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WHY MUST RELIGIOUS TRADITION BE RECONCILED WITH FEMINISM--RESTORATIVE, RADICAL, OR OTHERWISE?: A Response to Tova Hartman

WHY MUST RELIGIOUS TRADITION BE RECONCILED WITH FEMINISM--RESTORATIVE, RADICAL, OR OTHERWISE?: A... Elizabeth Fox-Genovese Tova Hartman begins with an unmodified assertion: “Feminism, in its many varieties, is inherently forward-looking; it calls for reform.” Her embrace of this premise informs her discussion of what she calls “restorative feminism,” which does not seek an outright break with tradition but seeks to redress the perversion of that tradition and restore it to a prelapsarian purity that endowed women with the rights and privileges that contemporary feminists claim as their due. But her project, as she has formulated it, never acknowledges and defends its governing premise—namely, that religious tradition must be “reformed” to accommodate the demands of feminism. It is a formulation that privileges feminism over “religious tradition.” And Hartman apparently does not recognize that the tradition of “reform” she applauds has, at least since the time of Rousseau and Robespierre, sought to shred tradition’s claims to legitimacy. In principle, I have great sympathy for attempts to ground our thinking about women’s contemporary situation in an engagement with tradition, provided that such attempts grant respect to tradition on its own terms. Since Hart 11:1 Copyright 2005 by Duke University Press man proceeds by indirection—she tells us what feminists other than herself have been arguing—it http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Common Knowledge Duke University Press

WHY MUST RELIGIOUS TRADITION BE RECONCILED WITH FEMINISM--RESTORATIVE, RADICAL, OR OTHERWISE?: A Response to Tova Hartman

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth
Common Knowledge , Volume 11 (1) – Jan 1, 2005
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2005 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0961-754X
eISSN
1538-4578
DOI
10.1215/0961754X-11-1-105
Publisher site
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Abstract

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese Tova Hartman begins with an unmodified assertion: “Feminism, in its many varieties, is inherently forward-looking; it calls for reform.” Her embrace of this premise informs her discussion of what she calls “restorative feminism,” which does not seek an outright break with tradition but seeks to redress the perversion of that tradition and restore it to a prelapsarian purity that endowed women with the rights and privileges that contemporary feminists claim as their due. But her project, as she has formulated it, never acknowledges and defends its governing premise—namely, that religious tradition must be “reformed” to accommodate the demands of feminism. It is a formulation that privileges feminism over “religious tradition.” And Hartman apparently does not recognize that the tradition of “reform” she applauds has, at least since the time of Rousseau and Robespierre, sought to shred tradition’s claims to legitimacy. In principle, I have great sympathy for attempts to ground our thinking about women’s contemporary situation in an engagement with tradition, provided that such attempts grant respect to tradition on its own terms. Since Hart 11:1 Copyright 2005 by Duke University Press man proceeds by indirection—she tells us what feminists other than herself have been arguing—it

Journal

Common Knowledge – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2005

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