My Feminism
by Emilie Rommel
 

He bought it as part of a promotional fundraiser for Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, a play about female sexuality that was performed at our small, Lutheran, liberal arts college. All right, so, if a feminist looks like a skinny, 6-foot 5-inch cyclist with xy chromosomes, it could look like just about anyone — right?

Feminism is a tough concept to convey. It’s not a simple, descriptive word (was it ever?), but a philosophical and cultural ideal saddled with many, mostly unflattering, stereotypes. And feminism is still largely a new idea — so new that many of the key players who gave it a name and shape are still very much alive.

When I was first introduced to feminism, I thought of a dozen women — historic figures, celebrities, and family members — as definitions of what I understood a feminist to be. They were smart, determined women, struggling with June Cleaver stereotypes and a limiting, patriarchal culture. All they wanted was to fulfill their personal and professional ambitions in a more equal world. I saw myself as a sister advocate, and my friends and I were very aware of which teachers called only on boys in the classroom. I recall becoming angry when women were defined as innately suited for housework and mothering.

I am 23 now, and my understanding of feminism has evolved. I understand it to mean equal footing with men in the areas of pay, promotion, and a promising future. Feminism today means that women can have ambition and acceptance. Feminists are the women at church, behind the surgeons’ masks, and running corporations. They are women whose past directly affects our future — whether it be in our families, workplace, or school.

Generation Gaps
My mother was 23 and married with five children when she witnessed the sexual revolution in the 1960s. Five years earlier, she turned down a full university scholarship because her father told her, “Girls don’t need college.” Across the country and only a few years later, my best friend’s mother accepted a full-ride scholarship to a university because college administrators decided that colleges needed girls.

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For me, faith and feminism are two sides of the same coin. I was raised by parents who celebrated feminism as a cultural and religious movement and I was nurtured in a Christian congregation that planted God’s grace and love and God’s wisdom and word profoundly in my heart.

I first encountered feminist theology and theory as a young woman. It became the catalyst for my calling as a student of Scripture and eventually as a pastor. The following three biblical texts paint the redemptive and moral landscape in which I live and love, minister and pray. As a feminist and Lutheran woman, these biblical texts center me in God’s presence, in the power of the gospel, and in my call to work for justice, mercy, peace, and love in my community and in the world.

This verse is rich and complex, but what I love about it is that both male and female are created in God’s image — which means that God is neither male nor female! God is indeed beyond gender. Yet, both male and female reflect the image of God, which might be better imaged as light, power, love, ground, or source. Genesis tells us something fundamental about all language for God: It is metaphorical. Scholars and theologians have written about symbolic and metaphorical God-language from the beginning, but it is feminist theology in the 20th century that has revitalized this practice in order to free divine language and to re-imagine the wonderful possibilities for naming the divine. (All names are, of course, ultimately limited. The best they can do is point to this reality that we really can only trust and intuit.)

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