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And the “Hall Was Burned to the Ground”: Mothers and Theological Body Knowledge

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Parenting as Spiritual Practice and Source for Theology

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Abstract

Do mothers know anything distinctive through bodily practices of acute care for another, particularly as it relates to theology? In this chapter, I explore how theology is shaped by human habitation of temporal physical bodies, arguing that mothers have a greater role in constructing theology than history has accorded them. I develop this claim through an examination of the life of Antoinette Brown Blackwell—known as the first ordained woman but seldom recognized as a scholar and mother—and then through an exploration of the occlusion and reclamation of maternal knowledge in theology. In both instances, I hope to spark imagination about what we have missed by constructing theology in static, disembodied terms as an elite exercise whose presumed subject is the unchanging adult.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Elizabeth Munson and Greg Dickinson, “Hearing Women Speak: Antoinette Brown Blackwell and the Dilemma of Authority,” Journal of Women’s History 10, no. 1 (Spring 1998), p. 126, citing Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric, vol. 1 (New York: Praeger, 1989), 25–33, 9–12.

  2. 2.

    See http://divinity.vanderbilt.edu/news/lectures/, accessed May 27, 2016. I am grateful to Dean Emilie Townes and colleagues at Vanderbilt Divinity School for the opportunity to present the spring 2015 Antoinette Brown Lecture as part of my work on this chapter.

  3. 3.

    See Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Christian Theology in Practice: Discovering a Discipline (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012) and Dorothy Bass, et al., Christian Practical Wisdom: What It Is, and Why It Matters (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016). My first effort to explore connections between mothering and theological knowledge appeared in “Epistemology or Bust: A Maternal Feminist Knowledge of Knowing,” Journal of Religion 72, no. 2 (April 1992): 229–247.

  4. 4.

    Elizabeth Cazden, Antoinette Brown Blackwell: A Biography (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1983), p. xi.

  5. 5.

    Laura Kerr, Lady in the Pulpit (New York: Women’s Press, 1951), 239.

  6. 6.

    Cf., Elinor Rice Hays, Those Extraordinary Blackwells (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967).

  7. 7.

    Kirkus Review, Accessed January 29, 2015, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/elinor-rice-hays-2/those-extraordinary-blackwells/.

  8. 8.

    Alice S. Rossi, ed., The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 343.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., 343–344.

  10. 10.

    Physician Robert Briffault asserted this widely held opinion as scientific fact in The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions (London: Allen and Unwin, 1926).

  11. 11.

    Cazden, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 16.

  12. 12.

    Barbara M. Solomon, “Blackwell, Antoinette Louisa Brown,” in Notable American Women 1607–1950, by Edward T. James et al., vol. 1: A-F (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 159; Cazden, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 52. They awarded the degree belatedly in 1878. Her name did not appear with the official listing of 1850 graduates until 1908.

  13. 13.

    Munson and Dickinson, “Hearing Women Speak,” 112; Sarah Gilson manuscript (a 300-page memoir based on conversations with Blackwell in her eighties, letters, and speeches) in the Blackwell Collection, the Schlesinger Library, 72–73, cited by Cazden in Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 36 (hereafter appears as Gilson ms.)

  14. 14.

    Cazden, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 27.

  15. 15.

    Antoinette L. Brown, “Exegesis of 1 Corinthians 14:34, 35; and 1 Timothy 2:11, 12,” Oberlin Quarterly Review (July 1849): 358–373.

  16. 16.

    See Munson and Dickinson, “Hearing Women Speak,” 124, footnote no. 31. They also cite Gerda Lerner’s book, Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 138–139.

  17. 17.

    “Antoinette Brown Blackwell,” Wikipedia, accessed December 3, 2014, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoinette_Brown_Blackwell; “Blackwell, Antoinette Louise Brown,” American National Biography Online, accessed January 29, 2015, http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00064.html.

  18. 18.

    Cazden, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 86.

  19. 19.

    Ibid., 86.

  20. 20.

    Rossi, ed., The Feminist Papers, 332, 336.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., 331, 342.

  22. 22.

    Cazden, Blackwell, 126–127; and Munson and Dickinson, “Hearing Women Speak,” 122, footnote 5, citing Susan Phinney Conrad, Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, 1830–1860 (Seacaucus, N.J.: The Citadel Press, 1978), 150. Munson and Dickinson slightly overstate Conrad’s view even though Conrad does conclude her account of Nettie’s life too early and abruptly by saying that her “growing family … removed her from the institutional centers of feminism.”

  23. 23.

    Antoinette Brown Blackwell, “How to Combine Intellectual Culture with Household Management and Family Duty,” The Woman’s Journal, November 7, 1874. See also “The Relation of Women’s Work in the Household to the Work Outside,” The Woman’s Journal, November 8, 1873; “Work in Relation to the Home,” The Woman’s Journal, May 2, 1874; “Sex and Work,” The Woman’s Journal, March 14, 1874. See also Cazden, Blackwell, Chap. 10.

  24. 24.

    As a scholar who has also turned to the sciences, I find Nettie’s shifting focus of particular interest, especially her criticism of evolutionary theories that influenced Freud.

  25. 25.

    Munson and Dickinson, “Hearing Women Speak,” 111 and 123–124, citing Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 54–57 and Edward Hammond Clarke, Sex in Education: Or, A Fair Chance for the Girls, Reprinted (New York: Arno Press, 1972).

  26. 26.

    Antoinette Brown Blackwell, The Sexes throughout Nature (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1875), in Rossi, ed., The Feminist Papers, 357. Munson and Dickinson also include this quote in “Hearing Women Speak,” 117.

  27. 27.

    Blackwell, The Sexes throughout Nature, in Rossi, ed, The Feminist Papers, 357. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

  28. 28.

    Blackwell, The Sexes throughout Nature, 6–7, cited by Munson and Dickinson, “Hearing Women Speak,” 116.

  29. 29.

    Munson and Dickinson cite as an example Sandra Harding, “Feminism, Science, and the Anti-Enlightenment Critiques,” in Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990). See also Nancy C. M. Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues, ed. Sandra G. Harding (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 157–180.

  30. 30.

    Munson and Dickinson, “Hearing Women Speak,” 120. See also 108 and 121.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 119.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., 118.

  33. 33.

    Cazden, Blackwell, 162–163.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., 144.

  35. 35.

    Gilson ms., 197 and 211, cited by Cazden, Blackwell, 122–123, 161.

  36. 36.

    Gilson ms., 211, cited by Cazden, Blackwell, 161.

  37. 37.

    Beverly Ann Zink-Sawyer, From Preachers to Suffragists: Woman’s Rights and Religious Conviction in the Lives of Three Nineteenth-Century American Clergywomen (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 17.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., 18.

  39. 39.

    For a description of the United Church of Christ award, see http://www.ucc.org/women_abawards, accessed March 12, 2015.

  40. 40.

    Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994).

  41. 41.

    Valerie Saiving Goldstein, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion (April 1960): 100.

  42. 42.

    See Mark Douglas and Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty, “Revisiting Valerie Saiving’s Challenge to Reinhold Niebuhr: Honoring Fifty Years of Reflection on ‘The Human Situation: A Feminine View’: Introduction and Overview,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 28, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 75–76. They also note that well-known biographies of Reinhold Niebuhr and renewed interest in his work overlook her work.

  43. 43.

    Saiving Goldstein, “The Human Situation,” 109.

  44. 44.

    Valerie Saiving et al., “A Conversation with Valerie Saiving,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 4, no. 2 (1988): 108, 110.

  45. 45.

    Saiving Goldstein, “The Human Situation,”108, her emphasis.

  46. 46.

    Miller-McLemore, Also a Mother, 89, 91; Cristina Grenholm, Motherhood and Love: Beyond the Gendered Stereotypes of Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2011), xviii, 20, 55–57.

  47. 47.

    Even in a recent “Roundtable: Fifty Years of Reflection on Valerie Saiving,” the influence of maternity on Saiving’s constructive thought receives scant attention.

  48. 48.

    Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1982) and Models of God: Theology for an Ecological Nuclear Age (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1987); Grace M. Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999).

  49. 49.

    Jantzen, Becoming Divine, 149. See also 44–157.

  50. 50.

    See Samira Kawash , “Directions in Motherhood Studies,” Signs 36, 4 (Summer 2011): 969–1003. There are important exceptions to the paucity of research on mothers in religion and theology, some of which I note in the final section of this chapter. But if “cultural definitions of motherhood are intertwined” with religion, as Rachel Epp Buller and Kerry Fast argue, then scholarship that incorporates “religious groundings in interpretations of motherhood” is needed. See, their “Introduction,” in Mothering Mennonite, ed. Kerry Fast and Rachel Epp Buller (Bradford, Canada: Demeter Press, 2013), 9.

  51. 51.

    Saiving summarizes her earlier argument in “Conversation with Saiving,” 100.

  52. 52.

    Saiving Goldstein, “The Human Situation,” 103.

  53. 53.

    Melvin Konner, The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 470.

  54. 54.

    An unidentified review of Brown Blackwell’s book, Studies in General Science in Gilson ms., 212, quoted by Cazden, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 51.

  55. 55.

    Fast and Buller, “Introduction,” 7.

  56. 56.

    Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1989), 171–190 and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993).

  57. 57.

    Irene Oh, “The Performativity of Motherhood: Embodying Theology and Political Agency,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 29, no. 2 (2009): 4.

  58. 58.

    Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1989), 212.

  59. 59.

    Rich, Of Woman Born, 34.

  60. 60.

    United States Census Bureau Newsroom Archive, http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/cb12-ff08.html, accessed June 8, 2015.

  61. 61.

    Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

  62. 62.

    Grenholm, Motherhood and Love, 2.

  63. 63.

    I am partly building on Martha Nussbaum’s differentiation between four meanings of the term natural (e.g., motherhood as natural) in Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): common, innate, expected, or normative (255, cited by Grenholm, 40–41).

  64. 64.

    Oh, “The Performativity of Motherhood,” 4. She refers to Martha Nussbaum, “The Professor of Parody,” New Republic 220, no. 8 (February 22, 1999): 37–45 and “Preface and Acknowledgements,” in Ellen Armour and Susan S. Ville, eds., Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), viii–ix. For a similar argument, see also Iris Marion Young, “Lived Body versus Gender,” in A Companion to Gender Studies, ed. Philomena Essed, David Theo Goldberg, and Audrey Kobayashi (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 102–113.

  65. 65.

    See, for example, Bonnie Thornton Dill, “Our Mother’s Grief: Racial Ethnic Women and the Maintenance of Families,” in Our Mothers’ Grief: Racial Ethnic Women and the Maintenance of Families (Center for Research on Women, Memphis State University, 1986); and Katharine von Kellenbach, “Reproduction and Resistance During the Holocaust,” in Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation, by Esther Fuchs et al. (Lanham, MD: University Press Of America, 1999), 19–32.

  66. 66.

    Miller-McLemore, Also a Mother, 147.

  67. 67.

    Rich, Of Woman Born, 283–284, cited by Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, 9, emphasis in Rich’s text.

  68. 68.

    Sara Ruddick, “Maternal Thinking,” in Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Joyce Trebilcot (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), 28 reprint from Feminist Studies 6, no. 2 (1980): 342–367.

  69. 69.

    Ibid., 225.

  70. 70.

    Ibid., 47–51.

  71. 71.

    Julia Kristeva, “Un Nouveau Type d’Intellectuel: Le Dissident,” Tel Quel 74 (Winter 1977), 6–7 quoted by Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Writing and Motherhood,” in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (Cornell University Press, 1985), 352, 368; and Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 178–179.

  72. 72.

    Miller-McLemore, Also a Mother, 143. The final quote comes from Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 179.

  73. 73.

    Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics & Moral Education (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 30–33.

  74. 74.

    Miller-McLemore, Also a Mother, 147–149.

  75. 75.

    See Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, Chap. 8, “Histories of Human Flesh” and 259, footnote 23 where she admits, “I did not set out to write about birthgiving but to minimize its importance in relation to mothering. I am only now beginning to think again about the implications for women generally of female birthgiving.”

  76. 76.

    Ruddick, “Maternal Thinking,” 193.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., 194, 208.

  78. 78.

    Ibid., 191.

  79. 79.

    Ibid., 196.

  80. 80.

    Ibid., 186, emphasis added. She draws on South African feminist Olive Schreiner who says women know the “cost” and social activist Jane Addams who talks about the “pang” and “plaint” women have about war.

  81. 81.

    Cristina L. H. Traina, Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

  82. 82.

    Mara Benjamin, “Intersubjectivity Meets Maternity: Buber, Levinas, and the Eclipsed Relation,” in Thinking Jewish Culture in America, ed. Ken Koltun-Fromm (New York: Lexington Books, 2013), 261–284.

  83. 83.

    Grenholm, Motherhood and Love, especially Chap. 6. For a recent and wonderfully rich exploration of the fears and vulnerability in maternal love, see Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love: A Theological Anthropology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015).

  84. 84.

    Janet Martin Soskice, “Love and Attention,” in Michael McGhee, ed., Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 59–72.

  85. 85.

    Mara Benjamin, “On Teachers, Rabbinic and Maternal,” in Motherhood in the Jewish Cultural Imagination, ed. Jane Kanarek, Marjorie Lehman, and Simon J. Broner (Oxford: Littman, Forthcoming 2017), 3, 13–14.

  86. 86.

    Young “Lived Body versus Gender,” 105.

  87. 87.

    Munson and Dickinson, “Hearing Women Speak,” 109.

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  1. Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

    Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore

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  1. St. Catherine University, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA

    Claire Bischoff

  2. Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA

    Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo

  3. North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA

    Annie Hardison-Moody

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Miller-McLemore, B.J. (2017). And the “Hall Was Burned to the Ground”: Mothers and Theological Body Knowledge. In: Bischoff, C., O’Donnell Gandolfo, E., Hardison-Moody, A. (eds) Parenting as Spiritual Practice and Source for Theology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59653-2_4

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