Voices Speak Out of Fertile Silence

by Elizabeth McMillan, R.S.M.

from Where can we find her?
searching for women’s identity in the new church
edited by Marie-Eloise Rosenblatt , pp. 68-79

Published by Paulist Press,1991.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions

Women Speak with a “Different Voice”

This church which glories in its rich moral tradition has been seeking to pay attention to women in an official forum as they tell their own story. Women’s voices have more to share with the church, however, than the “data” of their experience. Women announce new ways of conceptualizing the moral life, and new ways of resolving pressing moral dilemmas in the practical order. For when women articulate a properly moral interpretation of their experience, they tend to speak “in a different voice,” to use a phrase which evokes Carol Gilligan’s study of women’s moral development.(1)

Taking Gilligan’s study, In a Different Voice, as a starting point, I will examine here some of the main features of the kind of moral agency expressed by women. Through this exercise we expect to learn something about women’s emergent moral maturity and to challenge the church itself to greater moral maturity by exposing the limitations of its own moral constructs.

The diversity of women’s voices in the church dramatizes quite clearly the fundamental point that women do not all speak with one accord. Indeed the intense and productive debate among feminist scholars on the question of “difference” continues.(2) So we need to be careful as we proceed here not to collapse the obvious diversity of experience and moral perspective covered by the collective, “women,” into doctrinaire claims about(all) women.

Nevertheless, it can be helpful to identify ways of approaching moral questions which are typical of women in order to reveal some new moral constructs in the making and expose the limitations of the dominant masculinist constructs and methods of solving moral problems.(3) So, following Gilligan’s lead, and drawing on the literature spawned by her seminal research, we hope to identify some features of women’s moral voices which appear to be characteristic of them, and different from the way men typically approach moral problems.

In her studies of the patterns of moral decision-making of male and female subjects, Gilligan discovered that moral development appeared to be gender-differentiated. That is, when she asked her subjects to focus on what they perceived to be morally problematic, and how they proposed to solve the dilemmas, their answers showed gender-related differences. She found that girls and women tended to be more concerned with “caring,” i.e. with sustaining relationships without sacrificing personal integrity, and less concerned with rules, principles and rights. Female subjects also tended to perceive moral problems contextually, in terms of a narrative to be interpreted. Male subjects, on the other hand, tended to perceive moral problems in terms of “justice.” That is, they saw a clearly delineated conflict of rights to be adjudicated by a third party according to a set of universal principles.(4)

If we listen to the women’s voices as they address church leaders, we can hear that (1) they speak out of and about their personal experience, (2) they resonate with family and social connections, and (3) they are in some way representative of other women besides themselves.

The Voices Speak out of and about Their Own Experience

The experience shared by affirming and alienated women in the church is always and above all personal. Because it is, it also has to be particular, reflecting the context of the speaker’s life. It is a personal story which is part of a larger story requiring listeners as well as other narrators to clarify, correct and embellish it. “Personal” here does not mean private or trivial, evanescent, or lacking in public accountability. It means “subjective” in the sense of self-determining, not “subjective” in the sense of unable to be verified and validated by the experience of others. To characterize women’s self-expression as personal is to identify it with what makes a human being a person in the full sense, that is, having the ability to assume responsibility for one’s life and the lives of others.

In giving voice to their own experience, each is what Seyla Benhabib calls a “particular other,” a “finite, embodied creature” attempting to make a coherent moral narrative out of “the episodes of choice and limit, agency and suffering, initiative and dependence” that constitute their everyday lives.(5) Benhabib contrasts this characterization of the moral person with more abstract conceptions of the “generalized other” upon which traditional masculinist constructs are built.

These traditional moral constructs, exemplified especially in Kantian and social contract theories, obligate each disembodied individual to exercise moral agency in an ahistorical world where everyone has the same talents, needs, desires, and opportunities.(6) Each “particular other,” by contrast, has a unique history and a unique destiny. In the moral world of the particular other, each is obligated to place herself imaginatively in the place of the other. She is responsible for engaging the other in a mutual effort to create common moral space and to seek mutually acceptable solutions. In her world, moral universals are constructed by mutually committed participants.

One way to compare the kind of moral thinking that begins with particular experience and the kind that starts with principles is to see how both approach the fundamental moral obligation to protect vulnerable human life. The principled approach is more likely to rely on the development of a “consistent ethic of life.” It relies heavily on the consistent application of a universal, thus necessarily abstract principle such as, “Respect life from the moment of conception to natural death.” The integrity of the principle is seen as indispensable to the preservation of a public moral order which protects life.

The experience-based approach is more likely to rely on a “seamless garment” of moral narratives that are woven together by people who are committed to sustaining family and social ties through cooperation, reciprocity, and mutuality. What is indispensable to the health of the public moral order in this second view is finding specific strategies in the private and public spheres to ensure the integrity of those bonds without which vulnerable life cannot be protected no matter how often and by whom the principle is asserted.

Since women are concerned with the particular, historical other, they are more likely to take explicit account of the context in which all human lives are “embedded.” Consequently they give more time in their deliberations to the details of relationships, especially family relationships. They tend to be more attentive to the life stories of the protagonists in the moral dilemmas they are trying to resolve. In the end, they are inclined to give less weight to the validity of a moral norm than to such factors as motivations, limitations and possibilities at work in the lives of the people who are struggling to solve the problem.(7)

The Voices Resonate with Family and Social Connections

The fact that women’s moral perspective is more likely than men’s to be marked by the particulars of relationships and the details of personal stories cannot be attributed uncritically to their “nature.” To do so would be to risk endorsing a false kind of sexual complementarity which effectively constrains the scope of women’s responsible action.(8) Views of women that attribute to them a feminine “nature” presumably complementary to men’s nature usually do not assign a masculine “nature” to the latter. What the proponents of complementarity offer us in effect is a world in which the proper nature of “woman” is assigned by others. They reserve for themselves the task of defining the moral contours of a universe within which both men and women must act and evaluate their action morally.

Only after we have been alerted to the distortions which “complementarity” thinking threatens to introduce into discourse on women’s moral voice are we in a position to hear that voice as potentially transformative of traditional moral constructs. We can now recognize that even those who reject the idea that women possess distinctive virtues “by nature” would admit that the roles historically assigned to them have given them opportunities to develop such virtues as care, compassion, loyalty, and selfeffacing generosity. These are the virtues normally demanded by the nurturing role. Of course, if they are indeed virtues, forms of moral excellence, they deserve to be cultivated by men and women alike.

A question that has to be faced honestly, however, is whether these virtues are always what they appear to be in the context of women’s lives. For many women other-centered activity has produced counterfeit virtues, excuses for living through others, preventing them from assuming full responsibility for their own lives. Judith Plaskow and other feminist scholars have argued that the greatest moral risk of middle-class women in modern industrialized society is that of “not acquiring a strong sense of self, failing to assume responsibility, to make reasoned and free decisions, to take hold of their lives.”(9)

Gilligan’s model of moral development addresses explicitly this issue of assuming responsibility for oneself. She outlines six stages along the path to moral maturity: (1) a woman cares for herself to ensure survival; (2)upon reflection, she judges the survival mode to be selfish; (3) she assumes a self-sacrificial posture, perceiving the moral good to lie in caring for others; (4) as she becomes aware of the inequality in her relationships, she tempers her self-sacrificial “goodness” in the light of truth; (5) she seeks a way of being responsible for others without losing herself in the relationship; (6) she learns to care for others in a mature, interdependent way. She is finally able to integrate a recognition of her own needs into her response to the needs of others. As the model suggests, unless she can do this she risks losing her moral integrity in a false sense of “self-sacrifice.”

The different voice of women uncovered by Gilligan expresses a moral orientation that opts for connectedness and solidarity in the form of interdependence. Relatedness to others, not individual autonomy, is the fundamental moral datum. But since basic human bonds, even familial ones, cannot be taken for granted, this orientation carries with it the responsibility for sustaining them. Human solidarity is given as a moral task requiring effort on the part of mutually committed parties. It is a value to be constructed by a commitment to an “actual dialogue situation in which moral agents communicate with one another.”(10)

Some feminist authors attribute the tendency of women to value interdependence to the sex-gender designation of women as mothers.(11) They would see motherhood, the experience of actually bearing children or engaging in the nurturing work of mothers, as a privileged locus for investigating the moral significance of human solidarity and interdependence. Sara Ruddick dares speak of a “morality of love” of which care is “the primary virtue.”(12) This morality of love is a derivation of “maternal thinking,” itself a result of “the social character of reason, the sexual division of labor, the place of work in our lives, and processes of identification that occur in families.”(13)

Maternal thinking is typically acquired, according to Ruddick, by anyone who takes on the essential maternal tasks of protecting, nurturing and educating children to live in society. It is developed as women (and men who “mother”) reflect on their experience and articulate principles and maxims for action. It tends to be “expressed in stories whose maxims make sense in individual and community life, but are not universal laws.”(14) The type of rationality which is at work here has distinctive contours. “They ask certain questions rather than others, identify certain criteria for satisfactory answers, establish appropriate ways of knowing, develop fundamental attitudes to what is known, and identify virtues appropriate to their work.”(15)

Ruddick would extend maternal thinking to moral deliberation and action in the public realm. One of her specific concerns is to temper or even displace CRTMC (conflict resolution through mutual concessions) approaches to peace-making with “maternal non-violence.” She is not sentimental; her analysis takes into account that actual mothers are not always either peaceful or “good.” But she calls for some experimentation with what maternal practice has taught mothers.

Mothers have had to carry on a relentless struggle to achieve a “sturdy peace . . . that depends upon continuing relationships that include anger, disappointment, difference, conflict and nonviolent battle.”(16) Maternal thinkers have learned through this struggle to hear difference and what it takes to enable different people to grow. Familial peace is achieved over and over again not by appeal to the moral ideals of transcendence and objectivity, but by healing breaches, preserving bonds, enabling and teaching within families and communities where passions rage.

The Voices Are Representative of Other Women Besides Themselves

The editors of Commonweal flagged an important issue when they noted that the “expert testimony” of women before bishops’ committees was neither “formally representative” nor expert.(17) They point out that while church leaders took an important step in gathering testimony from a large and diverse sampling of women, this testimony does not give the bishops access to “all that women are saying” and doing. Nor is there a theoretical analysis of the status of women today that is comparable to the analysis found in the pastorals on disarmament and the U.S. economy.

Beyond victims’ stories of oppression and sexist exploitation, there are the stories of women’s achievement that need to be documented and reflected upon by the church’s pastors and moral teachers. Commonweal suggested that women are exercising moral agency in new modes. Many are starting to acquire economic and political power, and they are asking themselves about morally acceptable ways of exercising it. Likewise they are making their moral way as individuals, lovers, spouses and mothers in “a fundamentally altered moral universe where the fear of pregnancy can no longer be counted on as a sanction to enforce church teaching about sex and marriage.”(18) In a word, Commonweal wanted to note for the record the existence of those women who are in private and in public reconstructing the moral universe.

Those who were heard from in the first draft of the pastoral on women can nevertheless be said to represent significant groups of women in the church. In addition to the diocesan hearings, the committee solicited testimony from such groups as the National Council of Catholic Women, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Women for Faith and Family, Las Hermanas, and the National Black Sisters Conference. The consultation strategy that called for reaching out to these and other groups with a particular history and mission in the church suggests, of course, that each collective voice was taken to be representative of a set of concerns common to their members.

Through hearings and consultations, the committee tried to reach additional women who were “representative of a broad spectrum of American Catholic women.”(19) They did in fact hear from women who could be said to represent others of the same life circumstances, whether age, class, race, ethnicity, economic status, politics, or spirituality. As Jean Elshtain noted, “The pastoral is vivid and attuned to the particular lives lived by single, married, separated, divorced, widowed, lesbian, young, old, Caucasian, Asian, black, Hispanic, and native American women.”(20) For its purposes, the committee grouped the responses not by any of these categories, but by participants’ “common concerns” about current church teaching on women and institutional practice toward them. In the words of the committee, they pulled out “a selection of representative remarks that faithfully present recurrent themes of appreciation and alienation.”(21)

Any effort to collect a variety of responses into representative groupings will inevitably result in a loss of some of the richness and density of those individual responses. Yet if some sense is to be made of the testimony, it has to be submitted to interpretive categories. Presumably the rationale for reducing the variety of particular responses to “voices of affirmation” and “voices of alienation” is that these categories would enlighten the bishops as to the “concerns” of Catholic women vis-a-vis the church and thus offer them a guide to pastoral action.

The choice of interpretive categories is itself, of course, a significant interpretive gesture. The rough grouping into plaudits and complaints does not do justice to the task of interpreting the status of women in the church today. What each of the voices represents signals far more. No doubt a more refined approach to determining what the many voices represent in the lives of contemporary Catholic women will be employed in future drafts.

Conclusion: The Bishops Have Two More Steps To Take

Recent and ongoing efforts to promote communication within the church signals the possibility that leadership may have assumed a new public posture vis-a-vis women. Public documents record the respectful acknowledgment of women’s experience as morally relevant even if in no way authoritative in the church’s moral discernment. This opening of a public dialogue may carry a promise of commitment to working with women to rebuild human institutions from the ground up on a foundation of authentic mutuality.

If the bishops are truly interested in engaging women’s questions, and especially in listening to their different voice, they will need to take two further steps. First they will need to come still closer to the world that produced initially detailed, very personal, testimony. For them to understand women’s voices they will need to become personally involved in something like the project Jean Elshtain calls a “part-whole-part hermeneutic”:

Inquiry begins with the self-descriptions of subjects in context …. This is followed by the analyst’s rendering of those self-descriptions in a manner that makes them more widely and generally accessible by assimilating them into a theoretical framework that gives them explanatory power at a more abstract level of understanding …. The conceptual formulations based upon the subjects’ self-interpretations should then be shared with the subjects to elicit whether, on their view, the analysis seems intelligible and responsible. . . (22)

And as moral leaders the bishops will need to involve others in this “hermeneutical circle.”

A collaborative effort to reconstruct in thought and practice what it means for men and women to be truly human before God will have to engage us in long-term dialogue in the church. All the voices have to be heard, and all the categories of social and moral interpretation have to be reexamined in the light of our shared experience. While “our Catholic heritage” will retain a certain normative status, its texts and practices have to be subjected as well to moral critique.

A second step that church leaders need to take is to invite more women scholars, especially philosophers and theologians, into the interpretive task. The second step in Elshtain’s hermeneutic, rendering women’s self-descriptions more accessible to the church by assimilating them into a theoretical framework that gives them explanatory power, is precisely the work that feminist scholars have been about for twenty years. More of them should be asked to contribute publicly and substantively to the discussion of women’s concerns. They could contribute significantly to the construction of a more coherent statement of the status of women in church and society. If some of their voices sound “alienated,” let that dissonance be heard as a call to the creation of a new moral universe which all of us, women and men alike, will finally be able to affirm.

Notes

1. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982) and “Moral Orientation and Moral Development,” in Women and Moral Theory, ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, Publishers, 1987) 19-33.

2. A thread that runs through all recent feminist discourse and scholarship is the difference that difference makes in interpreting women’s experience. One question bears on the significance in fundamental human terms of the male/female difference. Another, just as important, bears on the fundamental human significance of differences among women that arise from racial, cultural and individual differences. A recent review of this debate among feminist philosophers was done by Jana Sawicki and Iris Young, “Issues of Difference in Feminist Philosophy,” American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy (April 1988) 13-17. See also Anne E. Carr, “The Scholarship of Gender: Women’s Studies and Religious Studies,” Transforming Grace (San Francisco: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1988) 6394, and Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

3. “Masculinist” refers to a gender-sex system historically constructed by men which contributes to the oppression, exploitation, silence or invisibility of women.

4. Lawrence Kohlberg’s model of moral development, which was constructed on the basis of empirical studies of boys and men, was found by Gilligan not to be reliable in assessing the moral maturity of her female subjects. Kohlberg’s model draws on social contract theory and especially Kantian moral theory. The natural law tradition, which underlies traditional Catholic moral teaching does not place the same unqualified emphasis on the value of individual freedom and autonomy. Within the natural law tradition the individual is bound to pursue the common good. However some contemporary interpreters of the natural law tradition deemphasize the role of practical reason, prudence, and individual circumstances in efforts to achieve the common good. To the extent that they do, they stand to learn something from Gilligan’s reflections on women’s ways of construing moral problems and ordering their solutions. See Kohlberg’s The Philosophy of Moral Development (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981).

5. Seyla Benhabib, “The Generalized and the Concrete Other,” in Women and Moral Theory, 166.

6. An influential contemporary moral treatise which draws on Kant and social contract theory is John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).

7. Marilyn Friedman, “Care and Context in Moral Reasoning,” in Women and Moral Theory, 190-204.

8. Cf. Mary Aquin O’Neil, “Toward a Renewed Anthropology,” Theological Studies 36:4 (December 1975) 725-736 and “Imagine Being Human,” Miriam’s Song II (Hyattsville: Priests for Equality, 1988); Mary Buckley, “The Rising of the Woman Is the Rising of the Race,” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 34 (1979) 48-63; Margaret Farley, “New Patterns of Relationship: Beginnings of a Moral Revolution,” in Woman: New Dimensions, ed. Walter J. Burghardt (New York: Paulist Press, 1977) 51-70; Rosemary Radford Ruether, New Woman, New Earth (New York: Seabury Press, 1975); Anne E. Carr, Transforming Grace.

9. Anne E. Carr, Transforming Grace, 118-119.

10. Seyla Benhabib, “The Generalized and the Concrete Other,” 169.

11. Cf. Virginia Held, “Feminism and Moral Theory,” in Women and Moral Theory, 111-128, and, in the same volume, Sara Ruddick, “Remarks on the Sexual Politics of Reason,” 237-260. See also Ruddick, “Maternal Thinking,” Feminist Studies 6 (1980) 70-96, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

12. Ruddick, 238.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid. 245.

15. Ibid. 241.

16. Ibid. 255.

17. “Dear John,” Commonweal 115:8 (April 22, 1988) 227.

18. Ibid. 228.

19. “Partners in Redemption,” 784.

20. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Sexism, Sin and Grace,” Commonweal 115 (June 17, 1988) 365.

21. “Partners in Redemption,” n. 11, 784.

22. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman, 304.

Recomended Reading

Cahill, Lisa Sowle. Between the Sexes: Foundations for a Christian Ethics of Sexuality. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985. This book by a Catholic natural law ethicist draws on scripture and the work of Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther to argue that in any age, in any society, what is wrong in the realm of sexual behavior is what is disruptive of community life; what is right is what strengthens the community.

Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. This is a critical reinterpretation of the major works in western political and social thought in the light of feminist concerns. Elshtain’s central concern is a rethinking of the private sphere of the family to ensure the security and well-being of children.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. New Woman/New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. This is a book of essays that lays bare the “unholy alliance” of religion and sexism by reference to Christian history. Ruether shows some links between sexism and other structural forms of oppression such as racism and classism.

Welsh, Sharon. Communities of Resistance and Solidarity; a Feminist Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1985. This powerful essay models even as it call for a new way to theologize about power knowledge and human community from a christian frminist standpoint