In Because of Beauvoir, Alison Jasper aims to bridge Christian and feminist imaginaries. The feminist side is represented mainly by Simone de Beauvoir (an inspirer of Second-Wave feminism, who disdained Christianity) and Julia Kristeva (a theorist transplanted from Bulgaria to France who found some intellectual resources in Christian theology). Kristeva's notion of “female genius,” Jasper claims, usefully illuminates the lives and writings of four Christian women whom she takes as case studies. These, although living in constrained circumstances and facing hostility from church authorities, found outlets for their creativity that were rewarding for themselves and beneficial to those whose lives they touched.
A first chapter summarizes Beauvoir's exploration of the question, “What is woman?” in her ground-breaking book, The Second Sex (French original, 1949). Beauvoir, an existentialist, believed that women of her era were still struggling to achieve human personhood; “female genius” lay beyond that struggle. Yet, as a lasting contribution, she carefully identified the strategies that had led to women's inequality. Dismissive of Christianity as a barrier to women's achievement of full personhood, Beauvoir's book prompted many later feminists to view Christianity as an obstacle to self-realization. Yet Christianity had a prophetic message to be recaptured, assisted in the 1970s and 1980s by the impressive development of feminist Biblical criticism.
Julia Kristeva, writing several decades after Beauvoir, differs from Beauvoir in several respects, including the philosophical position with which she is associated. Kristeva appropriated from Christianity images of Mary, maternity, birth, and female embodiment to “think with,” showing that Christian theology did offer powerful resources for women. Even if (as Kristeva presumably thinks) Christianity is illusion, it is rich in significance for feminist thinking. Unlike Beauvoir, for Kristeva female bodiliness is not something to be transcended but embraced. Moreover, Kristeva was not burdened with Beauvoir's view that women, struggling to achieve even a basic humanity, had not been able to develop creativity. Nor did the Romantic-era exaltation of male genius cramp her thinking about women. Jaspers appeals primarily to Kristeva's trilogy Female Genius (French originals, 1999–2002), that considers Hannah Arendt, Melanie Kline, and Colette as figures who were not known first and foremost for their feminism, but who as women broke barriers and made possible new horizons for others. Female genius, out of its “undaunted curiosity and rebellious resistance,” brought about “significant transformations,” for example, in the very definition of what “being female” meant (65). For Kristeva, “acknowledgment of a subject position is itself female genius” (52).
Jaspers next turns to four brief case studies of Christian women from Great Britain who, within the confines of the cultural expectations and social mores of their time, manifested “female genius” by their breaking of barriers. Through their writings and activities, they influenced many around them. Jane Leade, a seventeenth-century mystic, after her husband's death envisioned herself in a marriage to Christ and became a leader of the Philadelphian Society. She believed (contra Calvinist tenets) that there would be a universal redemption and that she was guided by heavenly Wisdom/Sophia. The evangelical Hannah More organized and fostered Sunday Schools, worked for abolition, and (to a limited degree) supported female education in her writings. Maude Royden, in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of the turn to the twentieth century, promoted women's suffrage, sex education, and pacifism; she was the first Anglican woman publicly to preach in a church, Jasper notes. Royden's claim to female genius, Jasper avers, shows her readers that theology has the potential to connect “body and mind, affect and representation, pleasure and politics,” a potential that “locates the divine in the creativity of each singular life marked by embodiment, affectivity, and representation” (138). Last, Michèle Roberts, novelist, playwright, and Booker Prize winner of the later twentieth century, comes from the Roman Catholic tradition. At university, she studied medieval women mystics and later appropriated texts from Nag Hammadi to celebrate female creativity in her writings. One has to read carefully in Because of Beauvoir to perceive that all four of these women derived some advantage along the way from birth, education, patronage, and/or money. This reviewer suspects that they would not have gotten far in their championing of various causes from a Christian perspective without these assets.
Christianity, Jasper concludes, has been wrongly charged with thwarting women's development and creativity. Without overlooking the real challenges that the women about whom she writes and women today face in the institutional church, Jasper resists the tendency to reduce them to the status of silenced victims.
This reviewer was somewhat puzzled to ascertain the proposed reading audience for this book. It would not satisfy theorists on Beauvoir and Kristeva, nor historians on three of the four figures Jasper holds up as test cases. The book argues forcefully to make a point that many educated people today know: that women have struggled against social, theological, and economic barriers, but at least sometimes have managed to break through constraints. Historians of women in Christianity can name (and have named) dozens of such who lived in eras past. Despite the tone of desperate struggle against almost insuperable odds that pervades the book, Jaspers presumably intends to encourage Christian women challenging the barriers to their equality in church and society. In this I sincerely hope she succeeds.
