ARTICLE TOOLS

Print this article
Bookmark this article
Toggle highlighting

In what could well be the "man bites dog" story of the month, Feminists for Life purchased the historic home of Susan B. Anthony last August. A spokeswoman for the organization said they hoped to turn the building into "a museum highlighting the work of early American pro-life feminists." For many, Christian and secular alike, that feminism and pro-life activism could co-exist, much less be combined, is an alien idea.

However, such work is not unusual for the organization, which sees itself as carrying on the work of Anthony and other early feminists in supporting the needs and rights of women—including the right to raise a child. Rob Moll reports in CT that Feminists for Life, while not neglecting more common avenues of pro-life advocacy, have a particular focus on college campuses. There they provide resources and public support for pregnant women who want to keep their children but are faced with the silence of "colleges [that] will provide women with information about sexually transmitted diseases, contraception, gay rights, and violence against women, but no resources for pregnant women such as child care or maternity leave." Feminists for Life argues that this is hardly a "choice" for young pregnant women.

The seeming subversion of "pro-choice" language and the term feminist in support of pro-life causes is enough to catch people's attention. Most public collaborations between Christians and feminists in recent years have been tactical alliances based on expediency; both groups oppose sex trafficking, for example, so they work together. Feminists for Life is something new: a group which is explicitly "feminist" in its desire to strengthen the position of women in the workplace—keeping them from having to choose between family and career—while at the same time unabashedly pro-life (although not a Christian organization). In fact, it argues that it is pro-life because it is feminist.

A similar emphasis appears in the writing of former CT associate editor Agnieszka Tennant, who enthusiastically claims the label of "feminist" in her critical review of John and Stasi Eldridge's Captivating. Tennant rejects the "tame" and "finicky" concept of feminine beauty advanced by the Eldridges, claiming her fulfillment not from her relationship with a man, but from God.

However, in the same review Tennant expresses her desire to be a mother, and elsewhere she has written on her rejection of oral contraceptives. While she is eager to avoid a life of domesticity and stay-at-home motherhood, she also explains how she has come to view the possibility of children as a good, rather than an "inconvenient interruption." (This is in part due to the influence of theologian Amy Laura Hall, who—not coincidentally—is on friendly terms with Feminists for Life.) Tennant might be a "liberated" woman, but not in the sense secular feminists typically mean.

Such reclamation of the term feminism by Christians, for all its current visibility, is not particularly new. Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, "a self-proclaimed Christian feminist" for the past few decades, is one example; while taking egalitarianism as a self-evident good, she also has written in opposition of "the radical feminist agenda [which] leads to women being demeaned, their lives destroyed, and their spirits enslaved." Van Leeuwen is not someone to be classified with Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan.

Such voices offer a distinctly evangelically flavored feminism to contrast with their "secular" and "radical" counterparts. Such voices are dearly needed, if for no other reason than to convince evangelicals that feminism is useful. Reviewing an anthology of feminist scholarship for CT, John Stackhouse laments the lack of evangelical voices, noting that "the absence of any feminist scholar who takes the Bible as divinely inspired revelation—and there are such people—is a poignant absence indeed."

But Stackhouse also notes, "If evangelical feminist scholarship is strangely absent in accounts of contemporary feminist theology, it is also true that any feminist thought is strangely absent in most contemporary evangelical theology." Stackhouse is rightly reluctant to accept feminist thought wholesale. But he argues that feminist theology, like other new interpretive methods, should at least be tested for usefulness.

It remains to be seen how evangelicals will continue to use feminist resources. What is certain is that evangelicals have increasingly diverse views about feminism and gender roles, and that the influence of feminists on evangelicalism, and evangelicals on feminism, is far from finished.