Gender theory and gendered realities: an exchange between Tamar Ross and Judith Plaskow.(The View from Here)

The initial exchange between Judith Plaskow and Tamar Ross took place at the closing session of an international conference on "Religion, Gender and Society" held at Bar Ilan University on May 21-22, 2006. For its publication in Nashim, Plaskow and Ross each responded to the written version of the other's remarks.

Judith Plaskow

I want to think aloud about some of the permutations and contradictions in Jewish feminists' attitudes towards gender and gender roles--both contradictions between theory and practice and contradictions within feminist scholarship and activism. Thirty-five years into the Jewish feminist movement, how are feminists theorizing about gender, and what is the relationship between feminist theory and the assumptions about gender that fuel feminist work in our communities? (1) What do feminists want in relation to gender roles and gender justice? I am not suggesting that there is any one answer to this question. In coming to speak at this conference, I am very aware that I approach the issue of gender as an American Jew for whom liberal Judaism is normative, and as one who has spent my career trying to get the liberal community to think about feminist issues in more radical terms. Yet I hope that in trying to sort out some of the complexities that characterize my corner of the Jewish world, my analysis may be of use to those with very different starting points and goals, and may lead to some fruitful conversation.

For both liberal and Orthodox Jewish feminists, the initial focus of the feminist critique of Judaism in the late 1960s and early '70s was the inequality of women in Jewish law. (2) As part of the broader feminist movement that was examining and questioning women's relationship to all social institutions, some Jewish women began to look critically at our roles within the synagogue and at the legal roots of our marginalization in Jewish public religious life. We realized that the assumption of gender difference is so fundamental to normative halakhic texts that it is simply impossible to talk about Jewish legal obligation without talking about gender. The Mishnah, for example, frames and attempts to categorize individual laws on the basis of a tightly gendered schema that is essentially hierarchical in nature. It establishes the basic rule that women are exempt from positive commandments that must be performed at specific times. This rule has many exceptions, but it means that women are exempt from communal prayer, and that, even if they take upon themselves the obligation to pray, they cannot pray on behalf of others. Women are also exempt from Torah study, the quintessential form of Jewish religious expression. The force of these exemptions, many early feminists argued, is to leave women with a vicarious Judaism: they are educated and socialized as enablers. Women perform the tasks that allow men and boys to engage in regular prayer, observe the rituals connected to Shabbat and holidays, and have time to study, but they themselves are "peripheral Jews." (3)

Much could be said about the first phases of feminist scholarship and activism and about the significant body of literature that it generated. But what is important about early feminist analysis from the perspective of my topic is its assumptions about gender. This analysis tended to focus on women as a class, presupposing that the things that unite women are more significant than any differences that separate us. The purpose of the feminist critique was to examine the mechanisms through which women were constructed as a subordinate group within Judaism in order to rectify that subordination, whether through halakhic change or a thorough reordering of Jewish life. While feminists rejected the ways in which Judaism defined and enforced the differences between women and men, we accepted the premise that there were women and men whose roles and statuses had been defined differentially. Indeed, one of the important contributions of early feminist theory was the distinction between sex and gender. Sex was the term for the fundamental biological differences between females and males, gender the term for social femininity and masculinity. There were biological women who had been socialized as an inferior class, but, since gender roles and statuses were a product of social structures and power relations that varied across time and culture, these could be changed.

Let me acknowledge, before I talk about critiques of this perspective, that it still operates as the foundation from which most of us order and interact with the world. The notion that gender is malleable--that the psychological and emotional characteristics of women and men and the roles they play in society are not biologically or divinely ordained--is itself a controversial point for many people. The idea that there is no clear line between sex and gender is much more difficult to accept. To claim that the concept that there are two and only two sexes is itself produced by the same set of societal processes and power relations that creates gender hierarchy, appears on first hearing to be nonsense--literally non-sense. (4) Yet it is precisely this claim that has become increasingly important to gender theorists, including scholars in Jewish studies.

The first significant theoretical challenge to the assumption that women are subordinated as a class focused, however, not on the notion of two sexes, but on the ways in which feminists had homogenized and essentialized the categories of woman and man. In highlighting the mechanisms through which women as women had been constructed as Other in Jewish law, aggadah, philosophy, and other modes of discourse, feminists sometimes passed lightly over the differences in Jewish women's experiences across time, in diverse Jewish cultures, and in different groups within particular cultures. It was easy to forget that French women were not Spanish women were not Turkish women were not Indian women; that role expectations of Sefardi women were influenced by surrounding Moslem cultures, just as those of Ashkenazi women were affected by wider Christian cultures; and that elite women in many societies had access to opportunities for learning or modes of religious participation that were lacking for ordinary women. The notion that women were subordinated "as women" made it possible to overlook the ways in which variations in women's status and participation by culture and class (among other factors) shed important light on the workings of the social construction of gender. (5) Feminists also homogenized the category of men in the same way as the category of women. We often used language implying that women's subordination was the product of men as a class, thus obscuring important distinctions between elite and non-elite men and the ways in which non-elite men were also excluded from the processes of culture-creation.