Her Story: A Journey of Liberation from Patriarchal Ethics by Dr. Cathy Higgins
The Covid pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities of our shared humanity, as well as the courage of those meeting the real needs of the community; in terms of scientific research, health care, education, food provision and systems of governance. We are aware, as never before, of our reliance on each other locally and globally. The crisis has raised ethical dilemmas: how can we ensure the protection of the most vulnerable; how do we balance the competing needs of society; and how do we prepare for what could be a very different way of living into the future? Women and men together have provided leadership in different arenas and contexts this last year, helping shape our collective responses.
When the Spanish flu pandemic swept the globe from 1918 to 1920 killing one third of the world’s population, and approximately 23,000 people in Ireland, there was no National Health Service in Ireland or Britain, and many able-bodied medical staff were volunteering in WW1 frontline hospitals. The Superintendent of Public Health in Ireland was a ninety year old man who was not able to give the leadership needed during this health crisis. Government advice centred on healthy diet, exercise, warm clothes, ventilating rooms and workplaces, and avoiding crowds.
Some medical practitioners in Ireland did not feel the government was going far enough in its fight against this pandemic, and protested. Among the most vociferous was Kathleen Lynn, a doctor working in Dublin. She had been at the forefront of the suffrage campaign for women and benefitted from the Representation of the People Act (1918) that enfranchised women in Britain and Ireland aged over thirty. Her vision had been to establish a children’s hospital in Dublin to care for families of the poor. When the Spanish Flu hit, Lynn, with the help of other women, established a makeshift hospital, St Ultan’s, in a derelict Dublin building. Lynn spoke at public meetings calling for returning soldiers to be quarantined and their uniforms fumigated to avoid infecting families and friends. She called, also, for mass inoculation and recommended a vaccine used the previous summer to treat those sick with flu. None of the patients with Spanish Flu she inoculated at St. Ultan’s died. Lynn demonstrated the leadership and medical understanding needed in a time of crisis. Her intervention saved lives and highlighted the importance of women in shaping ethical responses to the needs of their time.
Her Story: A Journey of Liberation from Patriarchal Ethics sets out to illustrate women’s attempts to inform ethical thinking and actions in different spheres of life and different regions of the world. As history illustrates, women have struggled to be taken seriously and her story has, more often than not, been either ignored or suppressed by patriarchal gate-keepers.
My interest in writing this book was to try to understand the rationale behind the undeniable fact that up until the latter decades of the 20th century in the West those who have decided what matters in society, and how society should function, have been, for the most part, men. To put it another way, how we live, the values we live by and act upon, and the choices we make in personal and public life, have for much of history been shaped and determined by men. It is for this reason that a central tenet of the feminist agenda has been to expose this truth, critique it, and through consciousness raising seek a gender balanced dialogue toward a more inclusive worldview to meet the innumerable challenges of our time.
An overview of the chapters will outline the book’s content. The first chapter tells the story of Englishwoman, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), and her experiential critique of the male dominated world she sought to transform. Her philosophy of life stands in sharp contrast to the male philosophers of the day who justified the exclusion of women from public life.
Chapter two introduces two very different women living in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, one from Belfast and the other an American, both concerned with the liberation of women and other oppressed people. The chapter considers the influential male thinkers of their day; men who engaged the ethical debates on women, the poor and slavery, either to give their support or maintain the status quo.
In chapter three the focus shifts to the significance of the Women’s Movement, in Europe and America, in furthering gender equality. They succeeded in influencing the culture and debate in civil society to ensure women’s gradual inclusion.
The efforts of feminist biblical scholars globally to challenge patriarchal biblical interpretations and God images is the focus of chapter four. And we stay with the socio-religious context in chapter five, as for centuries the control of women in the home and in society was justified with reference to the biblical story of Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit. This primordial myth has been misinterpreted by male theologians, and in particular Augustine in his doctrine of Original Sin. This patriarchal narrative is challenged by feminist theologians from diverse world contexts.
Chapter six picks up one of the primary ethical challenges of our time, our responsibility for climate change. It concentrates on the experiences of women living in the global South who suffer the greatest impact of climate debt. Their ecological efforts to respond to this crisis, save lives and repair the climate damage, are summarised. How can we in the global North match their efforts?
Finally, chapter seven tells the story of twentieth and twenty-first century Jewish, Christian and Muslim women, who have suffered from the divisions of race and religion and have sought to heal them.
The writing of this book was possible because of funding secured from the Department of Foreign Affairs by Maureen Hetherington, Chief Executive of The Junction, Derry Londonderry. This book is for anyone committed to creating an inclusive ethical future. Copies of the book can be obtained from Maureen. (Website: https://thejunction-ni.org/).
Dr Cathy Higgins