Breaking News: Feminism!!!

Merriam-Webster users are getting themselves up to date with feminism, the word of the year. Rather than a few linguists deciding on a new and different word every year, the online dictionary can count the number of times people look something up, so this honor is a true reflection of popular interest. Congratulate yourself, feminists!

From the Women’s March to #MeToo, women finally have captured the attention of the nation. Did people begin to realize that “I’m not a feminist, but …” is no longer an adequate response? The definitions today are the same that I taught for my twenty years at Temple University: “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” and “organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.” I always emphasized both aspects: “theory” and “organized activity,” analysis and action.

I never could see how feminism could be a problem, much less scary to anyone. But it took a long time. One of my professors at Penn, thirty years ago, said she did not think much of “gender analysis”; class and race were much more important to American history. About ten years later her most successful book was a gender analysis in her field. I am, of course, disguising her identity.

Of course, feminism is not a new word or concept. Noah Webster listed it in 1841, but with the archaic definition “the qualities of females.” Feminisme is used in the modern sense for the first time in France, perhaps by the utopian socialist Charles Fourier, and certainly later by the founders of the first French societies for woman suffrage. American women adopted it slowly in the first years of the twentieth century; those who had been active in the “Woman Movement” wondered why a new generation seemed to like this word better. To younger women, feminism seemed modern.

The more things change … today writings on feminism discuss succeeding waves, each focusing on different issues: first wave: 19^th and early 20^th century, suffrage; second wave: 60s and 70s, political and structural change; third wave, 80s and 90s, feminine and individual expression, fourth wave, 21^st century, combining the best of all that went before – to be generous to what’s now and superficial to everything. Bustle has a really fun history of feminism with lots of links, if you want to explore it more. You get the point: there’s a history to feminism; it did not burst on the scene in response to Donald Trump. Like the old saying, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” women realize what’s at stake now.

Before this word of the year came to my attention, courtesy of Judy Heffernan, I had done a gender analysis of my posts for this blog: most have been about men. Horrors! Since this post is trending in the direction of basics, I might as well include a little more on gender analysis. I like this definition from the Global Development Research Center:

Gender analysis:

• examines the differences in women’s and men’s lives, including those which lead to social and economic inequity for women, and applies this understanding to policy development and service delivery
• is concerned with the underlying causes of these inequities
• aims to achieve positive change for women

The term ‘gender’ refers to the social construction of female and male identity. It can be defined as ‘more than biological differences between men and women. It includes the ways in which those differences, whether real or perceived, have been valued, used and relied upon to classify women and men and to assign roles and expectations to them. The significance of this is that the lives and experiences of women and men, including their experience of the legal system, occur within complex sets of differing social and cultural expectations’.

Inequality is what concerns me in the church as well as in society, and it’s why I write about men: that’s where the power is right now. It gives me no end of pleasure to know that the Executive Director of WOC is based in Rome, where she can keep an eye on what’s going on in the only place that can change the structures of inequality in the church. And we all know that women have achieved positive change already by taking action and exercising their priestly ministry without waiting for official sanction. That’s what feminism is all about.