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
The mind has no sex! A brief history of liberal feminism.
While there have been feminist and womanist gender essentialists like Hildegard, Stein, and Walker, there have also been a lot of anti-feminist gender essentialists too. These anti-feminists declared that women are inferior to men by nature and should not have equal rights economically or politically. In the late 18th century, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a book called the Vindication of the Rights of Women that started a movement against this view. She is often called the first liberal feminist. Liberal, in this sense, means interested in equal rights and freedoms for all people. Other terms for this view is first-wave feminism, gender neutrality, or gender eliminativism. Wollstonecraft felt that the majority of feminine “virtues” were actually vices. She argued that compassion, modesty, and gentleness were virtues all people should strive to attain, not just women. Feminine vices which she saw women cultivating included smallness, weakness and childish submissiveness.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote that girls were praised for being delicate and innocent rather than strong and intelligent. This cultivating of girls to become childishly beautiful and fragile led to adult women being seen as vulnerable and fragile, incapable of having political or economic rights. To change this, she believed that all children (boys and girls) should be given an equal education in co-ed environments. All children should learn to read, think logically, speak and write, regardless of sex. She decried the idea that women did not need to learn to read. And she was impressed that in Lutheran states girls were given the same education as boys. (Thanks, Martin Luther for suggesting that it is a duty of all Lutheran princes to provide schools to educate girls and boys!)
In addition to advocating that women were intellectually equal to men, she suggested that women might be physically stronger than usually thought. She declared that many of the fashion choices that were considered feminine were restrictive. Clothes made women weak, not their sex. She noted that high heels and corsets were just as bad for the female body as the male body. She declared that girls should be as physically active as boys. She urged girls and women to exercise in loose-fitting clothing and suggested that once they did so, female athletes would be strong and fast.
With proper exercise and education, Wollstonecraft believed that the perceived gender differences would fade away, making it obvious that women should have equal civil rights to men. This appeal to justice was also an appeal to piety. She argued that God requires all people to understand their faith and act according to their reason to do God’s will. Treating women as dependents to their fathers, husbands, and kings kept them from doing what God desired them to do.
To those who argued that women were made to be wives and mothers, not political leaders, Wollstonecraft explained that heterosexual marriages would be stronger when they were between equals, and children would be better disciplined and educated themselves if their mothers were both literate and physically fit.
Wollstonecraft’s ideas were popular in the United States in the 19th century, and arguments like hers were given by many women campaigning for the right to vote.
A new voice came on the scene in 1851, when Sojourner Truth gave her now famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. Truth, arguing against patriarchal views of traditional femininity, raised to her full height, over six feet tall, and used her powerful voice to command the audience. She showed her muscled arms and told of the pains she had endured. She noted that she worked as hard as any man and was expected to do so as an enslaved person. Enslaved women and men were not treated any differently in the field. Emancipated, Truth argued, they should not be treated differently in civil society.
Truth’s argument was taken on by 20th-century suffragists, who demanded that women have the same political rights as men: the right to serve on juries, to sue and be sued, to own property, and to vote. While women did get the right to vote in 1920, the Equal Rights Amendment championed by Alice Paul never did pass. Importantly, President Joe Biden called it the law of the land in his final days in office.
Today, some feminists who follow in Wollstonecraft and Truth’s footsteps face backlash. Sheryl Sandburg, who wrote Lean In was told that she ought to recognize the value of traditional feminine roles and that she ought to realize how hard it was for women to succeed even when there was basic legal equality because of cultivated differences between the sexes.
While not all women feel like nothing differentiates them from men, we must recognize some women do. One of my favorite students once asked in class why drag queens never dressed like her; she stood up proudly to show off her jeans and plaid flannel shirt. “I’m a woman, aren’t I? Dress like me.”
The liberal feminists and gender eliminativists remind us that we need to look out for the rights of all people, and that includes women because they are human beings first. They also remind us that women who wear gender-neutral or even masculine clothes, who exhibit traditionally masculine attributes, and who serve in traditionally male spaces are women and deserve our support. Embracing women means embracing our sisters who don’t feel feminine and embracing ourselves when we just want to be seen as human first.
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.
Photo of Mary Wollstonecraft. Used with permission. Photo of Sojourner Truth. Used with permission.
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