Book Review: Caretakers of Our Common House

Review of Caretakers of Our Common House: Women's Development in Communities of Faith, by Carol Lakey Hess (Abingdon Press, Nashville TN, 1997). Her book is still in print. This review was originally published in Exponent II, 22(3) Spring 1999, 18-19.

---

Christians reflecting on the way their communities of faith sometimes fail to nurture women is nothing new. I have also read many feminist critiques of patriarchal religious institutions, [which] write typically with a strident and confrontational tone. But Carol Hess, professor of Christian Education at Princeton Theological Seminary, has written something new under the sun--and something long overdue, in my view. Her book is a constructive critique of Christian faith communities, informed by recent scholarship on women's emotional and psychological development, but stemming from an obviously genuine, honest, and uncompromising belief in the gospel as preached by Christ and recorded in the Bible. This belief renders her critique salient, pointed, and much more useful to religious communities.

Weaving together scholarship, Biblical analysis, and anecdotes with practical advice, Caretakers of Our Common House demonstrates the potential of scripture to transform lives and communities. As a mainline Protestant, Hess does not write from a literalist tradition, but with a strong utilitarian bent that LDS readers will recognize--that is, how a scripture's message can grow into fruition by letting it work on the readers as they develop a long-term relationship with that message. This is the first book I have encountered in the feminist tradition that analyzes feminist thought in light of Christian theology and not vice versa. Hess's bluntness on this point--that God is God, that He has given us scripture through which we may access what He'd have us know, and that He can be taken at His word--lends the entire work an authority somehow different from the defensive posture many LDS books about women in the Church tend to take. I found that Hess's approach rang true with much of my experience in the Church, and it reminded me of Brigham Young's statement that wherever truth is found, it is part of the gospel we sustain and celebrate.

As Hess takes on the "unBiblical" ways in which Christian communities often let women down and the "truthful" ways in which they can support and nurture them instead, I was reminded, too, of the destructive practices we often perpetuate--out of ignorance for the most part, I'm certain--in the day-to-day running of LDS wards and stakes. Hess assumes that it is Christ's divine and perfect teachings that communities of faith try--imperfectly--to embody. She exhorts those who embrace Christ's teachings to be, as it were, less imperfect in the ways they apply doctrine to church life. Caretakers resurrects the true nature, first of women as loved creations and daughters of God, and second, of the church which was designed to be for women as much as for men, the institution through which God intended to bestow grace on his daughters equally with his sons. I found much in this rich and thoughtful book that could improve the level of relationship and caring in our own community of faith.

Caretakers opens with a detailed meditation on the all-but-forgotten story of Vasti, the queen who was punished for her assertiveness and eventually replaced by Esther. In her first chapter, "Theology and Women: Giving Our Selves Away," Hess argues that doctrines of submission and obedience and cultural parables of noble female self-sacrifice to the point of mutilation and depletion (exemplified by Shel Silverstein's popular book The Giving Tree) are readily accepted by women [but] bind them in harmful ways. She does not contend that attachment and responsiveness are inherently damaging (on the contrary, in fact, they are enriching) but that most of our current models for female being-in-the-world don't permit women to act on their own behalf. Women, although preached to about the sin of pride, are in fact more often guilty of the sin of self-abnegation and of failing to hold others accountable for injustice. Hess writes, "Giving up oneself is no more faithful to God than seeking to master oneself" (41). Both are sins against the Christian doctrines of love and truth and [are] barriers to "God's concern for human wholeness and widespread justice" (45). The "prophetic torpor" and surface pleasantries that too often substitute for genuine openness and change do far more damage than benefit, Hess contends. She does not pose this as a problem of men oppressing women either; women have been oppressors or one another in history. We transform that reality only when "we listen, hear, and really seek to learn from other women whose voices we are inclined either to dismiss or to screen for what legitimates our own framework" (52).

In the next two chapters, ("The Dance of Human Development: In Celebration of 'Sheila': and "Rebuilding Our Mother's House: Caretaking and Being in Genuine Relation"), Hess explores these ideas further by applying them to recent research on women's developmental stages. Her central thesis states that cultural narratives of female disadvantage and subjugation plus theology that over-emphasizes giving to others, often work together to harness women and define them primarily in terms of their utility to others. The danger is that the self will be swallowed up in the other, which is not what Christ meant by "losing oneself" in the service of others. Everyone must learn responsiveness to others is she is to become like Christ but not at the expense of her own identity. Hess points out that many women seem to be arrested at this self-denying "interpersonal" stage of human development. "What should be a phase in life," she writes, "becomes the definition of womanhood" (68). These "de-selfing" practices and models (including suppressing anger and negating one's own needs) ultimately deprive others of true "relationality and community" because they limit a woman's range of responses, emotions, and behaviors--as they do a man's, for that matter (36). In contrast, mature people--God being the ultimate example--are concerned with truth and justice in their relationships with others and allow themselves and others the full spectrum of human emotional capability and expression to meet those ends. They recognize that everyone is enriched when we permit ourselves to be who we really are: fully capable, multi-dimensional whole people made in God's own image.

In her fourth chapter, titled "Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: 'Safe-Houses' for Raising Girls in Families and Communities of Faith," Hess discusses eating disorders among young women, positing that they represent a form of prophetic resistance against "girl-denying" and the silencing of women's voices. She takes churches to task for not being the kind of places where young women can be their whole selves and for not doing enough to recognize the scope of eating disorders among their membership. Her description of the ways young women are continually pressured to conform to a sentimentalized femininity resurrected some painful memories of my own from growing up in the Young Women's program, of times when the potential nurturing message got lost in (what I recognize now as) philosophical differences among the leaders about the definition of a woman and her role in families and communities. Hess offers concrete and practical advice about eating disorder treatment for leaders who work with girls, and she calls for us to model and teach a revised vision of the feminine: one that is less about what women need do for others and more about what God created women capable of being. Such a vision would not diminish the roles of wives and mothers but would strengthen them as wise and considered choices among the many available to God's daughters. Churches could vividly demonstrate to young women their commitment to "family values" by caring about girls and about the justice of family life (147).

Hess continues the theme of women needing one another to help "co-build" faith communities into "safe houses" in the next two chapters, "Wrestling with Our Sisters: Together Building Our Households of Faith" and "Women and Conversational Education: Hard Dialogue and Deep Connections in Communities of Faith." The story of Leah and Rachel warns us that it does no good to pit women against one another. In particular, Hess is saddened by the animosity and polarization that sometimes arises between women who are primarily homemakers and those who work outside the home--an all-too-familiar tension in Mormon wards, I'm afraid. She calls for more tolerance and support on all sides, saying that homemaking or "staying put" does not mean staying the same, but rather (in a definition I love) "merely means staying committed to a consistent group of people through the changes." For these women, home is the journey (165). Other women are in life circumstances that call for leaving home or transforming it. Their lives call for resistance, creativity, endurance, and above all, they deserve our support. Reading the Bible in a conversational way helps us to see women in the scriptures in real, and quite divergent, circumstances. We can then make that engagement of the holy text a model for our relations as a community, moving beyond the surface veneer to achieving true peace and oneness. Her last chapter, "Caretaking Leadership: Women of Fire and Mothers in Israel," uses the account of the Israelite prophetess and judge, Deborah, to argue that women should not suppress their gifts, insights and abilities. Women are called, no less than are men, to speak authoritatively and dream expansively about the future of our particular communities. Good leaders make a place for as many as will contribute to the group's positive future.

One of the greatest services Caretakers renders is to engage recent work on gender differences and bring it to bear on religious and spiritual life. Girls and women develop and interact in ways different from men, learn more collaboratively, communicate in different language, and so on, as the work of Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice), Deborah Tannen (You Just Don't Understand) and John Gray (Men are From Mars and Women are From Venus) have brought to popular attention in recent years. She does not consider this kind of scholarship as superficial or as fostering gender stereotypes, and she recognizes that gender is not the only barrier to understanding, but she nonetheless believes that communities of faith can be more empathetic, listen more openly, and be less complacent about reaching all their members. Her book reminded me of two other feminist critiques I have recently enjoyed. The first was the rollicking and unapologetic Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media, by Susan Douglas, which unearthed a world of ambiguous messages about women in postwar popular culture, and the second was Susan Moller Okin's reasoned book Justice, Gender and the Family, which takes on the structure and practice of family life, arguing that social justice begins with justice in individual households. What Douglas does for pop culture and Okin does for family life and social policy, Hess accomplishes for Christian churches: she offers a thoughtful and powerful case for why we can and must do better in nurturing people of both genders.

Caretakers gives us a chance to redeem for our daughters and sisters the often unsung heroines of the Bible and of Christian tradition. Hess's book is a call for women to sing those heroines and to keep "girl talking"--probing, sharing, explaining, affirming, being there for one another, and being seen and heard within our households of faith. In so doing Hess believes we will accomplish God's will for his church to the benefit of all His children.