Feminism, Future Hope, and the Crisis of Modernity

Author(s): Rosemary Radford Ruether

Source: Buddhist-Christian Studies, Vol. 18 (1998), pp. 69-73
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1390437
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SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

Feminism, Future Hope, and the

Crisis of Modernity
Rosemary Radford Ruether
Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary
ABSTRACT Current cultural forms, shaped by patriarchy, cannot
accommodate feminist aspirations for inclusive justice and must be
modified. We need to search across the world's diversity of cultures
for a new synthesis of forms that can accommodate those aspirations
that should be common to all people.

"Feminism" is usually understood to mean both a point of view and a

social movement that stresses the equality of women with men. Feminism
affirms the equivalent human personhood of women with men and seeks
to overcome the disabilities that women suffer in religious, cultural, and
social structures that have been shaped by patriarchy. As such, feminism
might not suggest a global vision of future hope, but simply the inclusion
of women in liberal ideologies that stress "human rights" and in democratic
social systems that stress equality of opportunities.
There are different views of feminism depending on how radically one
sees the prevalent social systems and ideologies to be determined by male
hegemony and hence the radicality of the social and cultural transformations necessary to really overcome it. I agree with those perspectives
that believe the feminist aspiration (or any aspiration for inclusive justice)
cannot be fully accommodated within the prevalent liberal/capitalist socioeconomic system and cultural ideologies. Feminism calls for a profound
transformation of classical and modern western ways of understanding
reality and organizing social relations. This does not mean I reject incremental reforms in existing social systems. Yet these incremental reforms
need to be defined in ways that open the way to more far-reaching vistas.
To understand the fuller vision of future hope called for by feminism,
one must first recognize how deeply patriarchy has structured classical and
modern Western Christian culture and social relations. I speak here only of
Christianity and Western Europe/North America as my context, but clearly
women from other cultures and contexts may have parallel critiques of
their contexts, such as, for example, South Korean women shaped by ShaBuddhist-Christian Studies 18 (1998). ? by University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved.

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70

ROSEMARY REDFORD RUETHER

manism, Confucianism, Buddhism, American Christianity, neoco

and capitalism.
The term "patriarchy" means "the rule of the father." This refers
to male power over females but a comprehensive social system based on
the domination of the patriarch or male head of family-clan over all the
human persons and things over whom he rules, who are defined in various
ways as dependent on him and serving him: wife (wives), children, clients,
dependent relatives, servants, slaves, animals, and land. Classical patriarchal societies linked such clans together in a political system in which the
patriarchs formed a ruling class in public assemblies, with a king ruling over
the whole.

The Western Semitic religions-Judaism, Christianity, and Islam-were

profoundly shaped by this kind of patriarchal society, with God seen as the
great Patriarch who creates and rules the cosmos. The relation of patriarch
to wife, children, and servants is reduplicated in the language used for the
relation of God to Israel or to the Church. In this way the hierarchical class/
gender social, economic, and legal structures of society are defined as
God's will and the order of creation. To change these relations for more
egalitarian ones is to rebel against God's rule, subvert God's order, and
unleash divine wrath and social chaos.

With the incorporation of Greek philosophical thought patriarchal relations also came to define cosmic and personal ontology in Christian theology. The self was defined as split between reason and passions, mind and
body. The self is rightly ordered when the male powers of mind rule over
the female elements of sensuality and bodiliness. The self falls into disorder
and sin. when the power or female part of the self gets out of hand and
subverts the higher male rationality. Relations of mind and body, like relations of male and female, master and slave, are defined in terms of power
relations of domination and submission. This model of domination and

control has also shaped relations with the nonhuman or natural world. In
Francis Bacon's language, nature is like an unruly female who must be
forced into submission and made the slave of scientific reason.

Modern liberal democratic societies partly reshaped but partly restated

this model of patriarchal cosmic, social, and personal relations. Nineteenth
century liberalism sought to redefine society as a body of male propertyholding citizens with equal rights before the law, participating in the economic and political process as equal individual agents. The sweeping universal language of the American Declaration of Independence, "We hold
these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal," did not
imagine itself as including women, slaves, Indians, and other dependent
adults, but only white, propertied males as citizens who were "created
equal" in relation to each other.

It took another 90 years to abolish slavery, another 145 years to enfranchise women, and almost 200 years before African-Americans were effec-

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FEMINISM, HOPE, MODERNITY

tively enfranchised. Liberal democratic constitutions were gradually adopted

around the world as part of the project of "modernization," changing social

patterns that denied women access to education, paid work, and political
participation. This has modified but not deeply changed the patterns of
sexism in society. Women became both the low-paid workers in the paid
economy and the unpaid workers in the home.
While a few women gained some public power and cultural participation, in the lower half of societies worldwide women remain the most impoverished and exploited sector, often abandoned to be both primary parents and breadwinners for poor families of dependent children, the elderly,
and the sick. It is these female heads of families who our great politicians
of "family values" have abandoned in what is falsely called "welfare reform,"
slipped over on us in the midst of a national political campign of mindnumbing irrelevance. For these ideologues the only function of the federal
government is its military and police functions in "national security." All

that has to do with human welfare is to be assigned the private entrepreneur, guided solely by the profit motive of the market economy. For free
marketeers, the profit motive is the only global ethic and the free market
economy the "natural law."
Western Europe and North America, into the twentieth century, were involved in a vast project of colonization in which the people and land of
much of the globe (Central and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia,
the Middle East, and the Pacific Islands) were appropriated to serve the
power and wealth of the colonizing nations and their dominant classes.
Despite occasional protest from missionaries, Christianization mostly went
hand-in-hand with colonization, reshaping the religions and cultures of dependent peoples to fit into Western models.
Only after World War II was there a major process of decolonization of
Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. But these areas of former colonization
today find justice and well-being eluding them in a worldwide market
system ruled by global capitalism in which the top twenty percent of the
world enjoys about eighty percent of the world's wealth, while the other
eighty percent share the remaining twenty percent, and the bottom fifth
(about a billion people) live in conditions of extreme destitution. The 1996
United Nations Human Development Report estimates that 358 billionaires
worldwide control assets greater than the combined annual incomes of
countries with forty-five percent of the world's people.
This growing gap between a wealthy global elite who enjoy the fruits of
modern technology and the poor who are virtually excluded from the basic
means of life is accompanied by growing impoverishment and poisoning
of the natural environment of air, water, and soil, and by militarized control
together with growing lawlessness and violence in everyday life. Cultures
of mendacity and consumerist diversion rule the popular media, eroding a
sense of community values and commitment to shared well-being. It is in

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72

ROSEMARY REDFORD RUETHER

this context that we can speak of a crisis of modernity, meaning by m

nity the culmination of this system of Western neocolonialism, techn

cal reason, and the market economy, incorporating most global res
and undermining alternative cultures and values.
What does feminism have to do with this global crisis of modernity?
Feminism can be defined narrowly as simply the quest of a few privileged

middle class women in modernizing societies seeking opportunities in the

privileged economic and cultural sectors as autonomous professionals, business leaders, and politicans. But feminism more broadly understood is part

of a global challenge to the cultures of domination that define women,

nature, and nonwhite Western peoples and religions as the "other" to be
either erased or incorporated into a dominant system of white Western male

control. Feminism seeks cultural and social relationality based on mutuality

in difference, rather than domination-subjugation. Men and women, human
and nonhuman, different cultures of West and East, need to find new
models of interconnection that respect differences in relations of solidarity
and mutual well-being.
In this context of this quest for alternative cultural and social relations of
mutual well-being, much of what is being defined as "postmodernism" in
Western philosophical thought has an ambivalent impact. On the one hand,
postmodern thought has signaled the crisis of the dominant model of technological rationality and cultural imperialism in which the Western indi-

vidualistic male was defined as the normative human. It has rejected this
hegemonic discourse in favor of pluralism and difference. In this sense

postmodernism can be seen as clearing the way for a quest for alternatives
that are respectful of differences across religious, cultural, ethnic, and
gender lines.

But much of postmodern Western thought carries this championing of

difference into an absolute against any "universal metanarratives" in a way
that impedes and even forbids the quest for more inclusive alternatives.
Postmodernists proclaim that all grand narratives are to be rejected, but
typically ignore the victory of those grand narratives of technological reason,
consumerism, and the market economy that are impoverishing much of
humanity and the earth. Postmodernism in this sense allows the beneficiaries of Western dominance, including some female professionals, to enjoy
their affluence, while rejecting any solidarity with the victims of that affluence in the name of "respecting difference" and the impossibility of going
beyond the particular.
Clearly, in order to shape a vision of future hope beyond the crisis of
modernity one needs some alternative global vision, not the rejection of all
global visions in a way that leaves the dominant system unchallenged. A
vision of future hope needs to pay particular attention to those most likely
to be left out of the dominant system: women, children, the poor in every
society, indigenous peoples and their cultures, the nonhuman communities

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FEMINISM, HOPE, MODERNITY

73

of nature. One needs to examine concretely, in their local and global contexts, how these groups are exploited and/or excluded and to imagine new
patterns of relationality that can build communities of mutual flourishing.
This means we need an open-ended understanding of commonality in diversity that can embrace many diverse cultural patterns of life enhancement,
while questioning those cultural and social patterns, both ancient and modern, that confine some groups of people to poverty, servitude, and violence
on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, and culture.
We need to develop some notions of what the "Good" means as a guide
and goal of personal moral and spiritual development in community. While
any definition of the "Good" will always be a human cultural and social
construction, this does not mean it is an arbitrary cultural construction

based on nothing. Humans are embedded in a framework of cosmic being

that is not arbitrary but has consequences for flourishing or violence, good
or evil, when its patterns of positive relationality are observed or violated.
Human religions and morality have each sought to understand this framework and thus to define what makes for goodness or evil in relation to one
another, to the earth, and to the divine.

We need to seek across our diverse cultures for a new synthesis of the
best of these guides for what makes for good living together in mutual
well-being and what makes for its opposites. This is what the Global Ethic

developed at the World Parliament of Religions tries to do. This quest for a
global ethic and spirituality for living together in mutual well-being must
be inclusive of every culture, of both men and women, and of the nonhuman world as the life support within which the human community subsists.
This cannot be defined from one perspective, from one class, one gender,
one race, culture, or religion. It demands a "hearing into speech" of women
as well as men, in the many social and cultural contexts of our diverse
world in its ecological matrix.
This hearing into speech of the many others can birth a more inclusive
ethic of solidarity between groups, cultures, and communities of mutual
flourishing. This is the cultural and social revolution into which we are

called in order to move beyond the western defined "crisis of modernity"

into a more inclusive vision of future hope for all peoples in an earth community that must encompass all its life forms.

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