In the 21st century, every organization with a mission to support women has had to consider how to define “woman.” Women of the ELCA defines “woman” as inclusively as possible, seeking to include all who identify as women in our circle of support. Yet, it is worth considering, what does it mean to identify as a woman? While sometimes this feels like a new question, the question of the nature of woman (What makes a woman a woman?) has long been debated. Throughout the centuries and across the globe, many women have entered into the discussion in order to push back against a definition that a patriarchal culture has constructed.
So, for this Women’s History Month, we are providing a series of blogs on some of the different ways women have defined themselves and how that definition can help all of us who want to help women thrive.
by Jennifer Hockenbery
Decolonizing the feminized mind: A brief history of Gender Existentialism.
Bell Hooks was one of the most fierce critics of first-wave feminists like Sheryl Sandburg. Hooks was not a gender essentialist; she did not believe that women were made by God as a different kind of being than men. But she did think that a certain model of human virtue that Sandburg praised in Lean In was actually a model created by White supremacist patriarchy rather than a model that truly empowered women to be who they were called to be.
Hooks was one of the strongest advocates of feminism, which requires women to critically consider what they believe are feminine values, masculine values, and human values to, in her words, “decolonize the mind” and create the values they choose for themselves. This view is called gender existentialism or second-wave feminism.
While many who write on women and gender studies consider Simone de Beauvoir the first gender existentialist, there is an argument to be made that many women in history were her predecessors. One example is Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a 16th-century Mexican nun, poet, and philosopher. Her poem, Hombres Necios (Foolish Men), explains how men defined women’s roles and then faulted women for playing those roles. Sor Juana’s solution, thus, is that simple equality is not enough. Women must be taught how to think for themselves and create new definitions for themselves as women. This is hard work!
Simone de Beauvoir tackled this hard work in Second Sex, in which she guides the reader through a long process of psychoanalysis—trying to expose why many women and men think the way they do about women. Beauvoir first deconstructs the myth of the eternal feminine, as if the female is a natural category for the weaker animal. She offers biological evidence that this is not the case from the lioness to the Praying Mantis.
She next de-romanticizes women’s weakness. She writes about fairy tales and love stories that portray women as fragile and men as heroic. She points out how these cause women to put their trust in men, no matter how abusive. She spends many pages on the matter because she saw the problem is deep in the female psyche and could not be changed with simply new laws. Of course, she also advocated that laws be changed, fighting for women’s suffrage in France and the right to birth control. Betty Friedan took this work and tailored it for American women in The Feminine Mystique. She pointed out how corporations specifically created a new feminine role model after WWII to keep women from embracing the freedoms the laws now offered. She offered ways for women to resist those models.
Most recently, French thinker Monica Chollet published a book, Reinventing Love, for 21st-century women who identify as heterosexual to begin to unlearn certain patterns that lead to abusive relationships to “reinvent” what love can look like without patriarchal norms. She spends time demythologizing romance novels and fairy tales with domestic violence statistics to help women unlearn patterns that feel romantic but are oppressive. For example, she points out that men who kill their wives and themselves are often considered to be committing double suicide rather than murder and suicide. She points out that men in prison for murdering their lovers often get love letters from women who are impressed by their masculinity. In contrast to such examples, Chollet presents models for mutually loving monogamous relationships between men and women, suggesting that we should expect heterosexual men to love women with the same type of acceptance and passion that lesbian women use to speak of their lovers.
Gender existentialists remind women that, many times, it is not just the law that oppresses women; many times, it is the culture. Defying this culture requires not only changing men’s imaginations but our own as well. Gender existentialists help us do the internal work so that we might truly embrace our whole selves and the whole selves of our sisters.
Dr. Jennifer Hockenbery is interim executive director for Women of the ELCA and editor of the Journal of Lutheran Ethics. She is the author of Thinking woman: A philosophical Approach to the Quandary of Gender.
Read: Week 1: Feeling Rad Trad?
Read: Week 2: The mind has no sex!
Photo of Bell Hooks by . Used with permission. Photo of Sheryl Sandberg by World Economic Forum/Michael Wuertenberg. Used with permission. Photo of Simone De Beauvoir by Government Press Office (Israel), Used with permission. Photo of portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Juan de Miranda. Used with permission. Photo of Mona Chollet By DeuxPlusQuatre. Used with permission.
.jpg){kind=link}