Race, class, and sex were three ways Jewish men had of defining people as “other.” In The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir says, “We find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility toward every other consciousness; the Subject can be posed only in being opposed--he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other; the inessential, the Object.” To define someone as “other” is a way of saying, “If I have to be my brother’s keeper let me define my brother as narrowly as possible, to make it less difficult for me.” To combat this misuse of other people, God’s people are warned throughout the Old and New Testaments not to oppress the poor, the stranger, the widow (woman alone).
There is a case in the Old Testament where a person who on all counts was an “other”--a female, Gentile, slave--was treated badly by Abraham and Sarah. After her body had been used she was sent away to die in the desert. But she cried out to God, and God heard her and promised her the founding of her own nation: the Arabs. The conflict generated by her abuse is apparent in the world today.
Abolition and Suffrage
The subconscious understanding of their own oppressed status may have given early women abolitionists a natural predisposition to understanding the unfairness of slavery. These women also understood that the issue wasn’t just the "vote," but any denial of personhood that resulted in the limitation of any individual’s life options.
The two women who did much to inaugurate the suffrage movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, first met at an abolitionist meeting in London in 1840. Mott, a Quaker preacher who felt strongly about proclaiming “deliverance to the captives,” found that the credentials of all the women delegates were rejected. They had to sit in a gallery as observers.
It’s no wonder that Sojourner Truth, a black woman who had fought for abolition, wanted to “Keep the thing going while things are stirring.” In 1866 the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution gave blacks the vote but omitted any reference to women. The second section of this Amendment introduced the word male into the Constitution for the first time. In a speech delivered in 1867, Sojourner Truth was greeted by loud cheers from the audience. She responded:
“My friends, I am rejoiced that you are glad, but I don’t know how you will feel when I get through. I come from another field--the country of the slave. They have got their liberty--so much good luck to have slavery partly destroyed; not entirely. I want it root and branch destroyed. Then we will all be free indeed. I feel that if I have to answer for the deeds done in my body just as much as a man, I have a right to have just as much as a man. There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men would be masters over the women and it will be just as bad as it was before.”
Many of the women who found in the Bible the necessity for slavery to be abolished saw that the logical extension of their arguments included themselves. The first of these arguments was that being created in the image of God implies that all human beings have dignity. To deny them their rights was an affront to the God who made them.
Sarah Moore Grimke, a Quaker abolitionist, was one of the first women to speak publicly to mixed audiences in the U.S. In a lecture given in 1837, Grimke said:
“They (man and woman) were made in the image of God; dominion was given to both over every other creature but not over each other. Created in perfect equality, they were expected to exercise the vice-regency entrusted to them by their Maker, in harmony and love.”
The second stream of thought argued that if women were indeed cursed (an argument also used against Ham’s supposed black descendants), that curse had been broken when a woman had bruised Satan’s head with the birth of Christ. The argument followed: “How can a person in whom Jesus Christ dwells be denied or denigrated?”
In a debate at a Woman’s Rights Convention in 1854, Lucretia Mott argued:
“The very first act of note that mentioned when the disciples and apostles went forth after Jesus was removed from them, was the bringing up of an ancient prophecy to prove that they were right in the position they assumed on that occasion .... (Peter) stated that ‘the time is come, this day is fulfilled the prophecy, when it is said, will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,’ etc. ... Now can anything be clearer than that?”
It was evidently not clear. The women were answered that if the divine Word from Genesis to Revelation were set aside as untrue, then woman might “be relieved from the perhaps unfortunate limitations that hold her back ....”
The Subject
The “male consciousness” de Beauvoir terms the Subject had two things to things to gain by defining women as other. The first was economic. The Other could do boring or grueling work that the Subject didn’t want to do. The Other didn’t even really need adequate pay because her needs were different, somehow less. The original meaning of the word family [familia] meant the total number of domestic slaves belonging to one man. To insure the continued supply of cheap manual labor; blacks and women in America were categorized as being happiest with simple non-intellectual tasks.
In 1870, Judith Sargent Stevens of Massachusetts wrote in response to that kind of categorization:
“Should it still be vociferated, 'your domestick employments are sufficient'--I would calmly ask; is it reasonable that a candidate for immortality, for the joys of heaven, an intelligent being who is to spend an eternity contemplating the works of Deity should at present be so degraded, as to be allowed no other ideas than those which are suggested by the mechanism of a pudding; or of the sewing the seam of a garment? Pity that all such censurers of female improvement do not go one step further and deny their future existence! To be consistent they surely ought.”
Once you admitted that all humanity had a soul, no one’s sphere of activity could be limited.
Besides seeing the possibility of a loss of cheap labor, the male consciousness felt its identity threatened when women forgot their place. Often when Christian women began to serve the Lord in a free response to the Spirit, the male subject became afraid of infringement on his priestcraft. In a document reacting to Sarah and Angelina Grimke’s speeches on abolition, the Congregationist clergy asserted that women’s duties and influence must be unobtrusive and private: “But when she assumes the place and tone of men as a public reformer, our care and protection of her seem unnecessary."
In other words, “Forget reform and justice,” the Subject was saying. “We don’t want our fragile egos threatened. We have such a tenuous hold on our self-esteem that we need you to be totally passive.”
That the Holy Spirit worked without regard to person irritated the Subject ... In 1646, John Vicars wrote the following response to a movement of the Spirit:
“Is it a miracle or a wonder (indeed, I confess it may be, to see such intolerable impudence) to see young, saucy boys ... bold botching taylors and other most audacious illiterate mechanics run rashly (and unsent for too) out of their shops into the pulpit: to see bold impudent housewives, without all womanly modesty to take upon them (in the natural volubility of their tongues, and quick wits or strong memories only) to prate (not preach or prophesy) after a narrative or discursive manner, an hour or more and that most contrary to the Apostle inhibitions.”
Here the association of sex and class status are clearly seen to be in the same category of ego-threat. It is easier of course to maintain distinctions of “other” when there are striking physical differences as with blacks and women. Discrimination against other minority groups in America, like the Swedes and Irish, couldn’t be maintained. When they lost their accents they couldn’t be differentiated from the “subject” himself.
Economically women may not have it bad as non-white males, as long as they know their place. The man can’t be proud of the wife he possesses if he keeps her in rags, and for obvious reasons he’s not going to keep her in a tenement in another part of town. So the woman who is a man’s property may have an easy time of it, depending on the status of her man. But “the woman alone” faces severe job and wage discrimination like the non-white male. Women are kept out of status jobs by white male hierarchies, regardless of their training. Nonwhite men are kept out because they don’t have the opportunity to become as well-qualified, in terms of education. Thus the importance of the repeated biblical injunctions to defend the stranger and the widow. The stranger today would be the non-white. The widow in the Bible was the only woman alone in a society where virtually every woman married at an early age. Thus the radicality of Paul in asserting that the highest aim in life for a woman was to serve the Lord rather than to become a supportive wife (1 Corinthians 7:34).
The Other
Helen Mayer Hacker talking about women as a minority group says there are two reasons why groups may not have minority consciousness. There are 1) those who do not know that they are being discriminated against on a group basis; and 2) those who acknowledge the propriety of differential treatment on a group basis.
Women can easily fall into either of these categories. First, they often tend to be isolated from each other, sometimes physically, encapsuled in a nuclear family home. Or they are separated from each other psychically, viewing women as the “other woman” who is waiting for a chance to take away her man, her source of identity, status, and financial security.
Second, women may feel they have something to gain by accepting second-class status. Like serfs they will get a certain amount of protection and security in return for their subservience. They may be taught that by reinforcing roles of helplessness or childishness they can elicit certain desired responses. (getting Big Daddy to buy me a mink, etc.)
Women may respond to their role of other with acceptance and self-deprecation, which necessarily includes deprecation of other women--a reason why women are sometimes such bad friends to each other. Or they may reject the role of Other and assume the traits of the oppressor, making themselves “subject” in a new dichotomy. Jill Johnson, author of Lesbian Nation, after splitting from her marriage, chose to have her son raised in a community of male homosexuals. (The male even in her own son was so “other” to her).
A Model
The women’s suffrage movement came out of the women abolitionists’ realization that they too were an oppressed class. The current women’s movement was started in large part by women who had been active in civil rights and the antiwar movement. Their defense of the oppressed also finally came to include themselves. As one woman who had lived communally with a mixed group of political activists commented, “The women were liberated to chop wood while the men wrote and thought.”
The modern women’s movement accepted the basic ideas of equality that, because of Christianity, were self-evident in Western culture, but without the biblical basis or biblical imperative of discipleship. So the movement is often strong on critique with no positive direction or model to look to beyond the critique.
As Christians our critique of the Subject/Other dichotomy is based on both male and female’s being made in God’s image, possessing a soul, and being common possessors of the Holy Spirit.
But beyond these basic biblical reasons for not allowing woman to be objectified, we have a model for “differences within wholeness” in the body of Christ. The Christian is told not to be a respecter of persons because Christ wasn’t. In the second great commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” the Christian is told to abolish all categories of “other.” To do that demands radical identification of the “other” with the “subject.” And as this happens the “subject” becomes the self we are called to die to.
When this article appeared, Sharon Gallagher was editor of Right On in Berkeley and is a contributing editor for the Post American.
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