While I’m currently an academic by day, by night (and in some of my holidays) I also do translation, editing, and other freelance work. Some of this is for the Adventist church, where my family have been members for several generations. While I’m not the most active member myself, the church and its 19-million-strong membership help out in health, education, and humanitarian aid around the world.
Though organised religion certainly has its drawbacks, I still think it can be a powerful way to mobilise people. This is why I offer my time and skills to the world church organisation, and to several local branches.
At the end of last year I wrote an article that was published in a national church magazine. You can read it here if you speak Dutch. The article gave readers a brief history of feminism. It also addressed an ongoing conflict between current world church leadership and the international communities it is meant to support. A few months after it was published in Dutch, an English version of the article was picked up by Spectrum, an independent Adventist news agency and magazine.
Below is an excerpt—you can find the full article at Spectrum‘s website, and in their quarterly magazine:
Like Christianity (or even Adventism), feminism is not a static entity, composed of people who think exactly alike and who all move in the same direction. Nor should it be—if it were, it would not be able to do the thing it aims to do: work toward equal rights for all people, regardless of their gender. In fact, the illusion of unity—unity of one group or even of the whole human race—was one of the problems feminism had to overcome along the way. Let me explain what I mean with a short history lesson.
Hillary Rodham Clinton may have been the first woman nominated to a major political party in the U.S., but she is certainly not the first woman to run for the office of president. In 1872, almost fifty years before any woman would be able to legally vote for her, Victoria Woodhull became America’s first female presidential candidate. A campaigner for women’s suffrage, she reasoned: “If Congress refuse to listen and to grant what women ask, there is but one course left to pursue. What is there left for women to do but to become the mothers of the future government?” If the government was not going to listen to women, women would just have to join the government. She lost spectacularly to Ulysses S. Grant, but her campaign drew a great deal of media attention, and she continued to campaign for women’s rights until she died at age eighty-eight—seven years after women were finally granted the right to vote.
Woodhull, and other women like her, formed what is called the “first wave” of modern feminism. The height of first-wave feminism occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the suffragettes and the women’s rights movement. These feminists were largely focused on the legal aspects of equal rights: the vote, the right to be educated, the right to own property.
The “second wave,” generally marked as taking place from the 1960s through the 1990s, came up against a different set of challenges. Equipped with the legal rights won by first-wave feminists, the second wave set out to negotiate questions of identity and social justice. Women were now legally “equal,” but deep-seated cultural biases still kept them from true equality on most fronts. They had to fight for the right to be women in the workplace, and in this new environment, they were forced to reconsider what it actually meant to be a woman and what it meant for a woman to be equal to a man.
Undaunted by these challenges, second-wave feminists succeeded in reforming higher many elements: education, business, politics, and reproductive rights; set up organizations and legislation for the protection of battered women; raise awareness about the movement at a popular level. Second-wave feminism was loud and proud, and this is the wave we are still most likely to associate with the term “feminism.” These women also changed history in a deeper way. I work at a university, teaching and researching literary and cultural criticism.
Basically, I study how art and literature shape identity. In my field, feminism is hugely important— and not just because the feminist movement ensured my right to work in the first place.
For hundreds of years, people assumed that great art was universal. We believed that it held up a mirror to the world—that it showed us who we were as people. Then, in the middle of the twentieth century, we suddenly and shockingly realized that most of the art we had previously considered “great” was actually only reflecting a very small portion of the world, from a very specific point of view. Most of the art was made by men, specifically, well-off white men from the West. We discovered that “we” were not as united as we had thought and that our unity had only been possible because we were excluding everyone with a different perspective than ours—people who were women, who were black, who were poor or uneducated. These people did not matter in our society, and so their art could not possibly matter either. Then a group of feminist critics came along—at this point still mostly women—who, thanks to their nineteenth-century feminist forerunners, were finally allowed to participate in scientific discourse. They pointed out, in a language other scholars could understand, that actually these other perspectives were everywhere and could be very valuable indeed.
The impact this realization had on the arts (and later on the sciences as well) cannot be overstated. There were endless, conflicting worlds and perspectives out there, just waiting to be recognized. The effect was revolutionary.
Read the full article here.