If It Wasn't for the Women...

So, I have been neglecting my blog in recent months… And to be honest, I am not quite ready to do a lot of new writing. Sixteen hours of exams was quite enough. Instead, I thought I would post some excerpts from my exams. I realize for some of you this will be very boring! But for those interested, it will give you a little insight into what has been swirling in my head for the last few months. And if you have any questions… comment away. I’ll try and respond.

My first exam area was congregational research as practical theology and the first question looked at various feminist approaches to qualitative research. Here is the first researcher I considered… Cheryl Townsend Gilkes.

Mary Jo Neitz has an article in The Handbook for the Sociology of Religion that presents an overview of feminist methods of research. She begins her article by articulating the struggle many feminists have had in integrating their feminist commitments with their sociology. It is only in the last few decades that feminist approaches to sociology have gained significance. Early feminists began asking why women seemed to be excluded or invisible in sociological research. The next generation took the “add women and stir” approach simply recreating existing studies with women subjects. More recently, feminist sociology has shifted to begin asking questions that arise from women’s experience. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes is a prime example of methodology that begins from women’s experience.
By beginning from women’s experience, feminists have shifted the location of scholarship from formal institutions and structures to the material realities of women who are often on the margins of such structures. This emphasis on material realties has led to an emphasis on practices rather than theories and ideas. To be more exact, knowledge and ideas are seen to be embedded in practices. Knowledge is seen as located and interested. Analyzing the power dynamics that shape the construction of knowledge becomes central to feminist research. More recent feminist theology has sought to radicalize and deepen this notion of the construction of knowledge by moving beyond women’s experience as a standpoint from which to understand truth to women’s experience as a performed reality constructed out of discourses. Mary McClintock Fulkerson’s work will highlight these shifts from standpoint epistemologies to discourse theory.
Cheryl Townsend Gilkes’ major work If it Wasn’t for the Women… focuses on the significance of women in the black community. Her work begins from the experiences of women, specifically black women. As such, the location of her research shifts from family and the formal structures of the church to the intersection of family, church, and community. Gilkes argues that most sociological research has rendered black women’s experience as invisible or deviant by focusing on white women’s experiences and patriarchal norms. They have failed to recognized the racial aspects of the construction of gender and have taken white women’s experiences as normative. For white women, family has been seen as the major site of oppression and their role within the family has been seen as marginalized or compartmentalized from their role in society. For black women, family and work have always been integrated placing them in a different relationship to black men and to white patriarchal norms. In addition, while black men have often exerted communal leadership through the church, patriarchal norms have kept women out of such positions. Black women have instead exerted their leadership within the community itself reflecting an integration of the sacred and the secular in their lives.
In shifting her focus to the experiences of women, Gilkes has made two moves methodologically. First, she has broadened her resources beyond formal written documents. While her work is very historical in nature, she has added women’s voices by referring to oral histories, sermons and testimonies, and literature. Her work reveals that within black culture, women are seen as central and foundational, especially to the church. Their histories are not as obscured as in the white culture. The black community has not been able to deny the leadership of black women who have often founded churches or served as leaders in the abolitionist movement. She did find that written histories often reflected more patriarchal norms while oral histories reflected women as more active and powerful agents. The second move made by Gilkes has been to focus on a more grounded theory approach. Rather than adopting existing paradigms from black history, sociology, or feminist scholarship, she has sought to create new paradigms based on black women’s experience. In particular she has sought to rewrite the understanding of the family in black history.
The next post will focus on Elaine Lawless… a researcher who also considers research from women’s experience but also develops a methodology for understanding how women narrate their own lives.