News Watch

---

In comparison to previous waves of feminism, what some are calling fourth‐wave feminism is still a fledgling movement. One network, Gather the Women (www.gatherthewomen.org), has helped connect more than 5,000 women around the world. Its first Gather the Women International Congress attracted 330 women from 26 nations.

Two leading thinkers of Fourth Wave Feminism, however, express comfort that it is less an organized movement like previous waves of feminism have been, and more an expanding network of women who want to transform the world one kindness at a time. One of these leaders, author Carol Lee Flinders, voices doubt about whether Fourth Wave Feminism even yet exists as a wave, instead describing it as a “fourth turning” or simply a “new feminism.” The previous waves of feminism, as described by Pythia Peay (Utne Reader, March/April 2007), were (1) suffragism in the early twentieth century; (2) the wellknown movement led by Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and others in the late twentieth century; and (3) what is now known as the Third Wave led by “women in their 20s and 30s who still advocate for women’s rights while embracing a ‘girlie culture’ that celebrates sex, men, gay culture, and clothes.”

In a sense, Fourth Wave Feminism picks up on the celebrative and playful aspects of Third Wave Feminism, but with the perfectly serious purpose of helping women think of how they can make a difference in the global village by starting to address social challenges in their own villages. Kathlyn Schaaf of Gather the Women says that because only women can give birth, they often fulfill nurturingoriented caregiver roles throughout the world. Such work is essential to the health of any family, but it is not compensated.

“Very often what women contribute is not valued,” she tells the Christian Research Journal. “If nobody’s listening to women because they don’t have value, that’s an incredibly wasted resource.” Gather the Women encourages women to look within themselves, and among each other, to address problems that otherwise could be overwhelming.

Consider the matter of AIDS orphans in Africa, where in some cases the majority of children have lost both parents to the pandemic. Through Gather the Women, Schaaf knows of 10 women who have banded together under the name of the Den Mothers. Each Den Mother has agreed to take in five extra children. To raise additional money to provide for these children, the Den Mothers have become entrepreneurs: they have purchased 100 plastic chairs, which they rent out for weddings, funerals, and other large gatherings. Fourth Wave Feminism has a pluralistic, interfaith approach to religion. In Schaaf’s words, “Every woman is invited to bring forth what is true for her.”

“This new movement has got a spiritual center, a sense of service to something larger than themselves,” Schaaf tells the Journal. “Many of them would call that God.”

Both Schaaf and Flinders say that women have an easier time than men at finding common ground with each other. If a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist, and a Hindu woman gathered in a room to talk about their beliefs, Flinders says, they could emerge from that meeting with a worldview that encompasses parts of each.

“If I were to make one generalization about women, it’s that we really cherish diversity,” says Flinders, who has lived for 40 years in a California meditation community known as Two Rock Institute. “We don’t have as much of a stake in religious doctrine because we generally do not hold church offices.”

Schaaf grew up in a Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod church, and she now attends Mount of Olives Lutheran Church—an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America congregation—in Mission Viejo, California. Schaaf says she and her husband are not as theologically conservative as most of the congregation, but they attend it for the benefit of their sons, who feel a connection with the youth group. “When you’re raising teenage boys, you’ll take all the structure you can get,” she says.

Schaaf says that Gather the Women encourages its members to tap into their deepest convictions about God. “It’s important for a woman to connect with the source of her faith, whatever it is,” she says. “She moves with such confidence and with such grace from that connection.”

Schaaf says that Gather the Women welcomes participants who reject masculine language for God, but women who prefer traditional language are just as welcome. “I personally have difficulty with any of the pronouns—he or she,” Schaaf says. She believes that God is too vast and complex an entity to be described adequately by human language.

Flinders believes that Fourth Wave Feminism is making more prominent a spirituality that always has existed just below the surface of previous feminisms. She cites Julian of Norwich, Clare of Assisi, and Catherine of Genoa as examples of women who were unusually assertive leaders for their time, and who left legacies in Western Christianity. “It’s always been there, and now we’re going to foreground it,” Flinders says of spirituality among Fourth Wave feminists.

When Flinders gives workshops, she hears from many second‐wave feminists that, while they still believe passionately in equal rights, “I never want to work from that place of anger again. It hurt me and it wasn’t effective.” What Fourth Wave feminists need to achieve, Flinders says, is the kind of moral vision practiced by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., who transformed anger into compassion and love for one’s enemy.

“It’s not like putting on a coat,” she says. “It’s the work of a lifetime, and contemplative practice plays an important role in that transformation. Spirituality strengthens you for the long haul. The wisest among us realize that you can’t pursue women’s goals in isolation.”

If Fourth Wave Feminism has an account of the Fall, a metastory that helps explain what has gone wrong in human culture, Schaaf offers one possibility: agrarianism. Agrarian cultures often are depicted more sympathetically than, say, industrial cultures, but Schaaf believes that the rise of agrarian cultures marked a time when owning property became central—and women were perceived as another piece of property to own.

“There’s something about that story that haunts me, as a woman. That seems true to me,” Schaaf tells the Journal. “A lot of that is a male construction. It’s a male world.” Schaaf sees Gather the Women as doing its part to help reverse that male construction, mostly by encouraging women to think and feel and pray together and come up with their own, necessarily more maternal, solutions to problems of injustice, poverty and violence.

—Douglas LeBlanc