Kirsten Birkett’s book The Essence of Feminism is another product of their Modern Beliefs Series. This is an interesting and very useful publication which I would encourage women, and men, to purchase and read.
But my encouragement must not be understood as representing a view that Dr Birkett gives us the final word on feminism. Because it is a small scale treatment, just 114 pages of discussion, she can hardly hope to achieve that status for it, and with her undoubted research and writing skills I have no doubt she would not do so. However its brevity means that it can be easily read through, almost at one sitting, so that it will provoke discussion, raise issues and leave the reader thirsting for more, which they can find if they dip into and read some of Dr Birkett’s seven-page list of reference material.
In Chapter 4, ‘The Morality of Feminism’, there is a fifteen page Case Study on Abortion. This is splendid, one of the most helpful summary discussions on the subject I have read. It would provide an excellent base for parish and pastoral care group discussion. In our age, when society generally is fleeing away from the Creator, abortion replaces contraception for many, and women suffer unrealised guilt and stress for much of the rest of their lifetime. So I would suggest buying The Essence of Feminism is a must, if only for the quality of its abortion discussion in pp 84-98. Perhaps Matthias Media should consider extracting those pages and printing them as a parish resource.
Much of my own reading on feminism has focussed on an historical study of First Wave Feminism and I have always been proud of the Christian and evangelical contribution (more so in Britain than in the US in my view) to achievements on behalf of women. So I was disappointed with Birkett’s chapter ‘Feminist History’, though to be fair, I noted her statement that a full history of the movement was beyond the scope of the book.
Yet it is in the evangelical contribution to first wave feminism that there is real support for Dr Birkett’s present view that contemporary feminism is unhelpful, and that all that is vital for women’s achievements can be found in Christianity. For just one example, the Clapham Sect member Hannah More’s work with young girls alongside Robert Raikes’ Sunday School movement — she forged a way for women’s education at the turn of the 18th/19th centuries. But what feminist historian, or historian of feminism, even notices her?
Dr Birkett’s discussion of contemporary feminism is based in de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, and Betty Friedan. They are all 1960’s feminists, now some decades away. Surely it would have been more helpful to consider more contemporary feminist writers? Betty Friedan moved back from her views in The Feminine Mystique and was soundly criticised by other feminists after the publication of her The Second Stage. I did not notice Birkett mentioning that fact in her discussion of Friedan. Also, briefly discussing Christian feminism through reference to Rosemary Radford Reuther and Mary Daly, the latter being lunatic fringe now at best, is likewise not a truly helpful way into that genre.
The brevity of Birkett’s material leads her into the kinds of generalisations of which she accuses the feminist writers. I was surprised to note on page 52 a glancing reference to “rape crisis centres and battered women’s centres”, in a way that appeared to me to be disparaging. Yet they must be regarded as a helpful contribution from the women’s movement, filling a void that others didn’t notice. We all must admit the use of them by perplexed pastors trying urgently to find safe haven for some pitiful battered victim in his pastoral care. But perhaps I should admit to ‘nit-picking’ here and blame this on the small scale of the material.
I join Kirsten Birkett in deploring recent productions of nineteenth century works as seen through this decade’s politically correct eyes, the Hollywood version of Jane Austen’s Persuasion being a case in point. My own all time favourite novel is Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, which I regard as a truly ‘feminist’ novel. Consider Jane’s thoughts shortly after she moved to Mr Rochester’s Thornfield Hall:
“Nobody knows how many rebellions beside political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”
That’s surely a cry for women’s advancement from the Bronte’s evangelical rectory at Haworth!
Readers, I encourage you to purchase and read Kirsten Birkett’s The Essence of Feminism. It will engage your thinking, you can tell how it has engaged me in many directions, especially where I’ve been provoked or I don’t agree. But that’s the mark of good material. To Kirsten Birkett I say, you have the beginnings of a really helpful work on feminism here, I await your later, fully extensive treatment!
