Reclaiming Language for Love

by Audrey deCoursey, Womaen’s Caucus Steering Committee

“Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me….”

Well, that’s not quite true, is it? How many words have hurt us? (just a) woman; (close-minded) Christian; (bleeding-heart, commie) liberal; (agenda-toting) homosexual; (like a) girl; (angry, humorless) feminist.

Imagined dialogue:
Him: “You’re one of those feminists, aren’t you?”
Me: “What? No, I’m not – or, well – yes, I am.”
Him: “Oh, I thought so.”
Me: “But wait! I can explain!”

These labels we are hurt by are strange: they hurt so deeply because they are words that describe who we actually are. We are hurt by these words because we realize that someone so equates a certain aspect of our identity with negative values, that when they call us what we really are, they mean it as a slur. Further, they have reduced all of who we are into a single element, which, while true, is not a full recognition of our infinite selves. Sometimes we even internalize those negative associations, and think less of ourselves for having certain identities. Being called a “liberal,” a “homosexual,” or a “hat-wearing, bag-carrying, sidewalk-walking person” is not an insult unless the person thinks liberals, homosexuals, and hat-wearing, bag-carrying, sidewalk-walking people are inherently bad.

And so, when we reclaim words and language, what we are really doing is reclaiming those identities from the negative baggage others have saddled them with (or, in the case of Christianity, baggage that violent Christians have saddled their own religion with). We are saying, “Yes, I am a woman; yes, that is a good thing; so yes, you had better call me a woman.” We are exercising that great feminist principle of choice: choosing for ourselves what and how we will be named, choosing to celebrate our most authentic selves in life and in word.

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Christianity is a religion with a love affair with language. Mary’s song in Luke 1, the Magnificat, is a beautiful expression of a person on the margins of society (female, teenaged, poor) claiming the power of words to express her faith and her choice to agree to God’s call to her. She uses language as the tool it is intended to be: human words used to magnify the divine language of love.

But language holds dangers, too. On the one hand, too often we overvalue words, forgetting what those words are supposed to do, which is symbolize the experience of something else. We get absorbed in arguments about the right theories instead of the right action; we get carried away in the beauty of our own philosophies, ignoring the real lives those philosophies are used to exploit or deny. (In his classic World War I poem “Dulce et Decorum est,” Wilfred Owen warns us of the dangers of “the old lie” that sends young people off to war: that it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country. Noble-sounding words of propaganda can trump the lived experience of the victims of war and other oppressions, enabling violence to continue in the name of a ‘greater good.’) On the other hand, too often we undervalue the power of words to harm. We ignore how language can be (mis)used to create and perpetuate systems of oppression, a misuse that is denied with pat excuses: ‘It’s only words, not sticks or stones.’ ‘It was just a joke, why are you so upset?’ ‘It’s just a name, it doesn’t affect anything else about our church.’

Is it okay for some of us to not be ready to go about reclaiming language? For some of us to still be hurt when we are called words filled with venom, even though we think we should be proud of that identity? Most certainly. All of us feminists are in a position of self-defense against the onslaughts of a patriarchal culture that recognizes our challenge to it as the danger it really is; therefore, each of us can only know for ourselves how best to protect ourselves for this struggle. Some of us are using language for that self-defense, and it is these creative reinterpretations and renewals we are celebrating in the latest issue of our Caucus newsletter.

In the pages of our winter issue of Femailings, we explore some of the language we feminist Dunkards are reclaiming and reinvigorating to aid us in our journey: feminist, liberal, Christian, queer, consciousness-raising, and, of course, the denominational name. It is daunting and yet wondrous that every word we speak holds such power within it; may this power ever be life-giving, love-magnifying, mind-expanding, and fun.

Vera Drake: Movie Review

by Jan Eller, Womaen’s Caucus Worker

Vera Drake is a mild-mannered, 50ish woman with a pleasant countenance. She is almost always humming a tune and in a fine mood. Her solution for every problem is a hot cup of tea. She cleans houses for the upper-crust of her town and tends to her mother and other bed-ridden friends and neighbors. Her husband works in an auto shop which his brother owns. It is post-WWII in England so homes and apartments are small and dingy and amenities few. Vera and her husband live with their young adult children in an apartment which is smaller than most people’s living rooms now. Vera is always in a good mood as she works for others and comes home to make dinner in their matchbox apartment.

As the movie progresses, we see the other “work” she does on the side, for which she accepts no money. Vera “helps” women when they become pregnant against their wishes. Her method, passed down by countless generations of women, is to use a tube and syringe to insert soapy water into the uterus to induce a miscarriage. Some women already have too many children/ some are unmarried and unable to care for a child. As you might expect, something goes awry and one of the young women ends up in the hospital with a life-threatening infection. Most of her clients don’t even know her name, but this woman is the daughter of someone Vera used to work with. In the Catholic hospital, the priests and nuns press the mother to tell them who did this. Reluctantly she does, and Vera is arrested to the astonishment of her husband and children who don’t know about this sideline. The rest of the movie deals with her arrest and the reactions of her family. Her husband, although he doesn’t really understand why she does it, stands by her throughout her ordeal.

The movie is very sympathetic to Vera and her plight. This movie to me is what it was like before abortion was legal in this country. Back-room deals, coat hangers, knitting needles, soap douches, etc.—bad stuff for women who find themselves, through no fault of their own, to be pregnant. Most of us who want to keep abortion legal also dislike the procedure itself. We would prefer safe and effective contraceptives so that no woman finds herself unable to carry or care for an unwanted child. The hope is that abortion would be a rare occurrence. If abortion becomes illegal or too restricted for women in this country, we will again see scenes like this where women’s lives are endangered by illegal means.

When I was a teenager, before Roe v. Wade, abortions were whispered about by using images of rusty coat hangers and fatal infections. In those times, as in Vera‘s time, abortions were available to the rich and “connected.” The daughter of one of the rich families she cleans houses for is seen having an abortion in the same Catholic hospital where we later see the young woman with the uterine infection. It seems that the same moral rules and criminal laws don’t apply to those who can pay for their “work.” The other irony is that the woman who makes the arrangements with Vera and connects her to her clients is the one who gets the money from the families and who escapes prosecution, while Vera gets jail time and no income for her “helping.” These scenes could be commonplace again, if Roe v. Wade is overturned. It’s significant that Vera never uses the word “abortion.” She’s always “helping” these women as she herself was “helped” when she was younger.

I’m reminded of a scene from the musical “Quilters,” which portrays pioneer women talking about aspects of their lives as they sew quilts. I still remember one scene where a group of women are talking about the unwanted pregnancy of one of them. It was clear that she already had too many children and one more might endanger her life so that she would be unable to care for the others. The women were discussing ways to promote a miscarriage. Our pioneer women knew that not all pregnancies were welcomed and also knew how to use herbs and other means to allow the body to spontaneous abort. There was grief involved but also relief as the women knew what their limits were. I’m sure these methods were never discussed outside of their circles, just as Vera never discussed her “work” with anyone other than the women she assisted.

We face the possibility in this country that abortions again will become so restricted or even illegal that women’s lives will be endangered by unsafe means of terminating a pregnancy. This situation, as before, will not affect those with money or connections but overwhelmingly affect those with the least means of supporting themselves. Again we will resort to home remedies and folk cures passed down from woman to woman, with uncertain outcomes. Some will resort to unlicensed medical workers and dirty instruments. Some will simply carry unwanted children and make do as best they can. My hope is that we will still have safe alternatives for those who need to terminate a pregnancy.

Loving Liberally

by Audrey deCoursey,
Womaen’s Caucus Steering Committee,
Pacific School of Religion MDiv candidate, Berkeley, California

If you listen to Ann Coulter tell it, you can’t be a liberal and a Christian. In her most recent book, Godless: the Church of Liberalism, she suggests that liberal political beliefs, cumulatively, constitute a religious system that has as one of its goals the driving of Christianity to extinction. Flattening the breadth of left-wing and Democrat politics into its most outspoken or controversial positions, Coulter constructs a theory of liberalism as a cohesive system (the compliment of our cohesion I don’t know that we deserve!), with priests (public school teachers), sacraments (abortion), and cosmologies (evolution), all cleverly designed to replace Christianity. But this exploitation of the term ‘liberal’ does an injustice to the word’s definition, and relies on a simplistic perspective of Christianity. Coulter’s saying that if one is Christian, then one cannot be liberal, is like saying that if one has a bicycle, then the bicycle cannot be blue.

[Read the publisher's review online: http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780739326336-0]

Ann Coulter is a unique being for the feminist to consider. I want to like her, to cheer her on as she rises to a place of authority and popularity in a field dominated by men (conservative commentary). Yet, when I listen to what she has to say, especially about the feminist pioneers who paved the way for where she is today, I can only shake my head and wonder where the mental disconnect happened for her to be able to spout such hateful rhetoric, so inconsistent with the facts of her position. Beyond the fragmented writing style, jumping from point to point before she has time to support any of her assertions, her exclusive use of male pronouns starts to exhaust me after a while.

This post is not a book review. I am not trying to offer an objective analysis of the book or of Coulter. I cite Coulter’s book as one use of ‘liberal,’ representative of the treatment the word in conservative popular media. The term liberal is used in popular media as a slur so often that even some prominent Democrats avoid the label, preferring ‘progressive,’ or, more weakly, ‘moderate.’ But is this a fair use of the word itself? Does ‘liberal’ really say anything about religion?

A trip to my sturdy New Oxford Dictionary of English (Oxford University Press, 2001) reveals some insight. Liberal means, first, “willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own; open to new ideas.” Christianity, at least as I see it, is a religion of being open to new people, and. The third definition of the liberal is “given, used, or occurring in generous amounts,” which certainly affirms the right recognition of God’s abundant love. The theological definition of ‘liberal’ is “regarding many traditional beliefs as dispensable, invalidated by modern thought, or liable to change.” Jesus’ early movement was liberal by this definition. Christianity only survived in the Judean world two millennia ago because there were enough people open to the new idea that this Jesus guy might have something worth hearing.

But even this theological sub-definition requires further pursuit. What do we make of a religion with a traditional belief in nonconformity with state or inherited religion? What is our understanding of the relationship of belief to change, and which changes first, the believer or the belief? What are the ‘traditional beliefs’ of a faith grounded in the principle of change and growth as inherent to life?

The label ‘liberal,’ then, like any label, should open conversations more than provide simple judgments. We could argue that the tenets of Christianity support any of various political programs in current US discourse; however, the designation of liberal, as with the designations of conservative or radical or progressive, is a separate descriptor of an approach to religion, and is not, as Coulter and others imply, a replacement to religion itself. Any religion worth its salt for the Earth – any religion true to the infinite God of mysterious abundance who enlivens our world – must be bigger than political spats and human definitions, holding space for the work of love in every avenue available, be they conservative, moderate, liberal, progressive, or radical.

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