Feminist Theology

In 1913 Emily Wilding Scott reported a conversation between church fathers debating whether women had souls. Upon the conclusion of the conversation, they decided that women ‘probably’ had souls. Emily Wilding Scott later threw herself in front of the King’s horse at the English Derby in protest for women’s suffrage.
The word ‘feminism’ was first used in an issue of ‘The Athenium’ in 1895. It has developed and become established as a broad term for socio-political movements and theories aimed at eliminating gender inequality and promoting women’s rights. Feminist theology began as a branch of feminism, and throughout history the two have been closely tied, as the first feminists were Christian women protesting for suffrage.
Today Feminist theology’s establishment has been revised into three stages: stage one being tied to Mary Daly’s ‘The Church and the Second Sex’ 1968, which shows the beginnings of noticing and documenting patriarchal overtones in tradition. Stage two saw a split in feminist theology- Mary Daly’s 1973 work ‘Beyond the Father’ presented the idea that tradition, being reflective of the patriarch, had infected and distorted the Bible, as the ideas depicted had been jeopardised through the lens of male perception. This idea surfaced as psychoanalysts became aware of the authors of works being subject to underlying social, cultural, and historical presuppositions: thus texts such as the Bible, comprised of male perception, was hindered by gender.   However Elizabth Schussler Fiorenza’s 1982 work ‘In Memory of Her’ took a revisionist approach to Daly’s debasement of the Bible and asserted that the essence of the word is true, but needed analysis to separate the patriarchal overtones from the word. To achieve this Fiorenza used two methodologies, ‘depatriarchalizing’ (the removal of male overtones to recover the true essence of the Word) and ‘remembering’ (creating a sacred history of female historical figures such as Hagar, and Tamar the daughter of...