Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (27 page)

Certainly as more straight women openly discussed their involvement with sexual sadomasochism, feminist critique was not as harsh and unrelenting as it was when it was seen as mostly a lesbian thing.

Challenging homophobia will always be a dimension of feminist movement. For there can be no sustained sisterhood between women when there is ongoing disrespect and subordination of lesbian females by straight women. In visionary feminist movement the work of activists who are lesbians is fully acknowledged.

Without radical lesbian input feminist theory and practice would never have dared to push against the boundaries of heterosexism to create spaces where women, all women, irrespective of their sexual identity and/ or preference, could and can be as free as they want to be.

This legacy should be continually acknowledged and cherished.

TO LOVE AGAIN

The Heart of Feminism

If women and men want to know love, we have to yearn for feminism. For without feminist thinking and practice we lack the foundation to create loving bonds. Early on, profound disappointment with heterosexual relationships led many individual females to women’s liberation. Many of these women felt betrayed by the promise of love and living happily ever after when they entered marriages with men who swiftly transformed themselves from charming princes into patriarchal lords of the manor. These heterosexual women brought to the movement their bitterness and their rage. They joined their heartache with that of lesbian women who had also felt betrayed in romantic bonds based on patriarchal values.

As a consequence when it came to the issue of love the feminist take on the matter at the start of the movement was that female freedom could only happen if women let go their attachment to romantic love.

Our yearning for love, we were told in our consciousness-raising groups, was the seductive trap that kept us falling in love with patriarchal lovers, male or female, who used that love to subdue and subordinate us. Joining feminist movement before I had even had my first sexual experience with a man, I was stunned by the intense hatred and anger towards men that women expressed. Yet I understood the basis of the anger. My own conversion to feminist thinking in my teenage years was in direct response to my father’s domination of everyone in our household. A military man, an athlete, a deacon of the church, a provider, a womanizer, he was the embodiment of patriarchal rule. I witnessed my mother’s pain, and I rebelled. Mama never expressed anger or rage at gender injustice, no matter how extreme dad’s humiliation of her or his violence.

When I went to my first consciousness-raising groups and heard women my mother’s age give voice to pain, grief, and rage, their insistence that worn-en had to move away from love made sense to me. But I still wanted the love of a good man, and I still believed I could find that love. However, I was absolutely certain that first the man had to be committed to feminist politics. In the early ‘70s, women who wanted to be with men faced the challenge of converting men to feminist thinking. If they were not feminist we knew there would be no lasting happiness.

Romantic love as most people understand it in patriarchal culture makes one unaware, renders one powerless and out of control. Feminist thinkers called attention to the way this notion of love served the interests of patriarchal men and women. It supported the notion that one could do anything in the name of love: beat people, restrict their movements, even kill them and call it a “crime of passion,” plead, “I loved her so much I had to kill her.” Love in patriarchal culture was linked to notions of possession, to paradigms of domination and submission wherein it was assumed one person would give love and another person receive it. Within patriarchy heterosexist bonds were formed on the basis that women being the gender in touch with caring emotions would give men love, and in return men, being in touch with power and aggression, would provide and protect. Yet in so many cases in heterosexual families men did not respond to care: instead they were tyrants who used their power unjustly to coerce and control. From the start heterosexual women came to women’s liberation to stop the heartache - to break the bonds of love.

Significantly, they also stressed back then the importance of not living for one’s children. This too was presented as another trap love set to prevent women from achieving full self-actualization. The mother, feminism warned us back then, who tried to vicariously live through her children, was a dominating, invasive monster capable of meting out cruel and unjust punishment. Those who came to feminist politics young were often rebelling against domineering mothers. We did not want to become them. We wanted our lives to be as different from their lives as we could make them. One way to ensure that we would be different would be simply to remain childless.

Early on the feminist critique of love was not complex enough. Rather than specifically challenging patriarchal misguided assumptions of love, it just presented love as the problem. We were to do away with love and put in its place a concern with gaining rights and power. Then, no one talked about the reality that women would risk hardening our hearts and end up being just as emotionally closed as the patriarchal men or butch females we were rejecting in the name of feminist rebellion. And for the most part this is exactly what happened. Rather than rethinking love and insisting on its importance and value, feminist discourse on love simply stopped. Women who wanted love, especially love with men, had to took elsewhere for an understanding of how they might find love. Many of those women turned away from feminist politics because they felt it denied the importance of love, of familial relations, of life lived in community with others.

Visionary feminist thinkers were also uncertain about what to say to women about love. In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

I wrote about the need for feminist leaders to bring a spirit of love to feminist activism: “They should have the ability to show love and compassion, show this love through their actions, and be able to engage in successful dialogue.” While I shared my belief that “love acts to transform domination” at that time I did not write in depth about the importance of creating feminist theory that would offer everyone a liberatory vision of love.

In retrospect it is evident that by not creating a positive feminist discourse on love, especially in relation to heterosexuality, we allowed patriarchal mass media to represent the entire movement as a politic grounded in hatred rather than love. Many females who wanted to bond with men felt that they could not nurture these ties and be committed to feminist movement. In actuality, we should have been spreading the word that feminism would make it possible for women and men to know love. We know that now.

Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politic. The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination. Love can never take root in a relationship based on domination and coercion. The radical feminist critique of patriarchal notions of love was not misguided. However, females and males needed more than a critique of where we had gone wrong on our journeys to love; we needed an alternative feminist vision. While many of us were coming to love in our private lives, a love rooted in feminist practice, we were not creating a broad-based feminist dialogue on love, one that would counter a focus on those factions within feminism that had been anti-love.

The heartbeat of our alternative vision is still a fundamental and necessary truth: there can be no love when there is domination. Feminist thinking and practice emphasize the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in partnerships and in parenting.

This vision of relationships where everyone’s needs are respected, where everyone has rights, where no one need fear subordination or abuse , runs counter to everything patriarchy upholds about the structure of relationships. Most of us have experienced or will experience male domination in our intimate private lives in relation to male parental caregivers, fathers, brothers, or, for heterosexual females, in romantic partnership. In actuality, the emotional well-being of women and men would be enhanced if both parties embrace feminist thinking and practice. A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving. Mutual partnership is the foundation of love. And feminist practice is the only movement for social justice in our society which creates the conditions where mutuality can be nurtured.

When we accept that true love is rooted in recognition and acceptance, that love combines acknowledgment, care, responsibility, commitment, and knowledge, we understand there can be no love without justice. With that awareness comes the understanding that love has the power to transform us, giving us the strength to oppose domination. To choose feminist politics, then, is a choice to love.

FEMINIST SPIRITUALITY

Feminism has been and continues to be a resistance movement which valorizes spiritual practice. Before I had feminist theory and practice to pull me fully into the awareness of the necessity of self-love and self-acceptance as necessary for self-actualization I walked on a spiritual path which affirmed those same messages.

Despite the sexism of male-dominated religions females have found in spiritual practice a place of solace and sanctuary. Throughout the history of the church in Western life women have turned to monastic traditions to find a place for themselves where they can be with god without the intervention of men, where they can serve the divine without male domination. With keen spiritual insight and divine clarity the mystic Julian of Norwich would write long before the advent of contemporary feminism: “Our savior is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come.” Daring to counter the notion of our savior as always and only male Julian of Norwich was charting the journey back to the sacred feminine, helping to free women from the bondage of patriarchal religion.

Early on feminist movement launched a critique of patriarchal religion that has had a profound impact, changing the nature of religious worship throughout our nation. Exposing the way Western metaphysical dualism (the assumption that the world can always be understood by binary categories, that there is an inferior and a superior, a good and a bad) was the ideological foundation of all forms of group oppression, sexism, racism, etc., and that such thinking formed the basis of Judeo-Christian belief systems. To change how we worship then it was necessary to re-envision spirituality.

Feminist critiques of patriarchal religion coincided with an overall cultural shift towards new age spirituality. Within new age spiritual circles practitioners were turning away from the fundamentalist Christian thought that had for centuries dominated Western psyches and looking towards the East for answers, for different spiritual traditions. Creation spirituality replaced a patriarchal spirituality rooted in notions of fall and redemption. In Hinduism, Buddhism, Voudoun, and diverse spiritual traditions women found images of female deities that allowed for a return to a vision of a goddess-centered spirituality.

Early on in feminist movement conflicts arose in response to those individual activists who felt the movement should stick to politics and take no stand on religion. A large number of the women who had come to radical feminism from traditional socialist politics were atheist. They saw efforts to return to a vision of sacred femininity as apolitical and sentimental. This divide within the movement did not last long as more women began to see the link between challenging patriarchal religion and liberatory spirituality. A huge majority of citizens in the United States identify themselves as Christian. More than other religious faith Christian doctrine which condones sexism and male domination informs all the ways we learn about gender roles in this society. Truly, there can be no feminist transformation of our culture without a transformation in our religious beliefs.

Creation-centered Christian spiritual awakening linked itself with feminist movement. In Original Blessing Matthew Fox explains: “Patriarchal religions and patriarchal paradigms for religions have ruled the world’s civilizations for at least 3,500 years. The creation-centered tradition is feminist. Wisdom and Eros counter more than knowledge or control in such spirituality.” Speaking to the issue of tensions between feminists who are concerned with nature/ ecology and those concerned with working for civil rights, shows that this is an unnecessary dualism:

Political movements for justice are part of the fuller development of the cosmos, and nature is the matrix in which humans come to their self-awareness and their awareness of their power to transform. Liberation movements are a fuller development of the cosmos’s sense of harmony, balance, justice, and celebration. This is why true spiritual liberation demands rituals of cosmic celebrating and healing, which will in turn culminate in personal transformation and liberation.

Liberation theologies see the liberation of exploited and oppressed groups as essential acts of faith reflecting devotion to divine will. Struggles to end patriarchy are divinely ordained.

Fundamentalist patriarchal religion has been and remains a barrier preventing the spread of feminist thought and practice. Indeed, no group has demonized feminists more than right-wing religious fundamentalists who have called for and condoned the murder of feminist thinkers, especially those who support women having reproductive rights. Initially, feminist critiques of Christianity separated masses of women from the movement. When feminist Christians began to offer new and creation-centered critiques and interpretations of the Bible, of Christian beliefs, however, women were able to reconcile their feminist politics and sustained commitment to Christian practice. However these activists have yet to fully organize a movement that addresses masses of Christian believers, converting them to an understanding that no conflict need exist between feminism and Christian spirituality. The same is true for those feminists who are Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim,
etc.
Until that happens organized patriarchal religion will always undermine feminist gains.