Feminism and Religion

When Harvard College was established in 1636, its founders proclaimed that their foremost goal was to prepare young men to enter the ministry.

Today, nearly 350 years later, that original intention has a new twist. Young men still go to Harvard to become ministers, but at the University's Divinity School--the site of such training at Harvard since 1816--some of the liveliest issues scholars are confronting concern the role of women in religion.

The hub of the school's activity in this area is a unique research program for women's studies in religion, the largest such effort in the country, and, administrators say. Harvard's only full-scale women's studies program.

Each year, the program selects five women scholars, carefully chosen to represent different theological disciplines and ethnic backgrounds. The five each teach a course for credit and are generally expected to produce a publishable manuscript by the end of their year.

More broadly, the program is intended to encourage the study of women's religious experience and perspectives throughout the University and in other schools around the world.

"We're not trying to legislate anything," says Constance H. Buchanan, the program's director. "We want to provide the information and expertise to supply the resources for change and help motivate people towards change."

Now in its second year (it existed in different form between 1973 and 1980), the program is the home for a number of unusual projects.

"Religion has played a powerful role in shaping women's social roles through history and in shaping views of gender," says Buchanan, explaining that the program's research projects seek to investigate this role. Much of the work, she notes, consists of recovering historical material that has either been ignored, altered or misinterpreted over the centuries. This year, for instance, Catherine Prelinger is examining the role of the deaconess in the 19th century, research that demonstrates the role religion played in encouraging women to work outside the home.

Cheryl Gilkes, a research associate last year and currently a fellow at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute, is conducting research on Black women in positions of leadership in Pentecostal churches, and the church's role in initiating Black women's battles against racism.

The Divinity School's women's studies program grew directly out of the women's liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. At a time when many social institutions came under reevaluation from a feminist perspective, the inequities of religion were clearly delineated. Religious institutions were singled out for excluding women by policy from leadership roles. Likewise, the traditional identification of God as a male raised serious theological debates as to why authority should be linked with masculinity.

At Harvard, a group of women divinity student formed a caucus to convince the faculty that the school ought to address these issues. "It was an awfully hard fight," recalls Gail Shulman, one of the student activists, nothing that the faculty was all male when she entered the school in 1971. Although some professors were sympathetic to the women's efforts, including then-Dean Krister Stendahl, "We had to spend a lot of time planning strategy," says Shulman.

Among the more unusual strategies were the establishment of WITCH (Women's Inspirational Theological Coalition from Harvard) and a takeover of Thomas Professor of Divinity Harvey Cox's course on eschatology and liberation theology, at which the insurgents blew party noisemakers whenever any sexist comments were made, Schulman says.

In 1973, the faculty finally adopted the caucus's proposal for a women's program, with the assistance of the Ford Foundation. The program has grown since then, winning increased funding over the years and better-qualified scholars as research associates.

Today, more than half the Divinity School's students are women, a statistic for which the administrators of the women's studies program take partial credit. "The program is a draw for a lot of very excellent feminist scholars," explains Susan Brune. A third-year student. Brune criticizes the school's overall curriculum for being short on feminist theory and methodology, but says she chose to come to Harvard because of its women's studies program.

One sign of increased awareness of feminist perspectives at the school is the fact that nearly all of the professors use so-called inclusive language in their lectures, reflecting the view that any god who is addressed as "He" cannot be meaningful for all people. Consequently, professors use words like "Godself" to replace "He" and "the Nurturer" to replace "the Father." As one student observes, "It's very uncool at the Div School not to use inclusive language."

But one of the program's broadest effects, Buchanan suggests, is not simply in theology but in the general discipline of women's studies. "One of the things that has been discovered," she says, "is that you really can't study women without studying religion."