Women in Christ: Toward a New Feminism / Edition 1

by Michele M. Schumacher

Overview

The challenge of promoting the "new feminism" has barely been addressed since it was first launched by Pope John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae. The thirteen contributors in this book, all outstanding international scholars, take up this task, together laying the necessary theoretical foundation for the new feminism. These chapters articulate an integral philosophical and theological understanding of persons that moves beyond patriarchy on the one hand and traditional feminism on the other. Central to the new perspective offered here is the biblical revelation of the human person - man and woman - in Christ, a vision that directs women beyond the "male" standard against which they have too often been measured. Far from constraining women to an "eternal essence," the dynamic view presented here encourages each woman to realize herself in perfect Christian freedom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802812940
Publisher:	Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Publication date:	10/15/2007
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.75(d)

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WOMEN IN CHRIST

Toward a New Feminism

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William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2004 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8028-1294-5

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Chapter One

PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Gender Difference: Critical Questions concerning Gender Studies

Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz Translated by Grant Kaplan

With the arrival of the new millennium, the question no longer concern the dualism between mind and nature, of the mind's own corporality and whether it is conditioned by the body (Körper). Instead this matter has been resolved and the body (Körper) itself has now become a focus of concern. The postmodern dissolution of the boundary between interior and exterior, organic and inorganic, masculine and feminine, mind and matter, culminates in the loss of the distinction between bodily representation and bodily reality. The desire for the fragmentary and the heterogeneous has shed the strait-jacket imposed by modernity but also opened the door to a nihilistic disintegration. Human bodies (Körper) function as mere object of art ..., they form living sculptures, fluctuating loci of action, or they are simply "undifferentiated matter." As a cultural artifact, the body loses its rigidity and stability. The notion of a social construct is taken literally and arises with the attempt to make one's own existence no longer dependent on the previous contingency of the body to which it belongs, but instead to self-consciously reform itself and to re-engineer itself at will.

How do we arrive at such a claim?

The Integral Compatibility of the Body, Soul, and Mind: Edith Stein's Phenomenology

The question about the "essence of the woman" has been taboo at least since Simone de Beauvoir. The "woman" becomes a woman because she is "made" to be so. Therefore lever definitions like Gertrude von le Fort's typical formulation for the thirties - that the essence of the woman is surrender [Hingabe] - have been deemed nonsense. Most scholarship concerning gender does not ask "What is a woman?" but "How does one become a woman?" From such a standpoint, ontological expressions or phenomenological analyses of essence appear to be excluded or relegated to normative futility.

The student of Husserl and temporary women's rights advocate, Edith Stein (1891-1942) sought in the 1920s and 1930s to approach the question of woman from a phenomenological standpoint. More specifically, she sought to examine in her own life the "phenomena" of female corporality and to use these phenomena as analytic points of departure for expressions of essence. Stein's statements are more expansive than can be articulated in this essay. This said, her formulation, a valuable alternative to the present debate about gender, is oriented quite clearly toward a natural basis, namely, the corporality of the body.

Stein applies as a principle the old scholastic maxim anima forma corporis - the soul is the form of the body. Of course, the correlate of this statement means that the body is the bearer and expression of something interior. In order to determine at least to some extent how women differ from men, the observation of the body serves as a principle of the female soul and mind. Naturally Stein does not define the woman only in terms of what makes her different from a man. Rather she repeatedly attempts to clarify an "essential" distinction of the sexes through their bodily difference. From such an analysis she seeks to locate more precisely the unique dignity (Selbstwürdigung) of the woman.

Stein begins with the fundamental and natural features of corporality which most clearly define a woman: readiness to receive (also to be understood as partnership with man) and motherhood (in relation to children) as capacities conditioned by the body of the feminine species. Both qualities lead to statements about a soul-like "inside."

The primary calling of the woman is the procreation and raising of children; for this, the man is given to her as protector.... With the woman there are capabilities of caring, protesting, and promoting that which is becoming and growing. She has the gift thereby to live in an intimately bound physical compass and to collect her forces in silence; on the other hand, she is created to endure pain, to adapt and abnegate herself. Psychically she is directed to the concrete, the individual, and the personal: she has the ability to grasp the concrete in its individuality and to adapt herself to it, and she has the longing to help this peculiarity to its development.

Stein articulated these points in an interview: "I emphasize motherhood to define the form of the female psyche. While the female psyche is not bound to corporeal motherhood, we cannot lose this model of motherhood, regardless of where we stand. The malady of our time is the relinquishing of this motherhood." Corporeal guidelines decisively form the psychological as well as the spiritual realms. In the psychological this formation results essentially in a specific "empathy" - the faculty of a relationship with a man. This faculty extends to the artistic and scientific realm, in the empathy for the weak as for the strong. In this, women manifest a lofty and diverse availability, a support for fostering life other than one's own, a protection of the human in humanity-threatening areas like technology. The fundamental strength of the woman lies in the faculty for such "emotion." This emotion is aroused by everything human, especially in relation to the beautiful as well as the true. The woman's strength lies in these emotions, "where this world experiences the mysterious force and pull of another world." Stein asserts that such a situation explains the spontaneous female awe toward everything great or considered great - an awe that must be tempered by a responsible feminine formation (p.97).

Such conclusions result in some dubious claims to be regarded as conditioned by their time. In addition, Stein's claims indicate that a single (corporeal) principle, namely, motherhood, should not be applied too liberally. Stein claimed in 1932: "Epoch-making achievements by women are relatively scarce, and this may be explained in terms of woman's nature. Yet, the feminine gifts of empathy and adjustment enable her to participate, understand, and stimulate; she does so outstandingly as an assistant, an interpreter, or a teacher" (p.115). Derived exclusively from the corporality of the woman, a similarly disquieting result runs as follows:

The body of the woman is fashioned "to be one flesh "with another and to nurse new human life in itself. A well-disciplined body is an accommodating instrument for the mind which animates it; at the same time, it is a source of power and a place of dwelling for the mind. Just so, woman's soul is designed to be subordinate to man in obedience and support; it is also fashioned to be a shelter in which other souls may unfold. Both spiritual companionship and spiritual motherliness are not limited to the physical spouse and mother relationships, but they extend to all people with whom woman comes into contact. (p.132)

Stein engages here in the type of narrow thinking that she seeks to critique in other writings. Biological capacities are confused with historical developments (gender in today's lingo)and taken as a norm. An analysis of phenomena does not de facto prevent this confusion.

The attempt to locate the specifically feminine form of the mind (Geist) becomes noticeably difficult. For Stein the primary importance of the female mind consists in "a longing to give love and receive love, and in this respect a yearning to be elevated from narrow, day-to-day existence into the realm of a higher being" (p.93). The border between active and passive in the female intellectuality consists just as much in its own growth as in "stimulating and furthering the desire for perfection in others; this yearning can emerge in the most diverse forms and some of these forms may appear distorted, even degenerate. Such yearning is an essential aspect of the eternal destiny of women" (p.94).

These speculations by Stein seem too general, or one could even say too abstract. This stems from the fact that her claims demand further anthropological and psychological research, and Stein never had a thorough command of these fields. It helps to remember that her own discipline of phenomenology had difficulty actually distinguishing man and woman on the basis of "essential" mental characteristics. What appears obvious in corporality becomes less easily deduced in the conception of the soul, and appears forced in the defining of the mind.

Almost in spite of herself, Stein broadened the parameters of phenomenological characterization whenever she analyzed the history of women or developed wide-ranging approaches to women's education. The education of women involves the transition from education by others to self-formation. As a rule Stein emphasizes the plurality of these general guidelines, which are perhaps too general. Before every person lies the particular task of developing what has been given to her in her own unique way. Further, such a task requires great skill, and the possibility of failure always looms. Stein articulates the particularity of women most clearly when she places the female essence within human (personal, free, self-identical) essence. She remarks concerning Ibsen's Nora, "She knows that before she is able to try again to be a wife and a mother, she must first become a person" (p.91). She also writes, "Indeed, no woman is only woman" (p.49). From a historical perspective she observes that the realization of personhood in Europe occurred through the education of women by women, embodied in such visionary, religiously motivated school founders as Mary Ward and Angela Merici. Stein also sees such a realization in the efforts of the modern liberal women's movement since the nineteenth century. Even so, corporality - that the soul is embodied - remains essential:

That the human soul is within a material body ... is not inconsequential. The body [Lieb] is characterized as such, and it is distinguished from the pure material body [Körper] that also co-constitutes it. All of the body's conditions and everything that happens to it is sensed or can be sensed. Everything corporeal has an interior element. Where the body is, there is also an inner life. It is not only a material body (Körper) that feels, but belongs essentially as a body to a subject who thereby (i.e. through the body) senses, whose exterior form is thereby represented, who is thereby posited in the exterior world, who is thereby able to be creatively engaged, who thereby grasps his own condition.

The "female eunuch" is not yet in view.

Bodiless Philosophy - Lifeless Philosophy? Thought in the Wake of Reduced Anthropology

In the following section we will examine whether the current female self-definition remains virtual. Certain elements of the contemporary discussion reveal a deficient understanding of the body, and this understanding has been prevalent for some time. Beauvoir's "classic" definition has been reinterpreted by Regula Giuliani as the transitional body: "The body has become ... an inert object imprisoned by material, a mere instrument and tool that serves to realize mental desires more (with a male body) or less (with a female body) adequately." The purpose of being human is an individual one, described as "the way from me to myself." It is established independently of the body and of sex, and employs a new form of essentialism.

Such a disengagement from the body takes place not only in the male-dominated history of philosophy, but also within contemporary deconstructionalism and the philosophical feminism that employs the postmodern framework. The marginal role given the body indicates that philosophy has never placed much importance on the theme of the body and sex. The omission, reduction, and minimalization of the body, all hallmarks of Descartes's philosophy, bear traces in the present era as well. This modern reductionism introduces a quantification and mechanization of the world, and at the same time leads to a geometrization of the person. Freud on the other hand diagnoses as a "sickness "the affirmative modern consciousness that is distanced from the body. Consciousness is infiltrated by a subconscious drive and impulsive action that stems from the body. One can detect an unresolved tension in the Freudian theory, for it does not stress the integration of a natural desire, but instead understands this cultural repression as necessary for society. For Freud the body and mind remain in cultural tension. With the help of the "great reason of the body," Nietzsche's transvaluation of all values also lays the groundwork for twentieth-century reflections.

The depreciation of the body through a residual ambivalence - is the body a stabilization or limitation of identity? - in no way demonstrates an esoteric, secondary matter of inquiry but instead leads to valuable and essential questions concerning the present constitution of subjectivity. Even if no present consensus can be formulated regarding the body as a foundation of identity, there is no doubt a new "somatism" to combat a total negligence of the body. This new somatism fluctuates between a "self-definition" unable to distinguish between the person and the body, and a virtual reformation and even disintegration of the body in cyberspace.

The distinction between body and matter can serve as a linguistic demonstration for the problem at hand. The literature prefers for the most part "matter "to an already "animated "body. Such a preference places an accent on matter as a quantitative mechanism, as a res extensa. However, some phenomenological efforts articulate the experience of having a body as an integral principle for subjectivity. French phenomenology a knowledges the body as an indispensable constituent of human existence. Certainly Sartre does not overcome the antagonism between the body (Körper) "for myself" and the body (Körper) "for others." The internal and external (mediated by society) experience of the body are two different matters for Sartre. The phenomenal, matter-of-fact unity of the body is theoretically undone. On the other hand Merleau-Ponty defines matter as a transcendental "being to the world "in contrast to Cartesianism that thinks of matter as prior to all thought. In some analyses this "being to the world" is relegated by double reduction to mere consciousness or mechanistic reflex. The existential analysis demonstrates much more the original intentionality of the body. It is always oriented to the world and to the individual, and both the world and the body experience this orientation before all reflection.

Continues...

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Table of Contents

	Foreword	vii
	An Introduction to a New Feminism	ix
Part I	Philosophical Anthropology
	Gender Difference: Critical Questions concerning Gender Studies	3
	The Nature of Nature in Feminism, Old and New: From Dualism to Complementary Unity	17
	New Feminism: A Sex-Gender Reunion	52
	Philosophy of Relation in John Paul II's New Feminism	67
	Woman's Threefold Vocation according to Edith Stein	105
Part II	Theological Anthropology
	The New Feminism: Biblical Foundations and Some Lines of Development	141
	Feminist Experience and Faith Experience	169
	The Unity of the Two: Toward a New Feminist Sacramentality of the Body	201
	The Teachers of Man, for the Church as Bride	232
Part III	Ethical and Practical Consequences
	Can Feminism Be a Humanism?	251
	Ethical Equality in a New Feminism	285
	Equality, Difference, and the Practical Problems of a New Feminism	297
	A Creative Difference: Educating Women	312
	Contributors	324
	Further Reading: A New Feminist Bibliography	327
	Index	333