Women’s rights, hierarchy and prophecy

It struck me recently that feminists are, in Walter Brueggemann’s sense, prophets.

In Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination, he argued the role of the prophet is to see the unimaginable — that the status quo is unjust and can, in fact, be toppled; that there’s a new, better world we can build, even if it’s never existed before. At the link I mentioned Martin Luther King, because his words captured the vision of an equal future so well. But everyone who worked in the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement — they were living the prophetic imagination even if they didn’t speak it so beautifully. Because they had the vision, the imagination, to see we didn’t have to live in a hierarchical society.

Hierarchy is appealing if you’re high enough in the ranks. For men, patriarchy is seductive (and some women who benefit from supporting it). The advantages you get if you’re promoted or paid better than women. The advantages at home if your wife handles all the cleaning and childcare. Even if there’s no such advantage, there’s the psychological benefits. Back when I was born, every WASP man knew even if he wasn’t at the head of the line, he’d never be at the end of it. Jews, African Americans, Asians, women, they would save him from being a loser. At least, he could imagine so.

If you benefit from hierarchy it’s hard to imagine a world without it; even people on the bottom levels are often more interested in climbing than reforming it — a common tactic by “dirty whites” such as Italian or Irish immigrants was to loudly embrace WASP racism, showing they belonged on the same level of the hierarchy as Anglo-Saxons. It’s often said that if you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression; beyond that it’s hard to imagine a world without oppression. Someone has to be on the bottom rungs; if women/blacks/gays don’t want to be there, clearly they intend to switch places with white straight men.

Pat Robertson (at the second link above) assumed that if black America takes the whip from whites, it’s so they can whip whites, not to make a world where nobody is whipped. Anti-feminists routinely predict feminist-ruled dystopias if women aren’t kept in their place. A new novel predicts gay rights leads to oppressing straights.

In the 1920s, when the Soviet Union officially abolished men’s property rights in their families (I’m not sure how much that affected the reality), many Americans assumed the women — as they obviously couldn’t be without some sort of owner — were now the property of the state, probably working as sex slaves.

Equal rights movements can imagine what the oppressor does not: an end to oppression, rather than simply shifting the whip from hand to hand. They can imagine equality. Abigail Adams could envision it more than 200 years ago, suggesting husbands give up the role of “master” for “friend”: “put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex.” (None of the men in her era had that sense, alas).

Mary Wollstonecraft did too. So did the feminists of my teen years. And Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, gay rights activists, they all imagined a world where the accident of their condition did not put them in “the power of the vicious and the lawless.”

Looking at the world now, I often feel the dream is inconceivable and unattainable. But it was more inconceivable when they lived and fought and yet they didn’t give up on it. We can’t either.

I’ll close with a quote from Thomas Jefferson. Even though he wouldn’t have been in sympathy with these movements, it still applies: “All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. the general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God.”