think what gets missed, who gets forgotten, are all the famous scientists (yes women).  For starters:

Biologists:

A Nancy Andrews (biologist) María de los Ángeles Alvariño González Agnes Arber Ruth Arnon Ana Aslan B Leslie Barnett Yvonne Barr Isobel Bennett Elizabeth Blackburn Alejandra Bravo Gertrude Simmons Burlingham C Deborah Charlesworth Sallie W. Chisholm Eugenie Clark Pascale Cossart Ursula Cowgill Morag Crichton Timbury D Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Morgan Dee Voon Eugenia Del Pino Lillian Dyck E Sylvia Earle Anne H. Ehrlich Rosa Smith Eigenmann F Marilyn Farquhar Wendy Foden Margaret Fountaine Rosalind Franklin Claire M. Fraser Elaine Fuchs G Birutė Galdikas Runhild Gammelsæter Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch Jane Goodall

G cont. Temple Grandin Carol W. Greider H Judith Goslin Hall Annie Francé-Harrar Sue Hartley Elizabeth Lee Hazen Nancy Hopkins (scientist) Ruth Hubbard J Janice E. Clements K Janet Kear Cynthia Kenyon Alice L. Kibbe Helen Dean King Mary-Claire King Nicole King L Nicole Marthe Le Douarin Esther Lederberg Rita Levi-Montalcini Lisa Hensley Susana López Charreton Ana María López Colomé Jane Lubchenco Mary F. Lyon M M. Christine Zink Barbara McClintock Anne McLaren Lynn Margulis Philippa Marrack Polly Matzinger Barbara J. Meyer Beatrice Mintz N Nalini Nadkarni Dorothy M. Needham Margaret Morse Nice

N cont. Eva Nogales O Tomoko Ohta Esther Orozco P Elizabeth Peckham Dawn Prince-Hughes R Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner F. Gwendolen Rees Anita Roberts Miriam Rothschild Janet Rowley S Kiki Sanford Barbara A. Schaal Stephanie Schwabe Beth Shapiro Anne Simon Maxine Singer Joan Slonczewski Marian Stamp Dawkins Sandra Steingraber Joan A. Steitz Nettie Stevens T Kathleen Taylor Shirley M. Tilghman Ruth Turner U Irene Ayako Uchida V Jeanne Villepreux-Power Ellen Vitetta W D. J. Wallis Florence Wambugu Susan R. Wessler Y Ada Yonath Z Mayana Zatz

Chemists:

B Leslie Barnett Irina Beletskaya Ruth R. Benerito Helen M. Berman Carolyn R. Bertozzi Hazel Bishop Rachel Fuller Brown C Mildred Cohn Marie Curie F Mary Peters Fieser Rosalind Franklin Helen Murray Free Elizabeth Fulhame

G Louise Giblin Mary L. Good H Anna J. Harrison Dorothy Hodgkin I Clara Immerwahr J Allene Jeanes Irène Joliot-Curie K Stephanie Kwolek L Jeehiun Lee Jing Li Kathleen Lonsdale M Maud Menten N Elizabeth Ann Nalley Dorothy M. Needham

N cont. Pauline Newman O Wilma Olson P Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze Lucy Weston Pickett Agnes Pockels S Katsuko Saruhashi Patsy O'Connell Sherman Maxine Singer Hertha Sponer T Mária Telkes Margaret Thatcher U Kathryn Uhrich

Physicists:

A Mildred Allen B Rama Bansil Laura Bassi Jocelyn Bell Burnell Marietta Blau Harriet Brooks Elsa Beata Bunge C Émilie du Châtelet Heather Couper Marie Curie D Dušanka Đokić Louise Dolan Persis Drell Mildred Dresselhaus E Helen T. Edwards Eva Ekeblad F Sylvia Fedoruk Ursula Franklin

F cont. Katherine Freese G Mary K Gaillard Beatriz Gato-Rivera Anita Goel Maria Goeppert-Mayer Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber H Geertruida de Haas-Lorentz Lene Hau J Shirley Jackson (physicist) K Karen Kavanagh Evelyn Fox Keller Hedwig Kohn L Hélène Langevin-Joliot Alice Leigh-Smith Renate Loll M Mileva Marić Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara Lise Meitner

M cont. Luise Meyer-Schützmeister Sameera Moussa N Ann Nelson Heidi Jo Newberg O Luisa Ottolini P Melba Phillips R Lisa Randall Heather Reid S Eva Silverstein Hertha Sponer V Carolyne M. Van Vliet W Hertha Wambacher Beth Willman Adrienne Wootters Chien-Shiung Wu X Xie Xide Y Vera Yurasov

Psychologists:

Nancy Chodorow

Florence Denmark

Anna Freud

Karen Horney

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Inez Beverly Prosser

Who else are we forgetting and who must we remember?

How Do You (if your body's sexed female and colored black) Read Leviticus 25?

Publication of any sort is an intrinsically social act, "I" having no reason to speak aloud unless I posit "you" there listening; but your presence is especially vital if I am seeking not to disclose the economic benefits of fish farming in Zäire, or to recount the imaginary tribulations of an adulterous doctor's wife in nineteenth-century France, but to reconnect myself—now so utterly transformed by events unlike any I've experienced before as to seem a stranger even to myself—to the human community....lending materiality to my readerly ideal, transform monologue into intercourse.

--Nancy Mairs

John Hobbins has written a series of posts to suggest that Leviticus 25 is a text that seeks to abolish slavery.  His penultimate post is the best, because he also talks there about slavery in India particularly, links to the wikipedia entry on slavery generally, and acknowledges that Torah says one abolitionist thing but is practiced differently.  Too bad he didn't say more of that or talk some, during this women's history month, about the on-going problems of trafficking and enslavement of females around the world.  Too bad there's not less of a monologue on the text, the text of Leviticus 25 as if it were a monologue.

Torah with its Leviticus says other things too, but that's not Hobbins's purpose.  For some time, he's been trying to unlink slavery and so-called "complementary" marriage in the Bible.  And so, to begin one of his posts in the series, he says,

A bunch of what is available online on the topic of slavery is written by people who don't know the first thing about slavery or class or economics or racism and who bring up the subject of slavery in order to denigrate the Bible insofar as the Bible regulates slavery instead of abolishing it. Still others transform the Bible into an egalitarian tract written thousands of years before egalitarianism existed.  Neither of these anachronistic approaches has anything to commend it if the goal is to understand the Bible on its own terms.

This is a straw-man attack of no one in particular.  Hobbins is being kind here by not naming anyone.  But, however, and nevertheless, he does talk about "the Bible on its own terms" as if he's not interpreting it for us his readers (especially his readers who, he believes, use the Bible as "an egalitarian tract").  This is what sounds to me like a monologue.  John is monologing, and he wants the Bible "on its own terms" to monologue.

(I intended to dialogue with him through comments to his post, but for some reason his blog isn't letting me.  So hopefully no one will mind much if they have to read my responsive thoughts over here.  And you are welcome to dialogue here if you like.)

Torah unread or unpracticed or unread in all its problematic glory is a very troublesome thing.  There's a very real sense in which it can never be so abstracted.  It can't be abstracted away from practice.  And it can't be abstracted away as the pure original textual ideal, the intention of a single author, Moses, and really God, perhaps.  And it can't be abstracted away from all the other things it says.  As Nancy Mairs puts it, "Publication of any sort is an intrinsically social act."

The fact is that readers do not use Torah so much as an abolitionist text.  Nor do they appeal to Moses, or God, in the abstract.  Just as soon as the five books were boxed and carried across the desert into the brutally-invaded lands, there was slavery.  Worse, much of all that was published in the box justified slavery and the subjugation of females by the men who read it. 

Then, later, in another land of goyim called the USA, the struggle for abolition didn't much refer to Torah in general or Leviticus in particular.  Men such as Frederick Douglass, for example, combed through the Bible to find ways to dialogue with others about slavery and abolition; but he didn't refer to Leviticus 25.  (Douglass, of course, did not say "God loves slavery" as the atheists writing about him on this rather monologic site infer that he should have said if he were logical.  My point here is not to suggest that the Bible says that God is pro-slavery or that God is abolitionist.  Rather, I'm wanting to stress that the Bible can't be read in human isolation.  Atheists can't read it that way; and neither do believers.  So Douglass reads it but just doesn't read Leviticus 25 as his abolitionist text).

Likewise, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lillie Devereux Blake -- fighting alongside Douglass for women's rights and for abolition of slaves in America  --  found the slavery issue in Leviticus inextricably bound to the treatment of women.  The former suffragette, looking at Lev. 14:20-22, saw "the cruel injustice of the comparative severity of the punishment for man and [a slave] woman for the same offence"; and the latter saw how in Leviticus the class of male-only priests subjugated females (not only mothers and daughters of the lesser classes but also even the ewes of the flocks of sheep).  These white women, like the black man who fought for his own freedom, dialogued with the text and with others about the text but never to uncouple the issues of slavery and the problems of female subjugation intermeshed there.

In the post-abolition USA, there is still reluctance to read Torah as an abolitionist text.  Our contemporaries whose families suffered slavery in this country and throughout the African diaspora don't tend to see Torah in the same way as those of us whose families justified slavery by the scriptures. 

Steed Vernyl Davidson, Justin Ukpone, and Gosnell Yorke, for example, say "texts used to justify slavery and to encourage pious acceptance of suffering and oppression do not appear with the same level of authority in the discourse of Africans in North America...  The Bible in the hands of Africans differs from that held by Euro-Americans."

And Rev. Dr. Madeline McLenney-Sadler says something more.  She's in dialogue with other African American women and their sisters in the Africana Diaspora who are in dialogue with the published text of Leviticus.  McLenney-Sadler says:

In the United States, African American women’s spirituality is often shaped in the crucible of heartache, assault, and neglect by those who use the name of love in vain….  We could go shouting to Zion about the instructions in Leviticus and its divinely inspired moral apex were it not for the face that the very same book that forbids abuses of power within the family…, requires fairness…, and demands atonement for both unintentional and intentional wrongdoing… also gives Israelites permission to enslave non-Israelites and use them as breeding machines (Lev. 25:44).  As Roberta Flack and the Black Eyed Peas would ask, “Where is the love?”   As Hebrew Professor [Dr. Randall C.] Bailey ... cogently argues [in his essay, “They're Nothing But Incestuous Bastards: The Polemical Use of Sex and Sexuality in the Hebrew Canon Narratives, 1995], Christians must be careful with the use and application of passages that appear to condone oppressive ideologies.” 

There is no twenty-first-century feel-good response that can make Lev. 25:44 spiritually comprehensible for a spiritual people seeking deliverance in the Africana Diaspora. 

[the above here is an excerpt from McLenney-Sadler's chapter, “Leviticus,” on page 91, in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel's Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora.  (HT David Ker)]

Notice how McLenney-Sadler with other African American and African Diaspora women -- like other men and women, white and black, such as Vernyl Davidson, Ukpone, Yorke, Cady Stanton, Devereux Blake, and Douglass  -- cannot easily separate the subjugation of women from the subjugation of slaves in Leviticus.  Moreover, they don't easily abstract abolitionism from the text as if it speaks alone, in monologue, without respect to them.  They're not making pronouncements about whether God loves slavery or whether the Bible speaks for itself to abolish it.  They must dialogue; they must view any publication as an intrinsically social act.  And, as we all know, they're hardly “people who don't know the first thing about slavery or class or economics or racism and who bring up the subject of slavery in order to denigrate the Bible insofar as the Bible regulates slavery instead of abolishing it.”

If Your Body's Sexed Female, Whence Thou Deserveth the "Best" Oscar

On the eve of International Women’s Day [which is today], Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director, for her Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker. She is one of only five women to have even been nominated for this prestigious award, and last night she fought off competition from James Cameron’s epic Avatar, among others, to win six Oscars for her film. A glass ceiling has undoubtedly been shattered here, and about time too.... To put Bigelow’s win in context, the Oscars have been running for 82 years; it took over eight decades for the representation of women in this illustrious category to leap from 0% to 1.2% (and it hardly needs pointing out that the representation of non-white, LGBTQI or disabled women still stands at 0%). That figure surely shows that however much it may be cause for celebration, Bigelow’s win also serves to remind us that Hollywood is still overwhelmingly dominated by white, straight, cis, able-bodied males.

-- Amy Clare, "Hollywood glass ceiling is shattered, but women are still losing out in film and TV," The F-Word Blog

Kathryn is the first woman to ever win in the Director category, and as was pointed out by AnnaLeighClark on twitter last night, it happened just before midnight and the start of International Women's Day. Also, as Shelby Knox pointed out, the statistics about this award were pretty stark: 82 years, 400 nominations, 4 women nominated, 1 awarded.

-- Miriam Perez, "Feminist highlights from the Academy Awards," Feministing

Throughout the entire broadcast, I was seething that they'd seated James Cameron directly behind Kathryn Bigelow, so every time they got a shot of her, they also got a shot of her ex-husband looking over her shoulder like some grim specter, evoking the Battle of the Sexes as which their dueling director-best film nods had been framed by the media. Ugh....  But then the most magical thing happened. Kathryn Bigelow won Best Director! FIRST WOMAN EVARRR! And then she kept! winning! The Hurt Locker destroyed Avatar! Suddenly no more shots of James Cameron. Har har Battle of the Sexes isn't so funny when women win, .... I didn't even love The Hurt Locker ..., and I would have much rather seen Precious kick the pants off of Avatar, but, given the whole tiresome Battle of the Sexes set-up of Bigelow vs. Cameron (and given the fact that I can't stand James Cameron), I was positively delighted to watch Bigelow walk up onto that stage again and again. Wheeeeeeeee!

-- Melissa McEwan, "Oscars Open Thread," Shakesville

More than just a blow-’em-up extravaganza, journalist Reed Johnson [in his essay "Kathryn Bigelow: An outsider looking in"] suggests that Bigelow’s film “shakes up traditional ideas of what men are and how they act.” Bigelow likes the big bang in her movies — guns, explosions, a rough-punch to the gut. And in The Hurt Locker, there’s plenty of that rugged, isolated individualism that so often defines modern manhood. But Bigelow is more deeply interested in the warrior codes of masculinity that are intertwined with men’s fears and feelings, and their conflicted impulses around loyalty and leadership, posturing and parenthood....  Still, there’s a ways to go in cracking the celluloid ceiling....  As Jane Fonda comments on Huffington Post, there are great moments in film this year, thanks to women in Hollywood. Five years ago, Fonda, with Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan, founded the Women’s Media Center to keep pointing out that “women are not only assets but requirements for a truly democratic media, and for strong, innovative entertainment.” We need to improve the numbers of women and people of color among the Hollywood players. But it helps that directors like Bigelow are shifting images of gender and masculinity in our everyday movie faves. This, too, is an important step toward gender justice....  Oh, and postscript. Thanks to Reed Johnson, I have a clever new phrase that I plan to use in a sentence today: Stealth Feminist. Brill!

-- Shira Tarrant, "THE MAN FILES: The Hurt Locker Blows Up More Than Bombs," Girl W/ Pen

One reporter said Bigelow had been reluctant to call herself a female director, asking, "Are you ready to say that now at this historic moment?"  Bigelow replied, "First of all, I hope I’m the first of many. And of course I’d love to just think of myself as a filmmaker, and I wait for the day when the modifier can be a moot point."  "But I’m very grateful if I can inspire some young, intrepid, tenacious male or female filmmakers and make them feel that the impossible is possible," she added.

-- Steve Pond, "Bigelow Backstage: 'Don't Give Up'"

If Your Body's Sexed Female, Why You May Provoke Re-Membering

At this blog, you've read the phrase "bodies sexed female."  It's a particularly (intentionally) provocative phrase, I think.  It's evocative, to me, in ways reminding me of why some women write, of why Christine de Pizan (writing The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies) and Laura Cereta (writing her letter to Bibolo Semproni) had to write to regender the corpus of male-only history books.

I first heard the phrase "bodies sexed female" from historian Cheryl Glenn.  Glenn is one of our contemporary de Pizans and Ceretas.  She's a good one to listen to during our "women's history month" in the USA.  (Canada's and India's will be in October).  She knows that the body of books inscribing our histories is male only by and large.  Listen:

For the past twenty-five hundred years in Western culture, the ideal woman has been disciplined by cultural codes that require a closed mouth (silence), a closed body (chastity), and an enclosed life (domestic confinement). . .

Rhetoric always inscribes the relation of language and power at a particular moment (including who may speak, who may listen or who will agree to listen, and what can be said); therefore, canonical rhetorical history has represented the experience of males, powerful males, with no provision or allowance for females. . .

Except for rhetoric, no intellectual endeavor—not even the male bastion of philosophy—has so consciously rendered women invisible and silent. . . .

And hear why:

Even though gender is merely a concept borrowed from grammar, it, nevertheless, continues to have far-reaching effects on cultural notions of the relation between the sexed body and its behavior.

Men have appropriated many public social practices, particularly prestigious practices like rhetoric, as universally masculine; the feminine experience (that of bodies sexed female) has come to represent exceptions, or the particular.

And listen to the conclusion of Glenn's Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance:

     I am gratified to be concluding this project, but I must resist closure.  A regendered, retold rhetorical tradition opens up--not closes down--investigation into rhetorical practices.  Even though gender is merely a concept borrowed from grammar, it, nevertheless, continues to have far-reaching effects on cultural notions of the relation between the sexed body and its behavior.  Gendered experiences continue to be difficult, if not impossible, to separate from human ones.  And for that reason alone, the masculine gender, just like male experience or display, has come to represent the universal.  Men have appropriated many public social practices, particularly prestigious practices like rhetoric, as universally masculine; the feminine experience (that of bodies sexed female) has come to represent exceptions, or the particular.

     In regendering the tradition [of the history of rhetoric], I have not gone so far as to "destroy gender" or even to "abolish the category of gender" (Wittig 67).  Instead, I have analyzed distributions of power along the axis of gender that have for too long been easily accepted as nature's empirical design for masculine superiority, for patriarchal representations of the universal.  This discourse of regendering has allowed me to examine gender(ed) performances within and across cultural constructions of the body, human identity, and power.

     To this end, the project of regendering rhetorical history is a feminist performative act, a commitment to the future of women, a promise that rhetorical histories and theories will eventually (and naturally) include women.  Of course, gender as a category of analysis contributes to this feminist project, but it is regendering that unsettles stable gender categories and enacts a promise that rhetorical history will be a continuous process of investigating the works of women and men rather than a final product that can be finally or universally represented.  As soon as it is written, any historical interpretation--including this regendered rhetorical tradition from antiquity through the Renaissance--becomes an anachronism, for it immediately codes its own investigative site as needing/deserving more attention....

Now, ask with Glenn, "is there a 'woman's' or a 'feminine' rhetoric?"  And consider why you may provoke with your answers (by listening to Glenn's conclusion in Andrea A. Lunsford's Reclaiming Rhetorica:  Women in the Rhetorical Tradition):

Usually, such rhetoric comes out of bodies sexed female.... it has surely come out of the mouths of men as well, of African Americans, of political prisoners, of the poor, the uneducated, the weak....  [Such rhetoric of] the (seemingly) disempowered could and does continually incite such powerful response ... those in power are all too often enraged by such rhetoric.