feminism, religion, and the politics of history

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Feminism, Religion, and the Politics of HistoryAuthor(s): Deborah WhiteheadSource: Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Fall 2011), pp. 3-9Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of FSR, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfemistudreli.27.2.3 .

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JFSR 27.2 (2011) �–9

Editorial

FEMINISM, RELIGION, AND THE POLITICS OF HISTORY

Deborah Whitehead

The Susan B. Anthony List, a conservative women’s pro-life PAC, was founded in 1992 with a mission of “advancing, mobilizing, and representing pro-life women” in the political and legislative arenas.1 The List was incorpo-rated as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit in 1997, founded the Pro-life Women’s Caucus in 2007, and its website claims that as of 2012, it “will have financed and endorsed over 75 winning members of Congress.”2 SBA List president Marjorie Dannen-felser asserts that the organization is “named for the suffragette herself who was very pro-life,” and the SBA List’s website “Mission” page declares that it stands in a long tradition of pro-life feminists:

Our organization works in the spirit and tradition of the original suffrag-ettes. Susan B. Anthony herself called abortion “child murder.” Alice Paul, author of the original 192� Equal Rights Amendment, reportedly said the early feminists believed that “Abortion is the ultimate exploita-tion of women.”�

After presidential hopeful Sarah Palin remarked during a speech to the SBA List in Washington in May 2010 that Susan B. Anthony was “one of my he-roes,” the SBA List’s historical claims about Anthony were the subject of duel-

1 SBA List Mission: Advancing, Mobilizing, and Representing Pro-Life Women, http://www.sba-list.org/about-sba-list/our-mission, accessed May 16, 2011.

2 Our History, http://www.sba-list.org/about-sba-list/our-history, accessed May 16, 2011. The SBA List provides financial support to pro-life women congressional candidates and also pro-life men if they are running against a pro-choice woman.

� SBA List Mission, http://www.sba-list.org/about-sba-list/our-mission; Marjorie Dannen-felser, quoted in Our Story: Susan B. Anthony List Beginnings video, http://www.sba-list.org/about-sba-list/our-mission, accessed May 16, 2011.



Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 27.24

ing Washington Post opinion pieces.4 Historian Ann Gordon and former ABC news broadcaster Lynn Sherr claimed in a jointly authored editorial that, hav-ing read everything Anthony had ever written and putting her writing into the larger context of her political activism, it was quite clear to them that “Anthony spent no time on the politics of abortion” and that “it was of no interest to her.” They also argued that although Anthony was herself religious, “a lifelong Quaker [who] included Mormons, Catholics, [other] Christians, Jews, and athe-ists in her movement,” she “firmly believed that religion had no place in poli-tics,” implying that contemporary attempts to link Anthony to political positions rooted in religious convictions (such as the pro-life movement) are misplaced. The quotations cited by the SBA List, Gordon and Sherr asserted, were either questionably attributed to Anthony or taken out of context. The issue, for them, was not the politics of “abortion rights. Rather it is about the erosion of accuracy in history and journalism.”5

In response, Dannenfelser reiterated a list of quotations from letters, un-signed editorials, and diaries that she claimed prove that Anthony and “other early women leaders did not believe abortion was a good thing for women.” Acknowledging that abortion was not “the issue that earned Susan B. Anthony her stripes in American history books,” Dannenfelser nevertheless argued that quotations from Anthony and other early American feminists establish that “fighting for women included the rights of her unborn child.”6 Dannenfelser also heralded the rise of what she termed a “new feminism,” composed of a “rising majority” of U.S. women “who reject the radical feminism of the 1960s and use traditionally ‘feminist’ issues, such as abortion, to herald in a new era of women’s rights.” Viewing this development as constituting “a shift back to the traditional roots of a Susan B. Anthony feminism that empowers women through their strength to give life even in the most difficult and unexpected cir-cumstances,” Dannenfelser employed both citation and rhetoric to construct a historical narrative that attempted to simultaneously disentangle feminism and

4 “Sarah Palin Remarks on Pro-Life Agenda,” speech to Susan B. Anthony List, Washing-ton, D.C., May 14, 2010, C-Span Video Library, http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/29�509-1, ac-cessed May 16, 2011.

5 Ann Gordon and Lynn Sherr, “Sarah Palin Is No Susan B. Anthony,” On Faith blog, Wash-ington Post, May 21, 2010, http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/05/sarah_palin_is_no_susan_b_anthony.html, accessed May 16, 2011. Gordon is a professor of history at Rutgers who has edited the five-volume Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997–2009) with a sixth volume still forth-coming; Sherr has edited a collection of quotations from Anthony’s speeches and letters, Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words (New York: Times Books, 1996). Between them, the authors assert in their editorial, “We have read every single word that this very voluble—and endlessly political—woman left behind.”

6 Marjorie Dannenfelser, “Susan B. Anthony: Pro-Life Feminist,” On Faith blog, Washington Post, May 21, 2010, http://www.sba-list.org/newsroom/news/washington-post-susan-b-anthony-pro-life-feminist, accessed May 16, 2011.



Editorial: Feminism, Religion, and the Politics of History 5

reproductive rights while positioning contemporary pro-life women as the only legitimate heirs of a “traditional” maternalist feminism represented by Anthony and the “original” U.S. women’s movement.7

Judging from its website, the SBA List seems to regard Anthony as at once an honored heroine and a familiar old friend: while it features photos of An-thony on the website and its iconography depicts her silhouette in front of the U.S. Capitol Building, the website also features the “Suzy B Blog” with the tag-line “the voice of pro-life women in politics,” containing commentary on news stories and other media relevant to the cause. But it is history that takes center stage. The very first tab on the List’s comprehensive website is entitled “The Movement,” and under this tab one can find a menu with the headings “Notable Women,” “The Other Side,” “Polling: Pro-Life Trends,” and “Polling: Electoral Strength.” “Notable Women” opens with the assertion: “the often untold truth of history is that the very women who fought to earn the right to vote also pro-moted a consistent respect for human life.” The remaining text on that page references Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and uses terminology like “au-thentic women’s rights,” “abortion was just a tool of oppression,” and “original, authentic pro-life feminism,” and heralds the List’s “courageous” and “strong women leaders” who “boldly challenge” Planned Parenthood, “dispel the myth that women need abortion in order to flourish,” “tell the truth,” and “make a difference.”� “Notable Women” includes both “Early Suffragists” and “Legacy Leaders” who continue the pro-life feminist tradition, with Sarah Palin at the top of the latter category. Under “The Other Side” heading, by contrast, is another kind of history: a history of Planned Parenthood and its “racist legacy.” Again, quotations from founder Margaret Sanger’s publications and correspondence are used to assert both that Sanger “was a eugenicist and an avowed racist” who advocated employing African American ministers to promote birth control in African American communities, and that this legacy continues to determine the contemporary actions of not only Planned Parenthood but also other reproduc-tive rights advocacy groups such as NARAL and Emily’s List.9 The two “Polling”

7 Marjorie Dannenfelser, “Susan B. Anthony: Pro-Life Feminist,” On Faith blog, Washington Post, May 21, 2010, http://www.sba-list.org/newsroom/news/washington-post-susan-b-anthony-pro-life-feminist, accessed May 16, 2011. The claim being made is that pro-choice feminists are actually “anti-woman” because they do not trust women’s natural ability to care for children in desperate cir-cumstances and because abortion is not “a good thing” for women, therefore rhetorically positioning pro-life women as the only “true” feminists.

� SBA List, “Notable Women,” http://www.sba-list.org/movement/notable-women, accessed June 2, 2011.

9 SBA List, “The Other Side,” http://www.sba-list.org/movement/other-side, accessed June 2, 2011. The SBA List is explicitly modeled on the success of Emily’s List, an organization founded in 19�5 with the goal of electing pro-choice Democratic women to office. To date Emily’s List has raised over $�2 million for candidates and has elected eighty-five women to Congress, sixteen to the Senate, nine governors, and hundreds of women to other state and local offices. “Frequently Asked Questions: Who Is EMILY?” http://emilyslist.org/who/faq/, accessed June 2, 2011.



Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 27.26

pages attempt to show that recent data indicate increasing public support for the pro-life cause. Hence, taken together, each of the “Movement” subpages function to use feminist language to create a historical narrative linking the past with the present, in which particular quotations from key figures are selectively employed to establish traditions constituted by unbroken links between original intent and present purposes. In the end, the momentum of the feminist move-ment itself, the language suggests, is shifting away from reproductive rights to the restriction of those rights.

The case of the SBA List makes clear the degree to which many conserva-tive women of faith have not felt represented by the U.S. feminist movement. Dannenfelser, formerly pro-choice and Episcopalian, apparently embraced the pro-life movement at the same time she converted to Roman Catholicism in college. While the SBA List is not an explicitly religious organization and fo-cuses its efforts as a PAC on the election of pro-life candidates to Congress, Dannenfelser was recently named by Newsweek as one of the ten most influen-tial leaders of the Religious Right, because the influence the organization exerts makes it “the standard-bearer for one of the religious right’s central issues.”10 In a video recounting the origins of the List, Dannenfelser explains that she founded the organization out of frustration with 1992 being proclaimed the “Year of the Woman” for the record number of women elected to Congress in that year.11 Along with other pro-life women, she noticed that the newly elected senators were all pro-choice Democrats, and “we were left out. We were not being represented at all.” In response, she and a “diverse group of women [of] different faiths, different political persuasions” formed the SBA List.12 The his-torical narrative told by the SBA List echoes that of other “alternative” or “for-gotten” histories promoted by conservative talk radio host Glenn Beck and the “historical reclamation” practiced by self-proclaimed constitutional historian and consultant David Barton in advocating the idea that religious, moral, and

10 David A. Graham, “Faces of the Christian Right: Leaders of a Changing Movement,” News-week, December 9, 2010, http://www.newsweek.com/photo/2010/12/09/religious-leaders.html, ac-cessed June 1, 2011.

11 Dianne Feinstein (D-California), Barbara Boxer (D-California), Carol Moseley Braun (D-Illinois), and Patty Murray (D-Washington) won Senate seats in the 1992 elections, the first year in which four women had ever been elected to the Senate. They joined incumbents Nancy Kassebaum (D-Kansas) and Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland) for a total of six female Senators in the January 199� opening session. In response to headlines heralding the “Year of the Woman,” Mikul-ski retorted: “Calling 1992 the Year of the Woman makes it sound like the Year of the Caribou or the Year of the Asparagus. We’re not a fad, a fancy, or a year.” “Historical Minute Essays: January �, 199�,” U.S.Senate, http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/year_of_the_woman.htm, accessed June 1, 2011. Currently there are seventeen women serving in the Senate.

12 SBA List Mission, http://www.sba-list.org/about-sba-list/our-mission; Marjorie Dannen-felser, quoted in Our Story: Susan B. Anthony List Beginnings video, http://www.sba-list.org/about-sba-list/our-mission, accessed May 16, 2011.




political conservatism have somehow been forgotten or erased in U.S. history and must be reclaimed if the nation is to continue to thrive.1�

While there is certainly much to critique about the uses to which history is put in these cases, I wish to emphasize instead the larger issue of the contested nature of historical narratives, and to think about what might be appropriate and effective responses of religious and nonreligious feminist scholars, activ-ists, and educators who are committed to women’s reproductive rights and/or to different understandings of U.S. and world history than those provided by religious and political conservatives.14 I suggest that the desire to recover the “Godly foundations” of America or a “traditional” family-centered feminism is not about “accuracy” or fidelity to history, at least not primarily, but rather about seeking to locate contemporary U.S. political and religious conservatism along a narrative of declension and reclamation that itself replicates a famil-iar kind of evangelical Christian narrative about America as a chosen nation. These claims on the past, what some scholars have termed a series of “myths” about the United States and its history, make themselves known in the pres-

1� On Barton’s and Beck’s uses of history, see, for example, Erick Eckholm, “Using History to Mold Ideas on the Right,” New York Times, May 4, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/us/politics/05barton.html, accessed May 16, 2011; Barton’s WallBuilders website, http://www .wallbuilders.com, particularly WallBuilders Overview, http://www.wallbuilders.com/ABTOverview .asp, accessed May 16, 2011; Interview with David Barton, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, May 4, 2011, http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-may-4-2011/david-barton-pt--1, accessed May 16, 2011; Glenn Beck, “Restoring Honor,” radio transcript, January 25, 2010, http://www.glennbeck .com/content/articles/article/19�/�5494/, accessed May 16, 2011; Amy Gardner, Krissah Thompson, and Philip Rucker, “Beck, Palin Tell Thousands to ‘Restore America,’ ” Washington Post, August 2�, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/0�/2�/AR20100�2�01106 .html, accessed May 16, 2011; Glenn Beck, video link, May 16, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost .com/2011/05/16/glenn-beck-restoring-courage-jerusalem_n_�6240�.html, accessed May 16, 2011; Paul Harvey, “Selling the Idea of a Christian Nation: David Barton’s Alternate Intellectual Uni-verse,” Religion Dispatches, May 10, 2011, http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/45�9/selling_the_idea_of_a_christian_nation%�A_david_barton’s_alternate_intellectual_universe/, ac-cessed May 16, 2011.

14 For specific critique of conservative uses of history, see, for example, Paul Harvey, “Sell-ing the Idea of a Christian Nation: David Barton’s Alternate Intellectual Universe,” Religion Dis-patches, May 10, 2011, http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/45�9/selling_the_idea_of_a_christian_nation%�A_david_barton’s_alternate_intellectual_universe/, accessed May 16, 2011; Julie Ingersoll, “Pseudo-Historian David Barton in the Times and on The Daily Show,” Re-ligion Dispatches, May 5, 2011, http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/julieingersoll/4579/pseudo-historian_david_barton_in_the_times_and_on_the_daily_show_/, accessed June 1, 2011; Chris Rodda, “No, Mr. Beck, John Adams Did Not Think Governments Must Be Administered by the Holy Ghost,” Talk to Action: Reclaiming Citizenship History and Faith, http://www.talk2action .org/story/2010/6/11/2562�/7626, accessed June 1, 2011; John Fea, “Blogging David Barton’s Ap-pearance on Jon Stewart,” a nine-part series, The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Reflections at the Intersection of American History, Christianity, Politics, and Academic Life, http://www .philipvickersfithian.com/search/label/David%20Barton%20on%20the%20Daily%20Show, ac-cessed June 1, 2011; see also John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011).



Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 27.2�

ent, structuring both our political rhetoric and our private understandings, and offering explanations, justifications, and prescriptions in story form about our proper responsibilities, expectations, and privileges as a nation.15 In turn, they possess enormous meaning-making power. “Our national myths,” according to Richard Hughes, “are the stories that explain why we love our country and why we have faith in the nation’s purposes. Put another way, our national myths are the means by which we affirm the meaning of the United States.”16 The construction of historical narratives about past luminaries such as Anthony by groups such as the SBA List, then, can best be seen as contemporary attempts at meaning-making and affirmation of particular political causes. It is precisely the attempt to recover the past at key symbolic and textual sites in the Ameri-can imagination—the National Mall, the Constitution, the early U.S. women’s movement—and to locate ourselves there, tapping into the powerful narratives and myths that accompany such sites, that makes these claims so evocative for those on both sides of the debates.

When religious and political conservatives invoke history in political de-bates, then, they are not so much interested in painstakingly researching histori-cal context and synthesizing details in order to provide a better understanding of the past, but rather, their primary interest is in the rhetorical power of his-torical reference to carry authority in the present and to retroactively establish credible traditions linking the present to the past. In conservative attempts to “reclaim” history, what we see is an effort to take literal or rhetorical possession of broadly culturally authoritative sources from the past and put them to oppo-sitional uses in the present. What this suggests is that historians and other schol-ars of religion, including feminist scholars of religion, might more effectively direct their efforts at opposing controversial or sketchy historical claims not at fellow scholars on academic grounds but rather, might use them as occasions to bring to light the particular kinds of rhetorical claims and hermeneutical methods at work in debates over the past’s role in the present, and the narratives and assumptions that are being produced and invoked in such debates. To let the sources and methods of such claims stand unopposed in public discourse gives rise to the false impression that merely having access to and quoting from original documents produces unequivocally authoritative historical truth, when in fact what it produces are rhetorical claims about history that then must be evaluated and critiqued for their evidentiary bases, interpretive strength, and ethical, political, and theological implications.

Feminist scholars of religion are, of course, well acquainted with the power of history and historical narrative. Over the past four decades, they have pro-

15 Robert Wuthnow calls these “deeply embedded cultural narratives examples of an ‘Ameri-can mythos.’ ” See Robert Wuthnow, American Mythos: Why Our Best Efforts to Be a Better Nation Fall Short (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), �.

16 Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 2.




duced groundbreaking studies of women’s religious history, theological cri-tiques and reconstructions of religious traditions, and theoretical analyses of the categories of gender and religion. Nevertheless, it is true that there has been a tendency in the larger women’s and feminist movements to view religion negatively, seeing it in liberal feminist terms as a hindrance to women’s full participation in public life, or in Marxist terms as a purveyor of false conscious-ness, or perhaps, owing to what Stephen Prothero has called religious illiteracy, simply ignoring the role of religion in U.S. history altogether.17 Even Sherr and Gordon’s assertion—that although she was personally religious, for Anthony, “religion had no place in politics”—is problematic because it oversimplifies Anthony’s and other early women’s rights activists’ complex interactions with religion in order to dismiss the Religious Right’s present claims on Anthony as an advocate for their pro-life cause.1� This complexity, if properly acknowl-edged, cuts both ways, forcing feminists of all religious and political persuasions to recognize the important historical role of religion in the feminist movement while also appreciating the very evident ambiguity and ambivalence religion has generated among both advocates and opponents of women’s rights. Further, it is precisely this kind of complexity that is lost when single quotations are extracted from texts and launched into public debate in an effort to establish authority for one’s own position. As Janine Giordano argues, many contemporary progressive feminists and historians are “not used to sharing the narrative authority of the history of feminism, or interpretation of the historical record, with conservative feminists,” or, I might add, with other political and religious conservatives.19 Feminist scholars in religion have done much to problematize and dispel as-sumptions that feminism and religion are incompatible and to highlight the rhe-torical nature of historical claims, but such work deserves and requires a move beyond the walls of the academy into the broader realm of public perception and political debate.

17 Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t (New York: HarperOne, 2007).

1� Maureen Fitzgerald notes that studying the religious influences on early women’s rights activists is both a matter of correcting the long-dominant view of the women’s movement as rooted in an “Enlightenment, or secular, political tradition,” and of better understanding these activists’ conceptions of self and freedom, which were often not primarily or only politically based but instead grew out of their religious convictions. See Maureen Fitzgerald, foreword to The Woman’s Bible (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 199�), ix. For more on the complexity of early women’s rights activists’ views on religion, specifically biblical interpretation, and their legacy today, see Elisa-beth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Transforming the Legacy of The Woman’s Bible,” introduction to Search-ing the Scriptures, Volume I: A Feminist Introduction, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza with the assistance of Shelly Matthews (New York: Crossroad, 1997).

19 Janine Giordano, “Channeling Susan B. Anthony,” Religion in American History blog, May 20, 2010, http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2010/05/channeling-susan-b-anthony.html, accessed June 1, 2011.



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