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Introduction to Feminist Theology in the United States.
Feminist theology has only become an academic department and publishing category in the last twenty years, but Feminist theological reflection has many foremothers in American history. The emancipation of women in the United States has never been a project isolated from the goals and ideals of American civil and religious liberty. The ideas and realization of civil liberty cannot be separated from those of religion. Owen Chadwick has pointed out that the legislation of toleration in England and Europe that ended the Reformation wars of religion, whereby plural religious authorities were tolerated by the state, was the beginning of the legitimacy of civil dissent.1
Women's religious experience has often pushed them to contradict religious and civil authorities, for which tolerance has been initially unforthcoming. One of the earliest religious and civil dissenters in American history was Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643).
A member of the dissenting Puritan church in England, she migrated to North America and joined the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, where she began to hold religious meetings in her home. At first attended by a few women friends, the quality of her theological gifts were soon recognized and the meetings grew larger, to include 60 to 80 people. Her primary theological message appears to have been that a person can have direct personal experience of the divine presence unmediated by scripture. By 1637, the theocratic colony's authorities viewed Hutchinson a troublemaker, and she was called before the General Court on vague charges of conduct "unfitting" for her sex (public preaching), divisive opinions and dishonoring (male) ministers. In the course of her able self-defense, based in scriptural exegesis, she also admitted to a sense of authority derived from personal religious experience of the Holy Spirit. The authorities seized on this as evidence of demonic influence and she was expelled from Massachusetts colony.
In the 19th century, Angelina (1805-1879) and Sarah (17921873) Grimke argued on Biblical grounds that God saw both the enslavement of African Americans and the bondage of women as sinful. Born into a slave-holding Episcopalian family in South Carolina, the sisters became abolitionists and toured New York speaking to women about slavery. They maintained that slavery was both contrary to the will of God and...