Abstract
The summer of 2022 found me captivated by the Women’s European Football Championships. The progress of England’s Lionesses, and their eventual lifting of the trophy in a thrilling final with Germany, had less to do with national pride, I think, and more to do with the sense that women’s football had finally come of age. There was something uplifting about watching the progress of a team of highly talented women bringing the joy of the Beautiful Game back from the Men’s Premier League which seems less concerned with football and more with money and the talent of individual players. The Lionesses somehow transcended those concerns: they played as a team, and there was something truly moving about their support and care for each other.
The history of women’s football is one which sadly coheres with the history of misogyny. Popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Football Association (FA), football’s governing body, banned women from playing in 1921. Their view that football was a game that was ‘quite unsuitable for females’ persisted into the 1960s. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the FA finally started to grow the women’s game. Fast forward to 2022, and there was something rather wonderful to watch the Women’s Euro games dominate the TV schedules in a manner usually only bestowed on the male game.
Lucy Ward, writing in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, identified one moment that transcended the game itself, but did, I think, reflect the history of women’s struggles against sexism. Scoring the winning goal in the final, after coming on as a substitute, Chloe Kelly whipped off her shirt, revealing her sports bra and celebrated for all she was worth her achievement. For Ward, this was a stunning moment. In it, she felt that Kelly was saying that ‘this is a woman’s body – not for sex or show’. Rather, Kelly was a woman who was simply revelling in ‘the sheer joy of what she can do and the power and skill she has’. 1 Leah Williamson, captain of the victorious team, also understood the significance of the Lionesses’ victory for women and girls more generally: ‘What we’ve seen already is that this hasn’t just been a change for women’s football but society in general, how we’re looked upon’. 2 From being a game of marginal interest, the women’s game was now something of national significance. Women matter, just as much as men.
This edition of Feminist Theology mirrors these themes of female power, reclamation and challenge.
Téa Nicolae appraises the reclamation of Goddess spirituality in Western thinking in a way that fits rather well with Chloe Kelly’s glorying in the power of her female body. As Nicolae says, ‘Goddess spirituality rejects the assumption that femininity is feeble, and reveres the female body’. She considers the way in which ‘images of feminine divinity hold therapeutic attributes which guide women towards psychic wholeness’. To be female is not to be second best, and the image of the Goddess celebrates that fact.
Ally Kateusz’s article on ‘The Holy Spirit Mother’ is a surprising and joyful reclamation of the womb as a symbol for the font of Christian baptism. Kateusz reveals the tradition of womb shaped fonts from the early days of the Christian church, thus offering a powerful statement of the sanctity and creative power of the female body. The texture and shapes of female embodiment enable deep reflections on the meaning of baptism and the gendering of the Holy Spirit. The history documented is not without sadness. As Kateusz relates the history of women as baptisers, a shadow account is revealed of the misogyny which attends to the female body and which led to the suppression of the font as womb.
Kateusz’s article suggests that we would do well to revisit the shapes of these early fonts and the understanding of the Holy Spirit reflected in them. The desire for transformation also informs Georgia Day’s article, in rather different ways. Day considers the experiences of intersex people, arguing that we need to move beyond ‘the socially constructed binaries that hold us back [in order that] we can experience the world in newer, richer ways’.
A similar desire for new ways of theological thinking informs Alison Downie’s article. Offering a panentheistic approach to mental health and illness, Downie highlights the destructive nature of some Christian teaching on how the body is read, drawing upon her own experience of the problems of certain kinds of religious approach to mental illness. ‘What empowered me to live’, Downie argues, was not credal affirmations or my fierce adherence to the gendered life scripts in which I had been raised and which I followed scrupulously to be a good daughter, wife, and mother who looked to the Lord to build her house. What empowered me to live was mental health care, including medication and intensive psychotherapy.
A similarly critical account of traditional religious attitudes is found in Arshi Showkat’s article on Mahr payments in Islamic marriages in Kashmir. The argument presented asks us to consider how a payment that is supposed to secure women’s future only does so if women are aware of the rights that have. ‘The lack of awareness of women about the rights pertaining to marriage result in their loss of decision-making’.
Deryn Guest considers ‘altarplay’ as a valuable practice ‘for those who, for whatever reason, find themselves having to navigate a descent’. Creating altars in the home enables those leaving traditional religion to play and work with the depths. Altarplay is helpful for a range of responses, Guest argues, but it is particularly useful as a means of navigating ‘a painful way out of [a] community of faith and into an alternative symbolic order’. For women, altarplay provides ‘a ritual version of a room of their own’. Altarplay ‘indicates that one has moved to a different worldview, but simultaneously acknowledges that ‘christian’ is what we have been, possibly for many years, and is thus part of our life history’.
The role of women in developing and critiquing religious traditions informs Jane Duran’s article on Lady Jane Grey, the famous ‘Nine Days’ Queen’ of the Tudor period. Duran reassesses Jane’s importance, seeing her less as a tragic, perhaps a romantic, character because of her short reign and violent death. Instead, Duran reveals Jane as a radical Protestant thinker in her our right.
A Women’s History of Religion, like a Women’s History of the World, will always be a mixture of celebration and sadness, loss and growth. In the articles in this edition, we find all of these themes, along with an energetic presentation of feminist theology that should inspire us in the coming year.
