Religion Dispatches notes it’s been 50 years since Time carried reference to Valerie Saiving Goldstein’s groundbreaking piece “The Human Situation: A Feminine View.”
Originally published in a scholarly venue alongside a piece by Rudolf Bultmann [the article] went on to be reprinted in the widely influential anthology Womanspirit Rising, edited by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (re-issued in 1992 and still available today). As a result, Saiving’s scholarly article was read by generations of feminists—or soon-to-be-feminists—and generations of college and graduate students across the United States and beyond.
Its influence was substantial. Mary Daly, for example, cited Saiving in her own influential early work, The Church and the Second Sex, and Plaskow herself wrote a (published) dissertation drawing substantially on Saiving’s essay entitled Sex, Sin and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich.
Womanspirit Rising published Saiving alongside others whose names came to define the second wave of feminist theology: Mary Daly, Rosemary Ruether, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza and Elaine Pagels, Rita Gross, Merlin Stone, Starhawk, and Aviva Cantor among them, as well as Christ and Plaskow themselves. While critiqued (not least by its own editors in their 1992 preface and their sequel, Weaving the Visions), the anthology continues to bring women, and men, to an understanding of why gender matters and why it matters when it comes to religion. It lets us see burgeoning feminist work—both critical and constructive—in Christianity, in Judaism, and in what were then new “goddess” religions. Despite sometimes being seen as dated in her essentialism, Saiving is, and was, key to this and much much more.
(To this considerable list, perhaps one day we will add twitterer Feminist Hulk.)
In reminding us of Saiving’s work, Susan Henking remembers how, in a way, the enterprise has not gone forward as anyone might have imagined, and indeed, in some ways, has stalled out.
Saiving gave us the gift of identity—and we live with it and wonder, perhaps, what she would make of what we have done with her gift. We have made theology, and we have made women’s studies. And we have deconstructed both.
We have certainly not made a world where women are free.
h/t Religion Dispatches