Wednesday, 15 March 2017

Women in Modern Christianity

Women in Modern Christianity

Introduction
Nineteenth century marks the period of development of feminism in America and Britain nations. There are various factors led to the formation of feminism, feminist movements, and particularly feminist theology emerged in ecclesiastical arena. Pietism, Great Evangelical awakening and enlightenment contributed for the emergence of feminist movements and feminist theologies which could liberate women from oppression. Through these movements women got aware of their bondage and sought measures for liberation. This paper will help to understand how changes in church led to the formation of women’s movements, and growth of feminist theories and feminist theology which arose in 19th and 20th centuries.
1.Pietism - impact on women
Pietism emerged as a reaction to a complex of social forces that transformed western civilization from Religion to Secularism. It emphasized an internal, subjective and individual return to Bible and the expression of true religion through good works were emphasized. Women played a major role in the Pietistic movement for the specific reasons; a levelling of class and other traditional hierarchies, widespread apocalyptic fears which created an unusual situation, a negation of women’s prohibition of public speaking to some extent, and most importantly a new emphasis on the direct revelation from God, as something available to every human being who honestly sought it. Many pietistic women were devoted correspondents writing letters to religious leaders, recorded their convictions in diaries, formal theological tracts, sermons and also recognized as religious leaders in their area.
1.1.Johanna Eleonora Merlau Peterson (1644-1724)
Johanna an educated women, was most important figure in the Pietistic movement, spread pietism and also responsible for spreading many of the theological ideas for radical branch of movement. The thirty years of war, the social and economic turmoil of the era led Johanna to devote her life to religious activism.[1] Through Spener, she had contact with Maria Juliane Baur Von Eyseneck, wealthy widow both led the ‘conventicler’ Bible Study meetings. It attracted many women, and men who offered interpretations of scripture.
1.2.Susannah Wesley and her influence
During 18th century the protestant churches presented an academic way of Christian life, and people began to experience general religious awakening. Conversion or rebirth became the focus of Christian living. John Wesley was responsible for bringing this change of religious revival and arose Methodism at a crucial moment in English history. From the beginning women played a key role in the Wesleyan Revival, organizing and teaching the class meetings. Wesley allowed women to participate fully in the class meetings, to serve as leaders, gave permission to exhort rather to preach, so that their ministry become more public and official. This opened wider opportunities for women participation in the Christian community and women were allowed to serve as preachers and evangelists. Wesley had a conclusion that a women’s call was the key factor in determine her ministry.
Susannah the mother of Wesley spend more time with her children in spiritual instruction. Her influence extended beyond her family, by holding meetings within her home grew in popularity and increased the number of attendants. She never campaigned for women’s right to preach, but she simply shared her understanding of the gospel and invited others to journey with her. God used her faith to ignite the hearts of many both men and women. It is also said Susannah struck the flint of revival: John caught the spark and fanned it into a blazing fire.
1.3.Sarah Crosby – the itinerant preacher
Sarah travelled to 960 miles in a year and conducted four meetings daily, held 120 public services, led more than 600 private meetings and wrote 116 letters. She was appointed as leader of classes in Bristol and had 200 students under her, thus preached and taught effectively under Wesleyan revival. She continued her itinerant work for twenty years and after her retirement she headed several classes, bands and served as matriarch of a group of women preachers referred to as the female brethren.[2]
1.4.Lady Selina countess of Huntingdon
Selina a wealthy and influenced women secured a foot holding for Methodism and saved the travelling preachers. She sponsored for travelling preachers, opened various estates to preachers and invited her friends among the upper class to attend meetings. She also sponsored for the Trevecca School for training, pastoral assignments, finances and was the general overseer of the work. Within ten years she built more than twenty chapels for her preachers.
2.Great Awakening and women
The second great awakening offered women greater opportunity to actively participate on a lay level in revivalism. Women began seeking lay ministries which was voluntary in nature both inside and outside the church. At the gatherings the Holy Spirit touched the lives of women as well as men and they both responded in typical revivalist. Women responded to their spirituality in various ways. Many societies were founded or directed and supported by women and they were actively involved in ministries to the sick, poor, orphans, prostitutes and prisoners. Women’s social work was not focused only on women and girls, Louisa Daniel organized in 1860 an organization to serve men at various military bases, providing them with recreational facilities, home cook food and Bible study materials. Women were instrumental in founding voluntary societies both within their own churches and across denominational lines, through these societies’ women ministered to her women, to children as well as to men.
3.Enlightenment and women
The enlightenment period tried to replace a religious worldview with a view more associated in human reason. The status of women during the enlightenment period changed drastically, and concerned about liberties, social welfare, economic liberty and education. In many ways the position of women was seriously degraded during enlightenment. The rise of capitalism produced laws that severely restricted women’s rights to own property and run business. Women were forced out of a variety of business throughout Europe. Sixteenth century witnessed that two thirds of the business in London were owned by women but by the eighteenth century that number shrunk to less than ten percent.[3] Most scholars see the emergence of movements as an outgrowth of the enlightenment and the impetus that gave arise to thinking about human rights.[4]
4.Women’s movements
The 19th century saw the emergence of organized women's movements, which, enlarged their opportunities and forced the issue of their rights. The origin of women’s movement was generally traced to Olympe de Gouges’ declaration of the rights of women brought out in 1789 on the eve of French revolution. The social activities of Evangelicals, the agitations on behalf of better working conditions for women in factories and the women’s role in the American anti-slavery movement.[5] The changes in the status of women took particularly with the breakdown of feudalism and the rise of Capitalism.[6]
4.1.The women question and the women's movement for suffrage in England
Many of the historical changes that characterized the Victorian period motivated discussions about the nature and the role of women. This was what Victoria called “The Woman Question”. This question encompasses group debates about the physiological nature, the political capacity, the moral character and the place of woman in society. The question of the place of women in society and in politics arose most acutely in times of wars through the Revolution of 1848 to the dislocation of industrial change, and the raise for Empire towards the end of the 19th century. Yet the woman question was also debated at the level of everyday life. Because women contested the limitations placed on their education, their property rights and their status in marriage and family. The ideas of the suffrage movement in Britain descended directly from Enlightenment political philosophy and nineteenth-century liberal theory, notably through Mary
Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman and John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of
Women. They shared a fundamental theoretical premise: “the human attributes of men and women and the consequent social injustice involved in their unequal treatment”
4.2.The role of Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill
During the Enlightenment the “Rights of Man” were under discussion in England and in
France. Mary Wollstonecraft has been called the Mother of Feminism and the first feminist. She was identified with the revolutionaries of 1789. She proposed to apply enlightened ideas to women. To her, women were rational creatures who were no less capable of intellectual achievement than men. Her “Vindications of the Rights of Women” were published in 1792 and was addressed to Talleyrand, protesting against the exclusion of French women from citizen rights. It is an important work since it advocated the equality of the sexes. She ridiculed the prevailing notions about women as helpless, charming and foolish. To her, women were educated in “slavish dependence”. She criticized the sentimental and foolishness of women. Her text is a protest against women subjugation. Education held the key of achieving self-respect.
To make women able to achieve a better life, not only for themselves but also for their children and their husbands. Women provided education to their children: that is why education was so important. It took more than a century before her ideas were put into effect. Her ideas caused enormous controversy because they were so revolutionary. The question of women role and women rights was discussed by the public in the 1860. The first pamphlets in favor of the enfranchisement of women began to appear in the middle of the 19th century.
John Stuart Mill published “The Subjection of Women” in 1869. He used the image of slavery and bondage. He argued in favor of social, economic and political emancipation of women, and assumed that each individual had interests which only he or she could represent, and on these grounds Mill justified votes for women. He presented a petition in Parliament calling for the inclusion of women suffrage in the Reform Act of 1867. The 1860s saw the unsuccessful demand for female suffrage (the failure of the 1867 Reform Act) and the partially successful demand for a secondary higher education.[7]
4.3.Anti-slavery movement
In 1820 and 1830 in North US an exciting and contagious spirit of reform was in the air and it began in churches. Women of Christianity began to play an important role in these reform movements. They raised voices against slavery in America, which became a most serious moral and political issue in the society during nineteenth century. Grimke Sisters were outspoken and witnessed and they said it is not the slave who alone suffers from the licentiousness of the master and his sons, but the wronged and dishonored wife and daughter, who deeply injured and weep in secret places. In 1833 leading abolitionists met in Philadelphia to form the American Anti- slavery society, which permitted women to attend and to speak. Later nearly twenty women met to form Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and it grows and spread to New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. In 1837 the first anti-slavery movement was held at New York, where nearly 200 women participated. In this movement they first learned to organize, to hold public meetings and to conduct petition campaigns. The movement grew very faster and there were few more movements emerged and strengthened each other.
4.4.Women rights movement
Mary Lou Thompson says women who started out to plead for the slave found they were not allowed to plead. They were ridiculed and not accepted when they appeared on the speaker’s platform or in anti-slavery conventions. So most of the women spoke for their own rights though a formal organization advocating complete legal equality and suffrage was not formed for another twenty years. Feminist Scholar, June Sochen opines that anti-slavery movement and the women rights movement were tied together in various ways.
4.5.Seneca Falls convention and the Progress of Women’s movements
F.S Downs comments, “The beginning of the organized women’s movement is generally identified into the woman’s rights convention convened at Seneca Falls.[8] The upstate New York village of Seneca Falls hosted a gathering of fewer than three hundred people, earnestly debating a Declaration of Sentiments to be spread by newsprint and oratory, and met on July 19, 1848 for three days. Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's, Martha Wright, Jane Hunt and Mary Ann McClintock were all separatist Quakers, long active in working to improve the position of women within their church were the prominent figures in organizing the convention.[9] The movement was given tremendous impetus by the civil war in the early 1860’s, during it women were called to assume responsibilities traditionally reserved for men. They developed organizations for the purpose of securing rights for themselves which were traditionally denied including the right to own property, the right to inherit, the right to keep their children in case of divorce, and the right to vote, to participate in the political process with men. The resolutions called for complete equality in marriage, equal rights in property, wages and custody of children, the right to make contracts, to sue and be sued, to testify in court and to vote. Within a year a National Women’s Rights Association was organized and State and National conventions were held regularly.[10] The Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention marked the beginning of the woman’s rights movement.[11]
4.6.Temperance movement
Alcoholism was a problem in the nineteenth century which affected women and the family members in numerous ways. Women were dependent on men for all their worldly needs, they believed that the only solution was to ban it. The movement gained momentum in twenty years and this was a middle class problem, and so middle class women and men who formed temperance societies to educate the masses to abstinence. Among all the reform movements, temperance was the cause which was taken up by Christian women more than any other cause. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was a descendant of the temperance crusade and encouraged Christian women to unite for temperance.
5.Women’s organizations
Nineteenth century is distinguished for the formation of a number of Woman’s movement. The second revival and the preachers’ encouragement to do good works helped to sprang up many voluntary groups. Women involved in various women’s organizations such as – Maternal societies, Benevolent Associations, Reform Associations, the club World and many other Women Organizations.[12] Among the organizations Women’s Missionary society was noteworthy, its origin of women’s missionary organizations goes back to 1800, when the Bosten Female Society was started by Mary Webb with fourteen Baptist and Congregational friends. The primary activities were prayer and fund raising for the cause of missions. Their initial interests was in mission work among the Native Americans but gradually their focus shifted to India and China. The success of missionary societies removed prejudice and opposition on the mission fields as well as home. Well trained young women became a source of strength to over worked missionary wives. 
6.Feminist theories and Feminist movements in twentieth century
The movements which emerged during the nineteenth century helped to get courage and fight for their rights. This movements united and led the women forward which is known as the Feminist Movement. Feminism may be defined as the movement that works for the liberation of all that need to be liberated particularly women.[13] Feminist theories emerged in the field of Women’s studies during 1970 in American universities. Feminist theories is a collection of feminist texts with shared goals, practices, and assumptions. Feminist theories stand in service to the women’s movements. Feminists sought to identify the various forms of oppression that structured women’s lives and they imagined and sought to create an alternative future without oppression.[14]
6.1.Liberal Feminism
The main concern for Liberal feminism is equality of civil rights particularly for women. Rosemary Radford Ruether states, “Liberal feminism has roots in both Biblical and Scholastic anthropology, but it represents a radical remodeling of the patriarchal component of these traditions under the impact of the eighteenth century Enlightenment”. The main activity of the liberal feminist in the first half of the twentieth century was to campaign for women’s right to vote, which paved the way for all other political office. They also sought full access to higher education in the fields such as law, medicine and ministry to which women were deprived historically. The early period is the heyday for the activists, but Second World War laid a pause for the campaign for women’s equality. The liberal feminists sought equal rights further by demanding equal pay for equal work, equal access to all levels of a profession. They also focused on male control over women bodies and claimed women’s right to reproductive self-determination, sex education, birth control and abortion. It also focused on factors such as women’s right to dignity, control over their sexual passions, against sexual harassment, wife battering, rape and pornography which dehumanize women.
6.2.Socialist feminism
Socialist feminism attempts to synthesize best insights of Marxist and Radical feminism. Capitalism, male dominance, racism, imperialism are intertwined and inseparable. Socialist feminism remains more historical than biological and more specific than universal: recognizes all the important differences among human beings—class, sex, but also age, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation. Women, like all human beings, are constituted essentially by the social relations they inhabit. A woman’s life experience is shaped by all these various dimensions. Refuses to reduce oppression to one single type or cause.[15] According to Storky, socialist feminism has its origin in the eighteenth century enlightenment. Reuther however traces it back to the nineteenth century classic study by Fredreich Engels, the origin and history of the family, private property and the state. There are other scholars who assume that the socialist feminism is the byproduct of the students’ unrest and civil rights movement of the 1960’s.[16] 
6.3.Radical feminism
Radical feminists appeal to women not as an economic class but as a class defined by the sex/gender system. Sexuality is the root cause of oppression women are oppressed because they are women. Radical feminists, through their analysis of the gender system, first disclosed the elaborate system of male domination known as patriarchy. Radical feminists focus on the subordination of women as its primary concern revealing how male power is exercised and reinforced through such practices as sexual harassment, rape, pornography, prostitution, as well as childbearing, housework, love and marriage. Radical feminists made stride in the battle against violence against women.[17] Radical feminists identify that biological differences as male and female are the sources of women’s oppression. They affirm that the only way for women liberation is to dethrone the whole patriarchal structures.[18] The important aspect of radical feminism is that they cannot be identified as a group. But they are found scattered here and there among other groups. They are anti-male attitudes which was exhibited right from the beginning.[19]
6.4.Feminist theology
Feminist theology is as nonsensical a concept as a theology of liberation, of hope, of questioning.[20] Feminist theology has its root in the women’s movement of the late 1960 and 1970 in North America. Feminist theology emerged as a grass root challenge to traditional views of women’s role in religion and society. Feminist theology does not represent the theology of every woman who reflects on her spiritual journey and her beliefs about God and the world. Feminist theology is an attempt to characterize feminist theology, Reflection on patriarchy, Feminist approach to the Bible, Feminist emphasis on mutuality and connectedness. Feminist theology takes feminist critique and reconstruction of gender paradigms into the theological realm. They question patterns of theology that justify male dominance and female subordination, such as exclusive male language for God, the view that males are more like God than females, that only males can represent God as leaders in church and society, or that women are created by God to be subordinate to males and thus sin by rejecting this subordination.
Feminist theologians move beyond traditional views of doctrines which are the conceptual arenas in which character is shaped. Doctrines shape not only individual identities but the identities and practices of entire communities as well.[21] Feminist theologians also seek to reconstruct the basic theological symbols of God, humanity, male and female, creation, sin and redemption, and the church, in order to define these symbols in a gender inclusive and egalitarian way. In so doing they become theologians, not simply critics of the dominant theology.[22]
Conclusion
Women in modern Christianity made the church and society to think about the role and place of women. Modern period witnessed the growth of feminist movements, feminist theories and particularly feminist theology for Church. Through these movements women sought liberation from the existing patriarchy, in society and church. The theories have led to many in this contemporary world, which will continue to live and grow, as long as women anywhere have grievances they can proclaim and as long as they are willing and able to organize to rectify them. Feminists tend to read the Bible in a critical method which gave rise to Feminist theology. 
Bibliography
Heine, Susanne. Women and Early Christianity. London: SCM Press, 1986.
Imchen, Narola. Women in the History of Christianity. Assam: Tribal Development and      Communication Centre, 2010.
Jones, Serene. Feminist theory and Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress press, 2000.
Martin, Francis. The Feminist Question. Michigan: William B. Eerdmanns Publishing Company,   1994.
Ralte, Lalrinawmi Women re-shaping Theology. New Delhi, ISPCK, 1998.
Webliography




[1] Narola Imchen, Women in the History of Christianity (Assam: Tribal Development and Communication Centre, 2010), 112, 114.
[2] Narola Imchen, Women in the History …, 116.
[3] Narola Imchen, Women in the History …, 117-121.
[4] Francis Martin, The Feminist Question (Michigan: William B. Eerdmanns Publishing company, 1994), 146.
[5] Lalrinawmi Ralte, Women re-shaping Theology (New Delhi, ISPCK, 1998),16.
[6] Narola Imchen, Women in the History …, 126.
[8] Narola Imchen, Women in the History of Christianity (Assam: Tribal Development and Communication Centre, 2010), 129-132.
[10] Narola Imchen, Women in the History …, 132- 134.
[12] Narola Imchen, Women in the History …, 137- 139.
[13] Narola Imchen, Women in the History …, 140-141.
[14] Serene Jones, Feminist theory and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress press, 2000), 3.
[16] Narola Imchen, Women in the History …, 142- 143.
[18] Narola Imchen, Women in the History …, 145.
[19] Francis Martin, The Feminist Question (Michigan: William B. Eerdmanns Publishing company, 1994), 147.
[20] Susanne Heine, Women and Early Christianity (London: SCM Press, 1986), 49.
[21] Serene Jones, Feminist theory and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress press, 2000), 13-16.

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