"Womanspirit Now "

READING

In 1977 the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association unanimously passed the Women & Religion Resolution, calling all individual Unitarian Universalists and UU organizations to examine and put aside sexist assumptions, attitudes, and language and to explore and eliminate religious roots of sexism in myths, traditions and beliefs.

Here is an excerpt from the resolution:

WHEREAS, a principle of the Unitarian Universalist Association is to "affirm, defend, and promote the supreme worth and dignity of every human personality, and the use of the democratic method in human relationships"; and

WHEREAS, great strides have been taken to affirm this principle within our denomination; and

WHEREAS, some models of human relationships arising from religious myths, historical materials, and other teachings still create and perpetuate attitudes that cause women everywhere to be overlooked and undervalued; and

WHEREAS, children, youth and adults internalize and act on these cultural models, thereby tending to limit their sense of self-worth and dignity;

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED: That the 1977 General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association calls upon all Unitarian Universalists to examine carefully their own religious beliefs and the extent to which these beliefs influence sex-role stereotypes within their own families.

The rest of the text calls upon the leaders of the Unitarian Universalist Association to carry out institutional work to promote the resolution.

In 1996 the UUA Board declared the work of the resolution finished.

(Source: UU Women and Religion, http://www.uuwr.org/main.htm)

SERMON

Unitarian Universalists have reason to take pride in the history of our movement. We have helped lead the way for one progressive reform after another: women’s suffrage, abolition of slavery, reproductive rights, and civil rights, to name just a few. Notable pioneers stand out way ahead of their time, especially women.

Judith Sargent, American feminist and writer, married John Murray, founder of Universalism in this country. She shared his ministry and public life throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. Olympia Brown convinced the head of the Universalist theological school at St. Lawrence University to accept her as a student. In 1863 she became one of the first women in America to be ordained. Margaret Fuller made her name as a journalist and editor, as well as a revolutionary for the Roman Republic; she was a woman who dared to live far ahead of her time, in the mid-eighteen-hundreds. By the turn of the century, a small group of Unitarian women ministers known as the “Iowa Sisterhood” kept liberal religion alive in a conservative backwater.

Inspiring as these examples may be, don’t assume that these women’s lives were easy or that their accomplishments were without anguish. Far from it. They all felt the oppression of sexism and struggled mightily and imaginatively against it.

Judith Sargent Murray, successful, prominent and well married, found Universalism to be a good platform to protest the patriarchal attitudes of her day. She wrote these words in 1790:

“Yes, ye lordly, ye haughty sex, our souls are by nature equal to yours;
the same breath of God animates, enlivens, and invigorates us
and that we are not fallen lower than yourselves,
let those witness who have greatly towered above
the various discouragements by which
they have been so heavily oppressed.”[i]

Olympia Brown was rejected by the Unitarian theological school at Meadville. She talked her way into a Universalist education at St. Lawrence, but had to settle for the least attractive positions after she was ordained.

“The pulpits of all the prosperous churches were already occupied by men,” she wrote. “All I could do was to take some place that had been abandoned by others and make something of it, and this I was only too glad to do.”[ii]

Margaret Fuller faced numerous obstacles to establishing herself as a journalist and editor. She landed some impressive jobs – with the Transcendentalist journal “The Dial,” for example, and some influential friends – Horace Greeley and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but she lived at the edge of poverty all her life. She accepted her marginal status and took many risks, including marriage to a young Italian revolutionary. Margaret Fuller, her husband and child all perished in the shipwreck, along with her journals from Italy. She was forty years old.

The Iowa Sisterhood exercised resourcefulness to prevail against a conservative environment. They founded their own churches. Then they mentored other women ministers as their successors. They saw themselves as missionaries even to their own people.

The second wave of feminism – with pioneers like Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan – was already well launched by 1977, the year of our “Women and Religion” resolution. By the time our General Assembly took their vote, feminist consciousness-raising was already in full swing all over the country. And Unitarian Universalists realized that even our own progressive tradition had ties to oppressive patriarchy.

Many of you remember those days. Felicity Nussbaum, a member of our congregation and a professor of English at UCLA, wrote in a journal article last year, “I came to feminism in the early 1970s after encountering two women at a small table outside the Indiana University library cafeteria. They were handing out a brave, bold article entitled, as I recall, ‘Kinder, Kirke, Küche.’ Reading it was an aha! experience shared by many women at the time,” Felicity notes. She adds, “The resulting headiness aroused by finding at long last a label to give to an until-that-time vaguely perceived misogyny propelled me right through the early years of my career and into my first book . . . .”[iii]

In the early ’70s I was hoping to go to divinity school, but I was too timid to share my idea with anyone but a few close friends. One day, while walking my dog through Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I came across a couple of women at a table outside the YWCA. They were friendly. They had pamphlets too. I took the pamphlets home and began the long slow process of pushing through my fear and towards my goal. Feminist encouragement got me there.

We women who came of age during that era all have our stories to tell. Now, more than thirty years since the “Women and Religion” resolution passed the General Assembly, we too have become part of history. I wasn’t aware, until I researched the resolution for this sermon, that the UUA has considered the work to be done and “sunsetted” the Women and Religion Committee. It would never have occurred to me that we are done, perhaps because I’m not.

Here is what has happened in the past thirty or so years: We have a new hymnbook – now not so new – with degenderized language. While only five percent of our ministers were women the year I entered divinity school, today we are fifty percent. And soon, according to theological school enrollments, women will make up seventy-five percent of our ministry. Our “Principles and Purposes” affirm “the interdependent web of all existence,” and our “Living Tradition” credits earth-centered spirituality as one of our sources: changes signaling a shift in sensibility, influenced by feminism. We have adult education curricula devoted to women’s history and spirituality. We have women congregational leaders in every area. (Only three of our congregation’s presidents have been women, however.)

To be sure, Unitarian Universalist women do not face the obstacles that confronted women hundreds or even thirty years ago. And most of us are confident that we are headed in the right direction. Still, I miss the feminist spirit that helped women of my generation launch not only our careers, but our lives.

While casting about for insight into what has happened to UU feminism in the past few years, I came across the website for the group that had been sunsetted back in 1996. The UU “Women and Religion” community is still alive and well, holding events at the grassroots level around the country. An initiative for an international meeting of UU women is coming together for 2009. But more important, my search for what UU “womanspirit” was really all about jumped out at me from my computer screen. The UU Women and Religion newsletter masthead – definitely not the slickest online graphic you’ll ever find – proclaimed their mission in this way: “News to use for more than just personal gain.” Now I understand something new. The struggle is not just for ourselves – our self-esteem, our careers, our families, our spirituality: it is for everyone. It is for anyone suffering under oppression anywhere. The women’s movement has gone global, as the plight of women under the Taliban made us all aware, and it has gone beyond the ideas of gender oppression that first defined it.

This past week, a fifteen-year-old Oxnard boy, Larry King, was shot and killed by a fourteen-year-old boy. (Apparently because he dressed and acted like a woman.) Such a horrific act affects everyone who hears about it, but as the Rev. Jan Christian, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Ventura wrote to her local paper, her church is “feeling those reverberations deeply. We have members with close ties to both boys and to the school,” she adds. “We are heartsick . . . . And our sadness only increases when we hear rumors that the act may have been fueled by bigotry. It increases because we are committed as individuals, as an institution and as a religious movement to opposing all bigotry, including bigotry related to sexual orientation and gender identity”[iv]

Today’s feminism is “not just for personal gain.” It never was – but so many of us needed so desperately the encouragement of our movement to become who we wanted to be, it has taken a generation to understand that fighting all oppression is the real work of feminism. Women are not the only beautiful tigers waiting for the truth to set us free. Out of our experience of disappointment and discrimination have come compassion and a clear sense of just how related we and all oppressions really are. That is the truth, too late for so many, including one Oxnard boy, but it is still among us as womanspirit now.

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[i] Judith Sargent Murray, writing as “Constantia.” “On the Equality of the Sexes,” 1790. Quoted in “The Unitarians and the Universalists,” by David B. Robinson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 127.

[ii] Quoted in “The Unitarians and the Universalists,” p. 223.

[iii] Felicity Nussbaum, “Risky Business: Feminism Now and Then.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 26.1, Spring, 2007, p. 81.

[iv] Letter to the Editor of the “Ventura County Star,” from the Rev. Jan Christian, February 15, 2008.