This week’s Newsweek cover article celebrating Sarah Palin has generated its share of comment and controversy. I was piqued in particular by the article’s concluding turn, which seemed to blame “mainstream feminism” for failing to engage evangelical women and therefore producing an opportunity for the rise of figures like Palin.
I contacted Marie Griffith, a professor at Harvard Divinity School and author of the highly praised and important book God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and Submission (2000), who was interviewed for the Newsweek piece, to go a little deeper into the subject.
RD: In the conclusion to the Newsweek article, you’re quoted criticizing “mainstream feminism” for having an “anti-religious bias.” While this might apply to a narrow band of cosmopolitan, second-wave feminism associated with white women, it doesn’t speak to the experience of many women whose feminisms are compatible with their religious traditions (as for many Jewish women), or younger feminists who have found their way to feminism precisely because they were raised in strongly patriarchal religious contexts, or those of us who have dedicated our efforts to holding space for feminism within historically patriarchal faith traditions. Most of us feel we have enough to do meeting and advancing the needs of our own communities, and we’ve learned with the third wave to be suspicious of any movement to “save” other women from their own culturally-specific beliefs. Is feminism responsible for talking the women of the religious right out of their strongly held convictions?
MG: I’ve written many times about the complex relationship between feminism and religion, and Miller quoted me more generally on a point about which I was trying to be much more specific. God’s Daughters, which gives close attention to the broad spectrum of interrelationships between religion and feminism, may be more helpful to you here than I can be in a brief blurb. But believe me, coming from a devout Southern Baptist mother who helped found the first NOW chapter in her Tennessee town, I well know that much of feminism is not only open to religion but has been deeply inspired by it. My point to Miller had to do with the perceptions many conservative evangelical women have about mainstream feminism — perceptions, incidentally, that I attempted to alter during my years of field research. They perceive such hostility, and so it becomes a reality of sorts — something that makes a political difference, even if it is greatly exaggerated or unnuanced in their renderings of it.
