128 - Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality

Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality

Edited By Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles

Boston, Beacon Press, 1985. 330 Pp . $21.95.

In this volume, twelve women scholars investigate the dialectic between women and religion. Using a range of cross-religious and cross-cultural perspectives, they explore new dimensions of two poles of research: women's experience and the interface of religion and culture. Mining the words "women's experience" entails, among other tasks, the probing of women's history, the recovery of women's story imbedded in ascribed roles and status, the unearthing of women's culture and creativity, the critique of traditional historiography, and the revisiting of hagiography. Similarly, going underneath the word "religion" means encountering the cultures, institutions, images, symbols, and attitudes through which religion is carried and with which it interacts, sometimes in concert, other times in censure.

The book explores not only how women are socialized and conditioned by patriarchalized cultural and/or religious patterns, but also, how women have discovered through and in religion the means to create and shape their own personal, spiritual, and sometimes political autonomy and destiny. Inner spiritual strength may appear precisely when the conditions for women are the most oppressive, the male hierarchy the most exclusive. Each chapter is a case study of a discrete context: women in the ancient Near East, in modern Hinduism, in the Pauline church, in the literature of American black women, in the biography of a Tibetan woman spiritual leader, in the figure of Monica, mother of Augustine, in the Marian revival of the last century, in antebellum America, in the parallels between "women" and "Jews" in German theology preceding Hitler, in the religious pilgrimage of Simone Weil, and in the study of Christian liturgy with an anthropologist's eye toward birthing and descent reenactments. Attention is given to issues of social class differences and race as they cast women's lives in different forms.

Many issues are addressed: the relationship between female symbols for the divine and women's equality, female sexuality vis-a-vis ritual, male attitudes about the nature of women and their place in the social and religious hierarchy, women's bodies and men's rituals, and the like. Chapters point out the contradictory forces in religion and religious symbols: their power to empower women's identity in spirituality and their power to destroy. A poignant example of this in Western Christianity is the revisionist study of Simone Weil by Judith Van Herick of Pennsylvania State University. Van Herick traces how religion created a space of cultural/political resistance for Weil, thereby energizing her life commitments, yet how it also ultimately informed the movements that led to her own death by starvation.

129 - Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality

In the introductory chapter, Margaret Miles of the Harvard Divinity School offers a clear and subtle overview. She points out the rich array of methodologies required to do this research, which is not an exercise in pulling women's names out of tombs and shadows, but one of reconstructing concrete life situations, roles, relationships, and ideologies that shaped particular women's lives in specific religious and cultural contexts. What Miles gleans and gathers moves beyond women's story to challenge the enterprise of historical, theological, and cultural studies themselves. In making a case for the necessity to broaden frames of reference, she is deepening the social, cultural, and symbolic capabilities of research as well.

Miles points out the unity of the collection, thereby making the book itself an excellent teaching tool. All of the contributions have in common the fact that their beginning-points yielded little evidence about their subjects and a limited, narrow, or almost nonexistent treatment of them over time. She poses the question: "What constitutes trustworthy evidence for women's lives and how are we to interpret this evidence?" She responds by demonstrating how this particular group of essays utilizes a variety of methodologies to carry forward its investigations. Among the points she makes are the following:

(1) It is necessary to move beyond dependence only on text, that is, to research devotional and popular literature, journals, letters, laws that address gender issues, images and metaphors, even the culture of foods, their preparation, distribution, and ritual meaning.

(2) We need to recover and reconstruct women's lives whom we know about only because of the men who wrote about them. This demands exploration of what the text "reveals" as well as of what it was "intended" to communicate.

(3) Awareness of the particular experience, bias, and frame of reference which the narrator brings to experience is significant.

(4) One needs to be aware of the differences between those major male figures that historians write about (men who have been the primary shapers of thought) and women whose lives have been involved in spheres of activity assumed either to be constant, and therefore unquestioned, or unimportant.

(5) It is important that we be aware of the role that the woman scholar herself plays as she is engaged with the women she studies, and the ways "her work enriches, reinforces, and illuminates her own life."

Each chapter in this book has its own identity, representing significant, long-term research and contributions to particular fields carried on in part through the Harvard Women's Studies in Religion Program, headed by Constance H. Buchanan, one of the volume's editors. The contributors represent a range of disciplines-history of Christianity, church history, historical theology, Near Eastern studies, New Testament, Hindu and Buddhist studies, anthropology, and religion and literature. The authors are: Margaret R. Miles, Jo Ann Hackett, Frederique Apffel Marglin, Bernadette J. Brooten, Delores S. Williams,

130 - Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality

Anne C. Klein, Clarissa W. Atkinson, Barbara Corrado Pope, Dorothy C. Bass, Sheila Briggs, Judith Van Herik, and Nancy Jay.

This first publication in The Harvard Women's Studies in Religion Series may not be "immaculate and powerful," but its authors are firmly fixed and impeccable in their task of unraveling that religious contradiction between the "ideal woman" that no woman can become and the sources from which that idealization has sprung, rooted as they are in the life pilgrimages of powerful women.

CONSTANCE F. PARVEY

The Lutheran Theological Seminary
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania