Archive for the 'Faith and Feminism' Category

Pilates with the Orthodox: thoughts on modesty, compromises, and community standards

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 23, 2010
in Athletics and Fitness, Faith, Faith and Feminism and Modesty
. 47 Comments

My wife and I have worked out with the same Pilates instructor, Stephanie, since 2005. She’s become a good friend of ours, and we’ve followed her around from studio to studio over the years. Happily enough, her main studio is now just four blocks from our home in the Pico-Robertson area of West Los Angeles. I can take a short walk to work out with her, and given my very tight schedule, that’s a real blessing.

We live in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood one block south of Beverly Hills. Our neighbors are all Jewish; we’re the only goyim on the block. Most of those who live around us are religiously observant, and on Shabbat and on holidays (today is Sukkot) nary a car moves from its spot, and the sidewalks are filled with families walking to and from shul. Ethnically, the neighborhood is a mixture of Persian and Ashkenazi Jews, with plenty of Israelis of various backgrounds as well. One hears lots of Farsi, lots of Hebrew, and, a little less often, Yiddish. Since my wife and I are active in the Kabbalah Centre, we’re a source of bemused curiosity to most of our neighbors, who know that we’re not Jewish (the Christmas tree last year was one of many signs) but sometimes see me strolling on a Saturday with a tallit draped over my shoulders. Everyone gets along, however, and we feel very welcome. It helps that Heloise, my extroverted daughter, is a hit.

In any case, most of the clients at the local Pilates studio are Orthodox Jewish women. Besides Stephanie, the other instructors are Jewish as well. Many of the women who work out at the studio observe the traditional modesty restrictions of their sect, including wearing wigs, long skirts, and tops that are of at least “three-quarter sleeve” length. Because of the rules against wearing pants, some of the women do Pilates and yoga in floor-length skirts with workout tights underneath. The studio does their best to accomodate them.

Of course, many of these women are uncomfortable working out with a man present. There are very few male clients at the studio, much fewer than you would find at comparable Pilates and yoga facilities elsewhere in L.A. Orthodox Jewish men are not often raised in a culture that values fitness, after all. Many of the female clients at the studio will not lie on their backs or get into other poositions (such as reclining on a Pilates reformer) while a man can see them. The studio is one large room, and it’s thus impossible for me to work out while Orthodox clients are doing so as well.

Stephanie and the other instructors have worked to rearrange schedules so that I’m there only when I am either the sole client or sharing studio time with those whose interpretation of modesty regulations is more lax. But we still sometimes run into trouble. I’ve had a standing Wednesday 6:15AM workout time with Stephanie on the books for months; we do Pilates/yoga fusion for an hour. But yesterday, a traditional Orthodox female client showed up at 7:00 to do Pilates with another instructor. While Stephanie and I hastily finished up, the conservative woman did some arm band exercises which allowed her to remain upright. As soon as I could depart at quarter past seven, she was able to get on the reformer and start “working her core”, something she would not do with me anywhere in the room.

Stephanie and I will now be working out Wednesday mornings at six, pushing back our start time fifteen minutes so I don’t overlap with those who cannot sweat or recline in my presence. I’ve also been asked to make sure I never enter early for an appointment at other times, as I might interrupt an Orthodox client in a “compromising position.” While female clients are welcome to sit and wait inside, I’m occasionally relegated to standing on the sidewalk, if only for a few moments. Continue reading ‘Pilates with the Orthodox: thoughts on modesty, compromises, and community standards’

Grieving the liberation: a note on faith, gender roles, and the loss of certainties

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 15, 2010
in Faith and Feminism
. 9 Comments

I reprinted this 2009 post recently: “We have used our power to dominate and our weakness to manipulate”: more on the egalitarian vision, and the fundamental sinfulness of traditional gender structures. (No, not quite the longest post title ever.)

A reader named Catherine writes:

I was raised in a very conservative Evangelical community (as in, I never wore a pair of paints until I was in my early twenties and had to ask permission from male authority figures to go on a date with a guy.) Because of this, I entered adulthood with very concrete ideas about gender and my identity was formed within those roles. But perhaps more importantly, my sense of purpose was inextricably yoked to this gender-definition.

My break with my religious tradition was precipitated, almost entirely, by my move to feminist ideals…Becoming a feminist created for me not only an identity crisis, but also an existential and spiritual crisis. What was my purpose on this planet if not to fulfill my gender-dictated role? In the crisis precipitated by this sudden purposelessness, I floundered desperately. I lost all that I was, but was reborn into someone who I would like to believe makes an even greater contribution than I might have made had I remained within those gender roles.

What Catherine wants is more discussion about how to cope with the “existential and spiritual crises” that emerge and the loss that is often felt when one lets go of the security and certainty of traditional gender roles.

It’s more or less axiomatic that the secular feminist left has little regard for conservative Christianity and its insistence on separate spheres for men and women. It’s also true that it’s very difficult for those same secular feminists to recognize the pain and the loss that can accompany the journey from fundamentalism to egalitarianism. Why mourn one’s oppression, they wonder? Why shed tears (unless they are of joy) at wriggling out of what seems to outsiders like a confining straitjacket?

The answer goes beyond the obvious truth that we all tend to mourn the loss of youthful certainties. Traditional societies offer women clearly defined roles and responsibilities. The roles may be subservient, the responsibilities may be primarily domestic, but within the confines of the home and relationships, “traditional” women can both wield a certain kind of power and derive an undeniable sense of satisfaction. In a society that sees men as clueless when it comes to cooking or laundry, in a culture in which men are expected to be unable to care for themselves, women’s willingness to nurture is celebrated. The work may be arduous, the horizons limited, but the rewards are not mere phantasms — they are real.

In one of my many theological peregrinations, I ended up spending a great deal of time with some conservative Southern Baptists who opposed the ordination of women. One of my good friends was a young woman — with a first-rate degree from a Christian college — who made it very clear she wanted to be a “pastor’s wife.” I was in a more rightward incarnation than I am today, but not so far right that I had abandoned my feminism. I asked her why she didn’t want to be a pastor herself. We had the usual exchange of New Testament proof-texting, and after that proved (as it always does) to be a complete waste of time, she remarked to me, gently, “Hugo, you seem to think that pastor’s wives are little more than servants to their husbands” My friend, who was originally from Tennessee, remarked that the pastor’s wives she knew growing up really were co-ministers with their husbands. They counseled couples and children, discussed theology and budgets with their spouses, and were key resources for the entire congregation. “They had every bit as much power as their husbands”, my friend insisted, “they just wielded it differently.” Continue reading ‘Grieving the liberation: a note on faith, gender roles, and the loss of certainties’

Of burqas, mini-skirts, and whopping presumption

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 22, 2010
in Clothing and Fashion, Faith and Feminism, Favorite Posts 2010 and Modesty
. 18 Comments

A couple of folks have asked me about the French attempt to ban the wearing of the burqa or the niqab in public. (Google about for various discussions about the not-always-clear distinctions between the two.) What is important to note is that the burqa and the niqab, terms sometimes used interchangeably and in slightly different ways in various parts of the Islamic world, both involve concealing much if not all of the face. This is distinct from the notion of hijab, which normally refers only to the covering of the hair, and perhaps the concealing of arms and legs.

Before I go any further, let me recommend this short and sensible response from Jill at Feministe. Another good post is here, at Muslimah Media Watch.

The French initiative (which has not been finalized) is motivated by concern for the rights of women. Though only a tiny fraction of Muslim women in France actually wear the burqa in public, they are highly visible symbols of a particular kind of conservative Islam, one that severely circumscribes women’s public role. It is no doubt true that women who wear the burqa do so on a spectrum of volition. Some are presumably forced to wear it; others — and the evidence for this is considerable — do so in opposition to their family’s expectations rather than in acquiescence. One person’s oppression, after all, is another’s vigorous assertion of independence and identity.

Reading coverage of the burqa story in the mainstream and feminist media, I’m struck by what a number of other feminists have also noted: the degree to which those who claim to be acting on behalf of women seem to be certain that they know what women are actually thinking. Concealment of the body that goes beyond a cultural norm is automatically read by some as oppressive, something no woman in her right mind could want for herself. It reminds me of the same damn argument I hear from some of my students about classmates who dress in more revealing clothing.

We’ve all seen it happen in the classroom on a hot day (of which we have a surfeit here in inland Southern California). A young woman walks into class a few minutes late. Perhaps she’s wearing a mini-skirt or very short shorts; perhaps she also has a low cut shirt or a tube top on. From at least some of her fellow students, she will be on the receiving end of both hostility and lust. Listening carefully, one can hear the sotto voce whispers, “Who does she think she is?” and “This is school, not a night club”, or even the simple, devastating, “What a slut.” In nearly twenty years of college teaching , I’ve witnessed this umpteen times. (More so at two-year schools, for reasons discussed in this post on clothing, class, and community colleges.)

When I ask young men and women why they think a female student might wear revealing clothing, most discount the possibility that she’s doing so for comfort or for her own pleasure. “She’s insecure”, they’ll insist. “She just wants attention.” Some get into advanced pop psychology: “She probably doesn’t have a good relationship with her Dad, so she needs male validation.” The notion that a girl could be expressing agency, courage, and genuine self-confidence is almost always dismissed. As those of us who teach gender and sexuality know, young people are all too often strangely puritanical in their insistence that a strong sense of self-worth can’t be congruent with sexual display. And they are certainly nearly universally presumptuous in their certainty about what their be-miniskirted classmate is “really thinking.”

The argument in favor of banning the burqa has never struck me as feminist. I’ve never for a moment bought the notion, advanced by some media-savvy social conservatives in all the Abrahamic religious traditions, that concealing a woman is a kind of feminist act. The notion that men can only respect as an equal a woman whose flesh is concealed is absurd; it sells men short and it does something even more decidedly unfeminist, which is make women entirely responsible for how men conduct themselves. The idea of mandating headscarves, or banning short skirts, troubles me. But the banning of the burqa bothers me equally.

One of the hallmarks of an illiberal, anti-feminist society is that it sees women’s bodies as threats. A society horrified by a display of self-confident sexuality is no better and no worse than one scandalized by the equally public display of deep piety. Religious feeling, like sexual feeling, is in some sense private — but it also is so much a part of us that it is unreasonable and bigoted to ask us to conceal it entirely when we come into the public square.

The French Enlightenment tradition is a fine if not untroubled one. (Rousseau makes me shudder, but Voltaire offers some comfort.) Certainly, the French grasped the rights of the individual before many of their neighbors, and they shed blood to guarantee those rights. And if there is one Enlightenment principle that I cling to, it is the notion that the right of the individual to trouble the conscience of the many ought to be damned near sacrosanct. On a public street, the right of a woman to walk unmolested and unchallenged in a burqa or a bikini is worth protecting. And when we see that woman, we do well not to rush to judgment about what particular constellation of religious and psychological influences led to her sartorial choices.

Doubt and desire, faith and feminism: on “Jesus Girls”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 07, 2009
in Books, Christianity and Faith and Feminism
. 0 Comments

Anastasia McAteer is a fellow Pasadenan and Fuller Seminary alum whose blog Feminary has long been one of my favorites. From her blog and from Facebook, I learned about the new anthology to which Anastasia has contributed: Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Female and Evangelical, edited by Hannah Faith Notess. For anyone interested in the intersection of feminism and faith, the title alone makes the book indispensable, and I ordered a copy. (It’s cheaper from the publisher than it is on Amazon, where the book is out of stock at the moment. Click the link.)

As Notess writes in her introduction, one of the defining experiences of American evangelicalism is the offering of a “testimony” — the story one tells to those as yet “unsaved” of one’s conversion experience. Even for cradle Christians, evangelicalism generally requires that each believer be born again, even if that rebirth happens at age eight; all must make “a decision for Christ.” Jesus Girls is rich in testimony, but not of the sort taught in Sunday Schools. The nearly two-dozen essays within its pages bear witness to the extraordinarily diverse, yet surprisingly similar ways in which young evangelical women come to grips with their sex and their faith. Though all were raised under the umbrella of evangelicalsm, we have stories from women who grew up in a wide variety of traditions — Free Methodist, Pentecostal, Southern Baptist, Reformed, and, of course, “non-denom”, meaning unaffiliated.

The essays are arranged by theme: Community; Worship; Education: Gender and Sex; Story and Identity. Some of the women who write have left the church, but most are still committed Christians, though their faith has changed since they were little girls. Beyond the themes imposed by the editor, the essays reflect similar experiences, some of which are hardly unique to evangelicalism. The desire to please parents and teachers at any cost, to not be a bad girl and to fit in, is one with which we too often raise our daughters both in and out of the church. But growing up evangelical adds a twist: God is watching, watching all the time, and nothing escapes His gaze. That theme of relationship with God and Jesus appears again and again in the collection, sometimes explicitly and others obliquely, but frequently touching on the difficulty of developing a relationship with the Lord that goes beyond the people-pleasing with which women are invariably inculcated.

For those who have stayed in the faith, the stories in Jesus Girls reflect the ways in which their faith has had to grow in new and unexpected ways. In her “Why Isn’t God Like Eric Clapton”, Andrea Palpant Dilley embraces traditionally masculine imagery, and the tensions it creates to do so as a believer embodied as a woman:

My doubt was my desire, to touch the untouchable, to possess the presence of God…I am at core an Old Testament Christian: prone to Job’s questions, David’s psalmic longing, Cain’s wandering, and Solomon’s love of beauty and dominion. My faith has been more predatory than anything else, a hungry prowl in the dark and a practical, unrefined pursuit — like chasing a ten-foot tiger with a carrot peeler — something larger than life that has to be found with the inadequate tools of mundane life.

The theme of rejecting, reclaiming, and revisioning relationship with God is beautifully explored in Heather Baker Utley’s “The Journey Towards Ordination”. Raised a liberal United Methodist, Utley became an evangelical in college, and flirted with embracing the female submissiveness (the complementarian heresy) so much a part of more conservative churches. In time, however, Utley realized she needed to do more than simply accept the liberalism of her childhood or the traditionalism of her late adolescence; she had to do something new, something adult:

My identity wasn’t supposed to be defined by a gender role or an occupation — it was suppoed to be defined by God. Maybe I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom and use my pastoral gifts elsewhere, but if that was true, I wanted to make those decisions as a function of my own spiritual growth, not as a result of the church giving me a gender-based identity to become submissive and maternal. Gone were the role, the traditions, the “liberal” way I was raised and the “conservative” life I’d adopted. I felt empty without these pieces of my identity, but I was filled with hope. I knew I was going to start over — just God and me — and I was going to rediscover who I was defined only by my relationship with him.

Emphasis mine, and it’s in bold because it encapsulates the theme of the book. So many books about women and the church are written from one of two perspectives: a secular progressive standpoint, deeply suspicious of any attempt to reconcile feminism and faith — or froma rigidly conservative position, eager to push both sexes into narrowly-defined, “God-ordained” complementary roles. Jesus Girls is particularly welcome because it is a book written by women whose Christian faith, for the most part, remains at the center of their lives, but it is a faith that they have defined and redefined for themselves. Some have left the churches of their childhood (Anastasia McAteer grew up Evangelical Free, flirted with collegiate pentecostalism, and is now an Episcopalian), others have stayed in the denominations in which they were raised. But each has wrestled with what it means to be a woman, to be a Christian, to be in relationship not only with God but with God’s frequently exasperating, sometimes lovely, and invariably imperfect people. The stories of that wrestling are the heart of the book.

For progressive secular feminists, Jesus Girls will burst some commonly-held assumptions about evangelical women. For women still in the churches who have not yet found a way to give voice to doubt, this anthology will be a great comfort. For all of us, it is a reminder that faith and feminism can be reconciled — and that reconciliation isn’t just a theory, it’s something that women are living out every damn day. That reconcilation takes many forms, and in the rich variety of stories within this slim book, there are examples and inspiration aplenty.