479 - Receiving Woman: Studies in the Psychology and Theology of the Feminine

Receiving Woman:
Studies in the Psychology and Theology
of the Feminine
By Ann Belford Ulanov
Philadelphia, Westminster, 1981. 187 pp. $9.95 (paper).

Those caught in the cross-fire between a Moral Majority delimitation of woman's place and a post-Christian radical feminist rejection of any concept of femininity will find a friend in the author, a Jungian analyst and Professor of Psychiatry and Religion at New York's Union Theological Seminary. Women's task, she says, is to express all of themselves and thus to embody a quality of consciousness and spirit that the world badly needs. This is not to succumb to stereotypes projected upon them by those who fear the feminine, nor to obliterate the masculine-feminine polarity. Drawing on Jung and Winnicott, she identifies distinctly feminine elements of being and relates them to a woman's claiming her own authority and religious experience.

The book is feminist in the best sense, valuing the full capacities of women and critiquing an angry political feminism that sets new limits on women. A wooden and abstract style, however, weakens the message of the feminine rooted in living images and experience. Still, this is a thoughtful perspective for all those concerned with feminist theology and women's call to faith and ministry.

Diana Lee Beach
New York Theological Seminary
New York, N.Y.