Female, Male (2)

We could spend a lot of time glossing the terms and qualifications men have used to describe women, and the terms that the texts of spiritual and religious traditions have applied to them for so long. What emerges is a somewhat paradoxical constant. Beyond such matters as biological differences, physical strength, menstrual cycles or emotional reactivity, what emerges is the power and the real strength of the so-called ‘weaker sex’. The relationship with life inherent in giving birth, the experience of the physical pain that had to be borne and overcome (until the discovery of the benefits of epidurals) and the injunctions to dress modestly that we find in everything from Hinduism to Buddhism, the Epistles of St Paul to Islam, all these reveal the fragility and vulnerability of men, their doubts as to their real powers and above all their weakness in the face of their instincts, bodies and needs. Both what men say about women and male interpretations of spiritual or religious scriptural sources (which have sometimes been applied to the family and social order) are highly revealing – in the sense that a mirror is revealing – and tell us a lot about men’s self-image. The terminology they use, the order and the system they impose and the roles they prescribe are as much expressions of a need for protection as any real will to power.

We have to begin at the beginning. The intuitions of the women’s liberation and feminist movements all over the world from the nineteenth century onwards and throughout the twentieth were highly pertinent: autonomy is central to the ‘woman question’. In order to protect themselves from the strength, power, freedom, and sometimes the domination, of women, men organized and systematized their ontological, physical, social and financial dependency, and sometimes their intellectual dependency. The movements that fought against women’s slavery in the United States (Female Anti-Slavery Society) and the Suffragettes who, from 1865 onwards fought for civil equality, first in Great Britain and then in the United States, wanted recognition of women’s autonomy in terms of being and status as much as in terms of the enjoyment of rights. The three ages of feminism in the West were a slow and difficult ascent from the periphery to being: access to rights, a critique of the system of domination and, finally, access to discourse and recognition of women’s being. Irrespective of whether or not one recognizes militant feminism as legitimate, the one thing that all these approaches and theories have in common is education and, more importantly, speech. It is true that the things that first shape a mind and construct its relationship with reality have to do with the words, concepts and terminology that are used. What runs through all the traditions, cultures and (male) religious interpretations is the focus on the function of women rather than their being.

Such is the male vision of women and the male discourse on women: men ‘naturally’ organize, control and determine ‘their functions’. Their status as men makes it impossible, by definition, for them to elaborate any discourse about the ‘female subject’, or about the being and femininity of women. This approach to being through the medium of the word is the first stage on the road to autonomy. When Simone de Beauvoir asserts in The Second Sex that ‘Women are beings in their own right, as distinct from men’, she is trying to establish the principle of autonomy and independence as the first foundations of discourse and education. That autonomy and independence must be founded at the ontological level and must be protected (or demanded) at the social, political and economic level. That, in her view, is the best way to resist the logic of alienation that produces the stereotype of the socially dependent woman who constructs her own secondary status: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ Debates over this issue have been lively and sometimes violent, even when they were debates between feminists themselves. Is there or is there not a difference between men and women? Are their differences inherent in their respective natures, or are they products of social conditioning? Some feminist milieus, both Catholic and secular, assert (like the supporters of ‘difference feminism’ and Carol Gilligan in the United States) that there are indeed differences, whilst other groups are critical of women’s social conditioning, but they are all agreed as to the importance of education, and see it both as a vector for representation and a liberating instrument.

There are many different female and/or feminist views as to the nature and real extent of the possible conditioning of women, the degree to which it influences the way they see themselves, their choice of profession, their role in the family and in society, and so on. But all the critiques are in agreement about three basic themes: 1. the importance of a discourse about the feminine being that is the product of women themselves, without any mediation from men; 2. the critique of all discourses and all projections that maintain that women’s dependency is a sine qua non for access to self-recognition and autonomy; 3. the emergence of an autonomous and independent woman-subject must lead to a new definition of the feminine and a new representation of femininity. We therefore need a systematic analysis of how girls and boys are educated within the family, of how/what they learn at school, and of the representations associated with the roles that are ascribed to girls and boys from infancy. We may well, depending on the theory or school of thought we endorse, think that girls will naturally make different choices from boys, but the important thing is to facilitate the assertion of woman’s being and to protect her independence and the choices she makes.Women’s movements have emerged within Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism,
Christianity and Islam, and they represent a reaction to the ancient male imagery that associates women with life, suffering, the body, desire or temptation (or even, in certain Catholic circles, that raises the issue of whether or not women have a soul).

Similar movements have emerged in the agnostic or atheist circles that assert, in both North and South, women’s autonomy, their right to education and to be both present and active in social life. In historical terms, these movements started out from a very different place: demanding the right to vote, like the feminist Clara Zetkin, meant demanding a social maturity that implied recognition of the female subject’s freedom (and access to the education that was its precondition). It became apparent from that commitment and struggle that a new awareness had to be developed, and that individuals had to be taught to understand the meaning of what they were asserting, or rather the meaning of their reappropriation of their individual and social identity. Education is, for both women and men, a precondition for being, and the substance of what they are taught can either reproduce schemas of alienation, marginalization or domination, or reform them. The need to recognize women’s right and their demands for autonomy and liberation necessarily involves a determined commitment to education: in terms of the ‘woman question’, this is a constant in all human communities because education produces knowledge, and because knowledge has the power to undermine established and self-contained systems of power that reproduce their own logics, and therefore inequalities.

These approaches are multidimensional and require particularly demanding preliminary critical work upstream. In terms of spiritual and religious traditions, we have to undertake a rigorous evaluation of male appropriations of the meaning and objectives of the scriptural sources. As there can be no spirituality or religion without culture, we must at the same time study cultures, their logics and the way real and symbolic powers are distributed between men and women. In the light of those superstructures, to borrow the vocabulary of Marxism, it is possible to understand what subtends and legitimates the social system, the organization of private and public space, relations with authority and power, and even the philosophical, religious or cultural representations that justify the distribution of roles and functions. A female rereading and analysis of historical legacies and memories, of hermeneutical exegeses and of the management of power will make an important contribution to our understanding of their logics and to changing the mentality of society as a whole.

Many women said it in the twentieth century, and we now have to say it again – and emphatically – in the light of what we said earlier about the quest for meaning and the universal: women’s commitment to the recognition of their female identity, autonomy and equal access to both spiritual experience and social involvement was and is a demand of their share in the universal in the elaboration of human thought and values. Irrespective of whether we think that women and men are intrinsically different, or whether we think that a distinction should be made between ‘sex’ and
‘gender’, so as to try to circumscribe the real impact of social conditioning, or whether we base our arguments on contemporary psychoanalytic theories, our primary and fundamental goal is the same: we must determine and identify the feminine universal’s role is constructing the universal common to all human beings. The new critical readings of religious texts produced by women (an imperative commitment for all religions) as well as men–from Hinduism to Islam, and from Buddhism to Judaism and Christianity – basically express the same ambition to integrate female being, the female gaze, her quest, status, and her differences from and similarities to the ‘masculine’. Education is the guide we need on for that fundamental quest.