| Preface | xiv |
| 1. | Living between the Times: Bad News and Good News about Gender Relations | 1 |
| Good News and Bad in the Biblical Drama | 2 |
| Good News and Bad in Contemporary Gender Relations | 4 |
| Gender Relations and the Biblical Drama | 6 |
| Creation, Fall, and Gender Relations | 7 |
| The Redeemer and Gender Reconciliation | 8 |
| Gender Relations in the Early Church | 10 |
| The Continuing Call to Mutuality | 11 |
| Looking Ahead | 13 |
| Lights at the End of the Tunnel | 14 |
| Part I | Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Gender Relations | |
| 2. | Feminism and Christian Vision: Lessons from the Past | 19 |
| How We Define Feminism | 21 |
| Some Further Theological Reflections | 25 |
| Roots of Contemporary Feminism -- The "First Wave" | 28 |
| Liberal Thought | 29 |
| Evangelical Reform: A Relational Expression of Feminism | 31 |
| The Socialist Vision | 37 |
| Toward a Dynamic Concept of Gender Relations | 40 |
| 3. | Western Feminism since the 1960s: Lessons from the Present | 44 |
| Liberal Feminism Revisited | 45 |
| Marxist Feminism: A Class-Based Analysis | 49 |
| Women as Producers and Reprodurers | 50 |
| The Family under Capitalism | 51 |
| Housework: Socialized or Home-Waged? | 52 |
| The "Comparable Worth" Campaign | 54 |
| Radical Feminism: A Form of Contemporary Relational Feminism | 55 |
| The Radical Feminist Retrieval of Mothering | 57 |
| The Radical Feminist Rejection of Femininity and the Retrieval of Sexuality | 59 |
| Some Theological Observations | 62 |
| Recent Developments: Socialist and Postmodern Feminism | 63 |
| Postmodern Feminism: The Challenge of Deconstructionism | 65 |
| What Price Pluralism? Problems and New Possibilities | 67 |
| 4. | A Cross-Cultural Critique of Western Feminism | 70 |
| Challenges to White Western Feminism | 71 |
| Autonomy, Development, and Class | 72 |
| Social Solidarity: Within the Family, with Women, and with Men | 79 |
| Emancipation from Tradition | 89 |
| The Decentering of Feminism | 94 |
| The Advantage: A New Humility | 95 |
| The Disadvantage: Loss of Moral Grounding for the Feminist Project | 98 |
| A Christian Perspective on Difference | 100 |
| Toward a Christian Feminist Vision That Embraces Women and Men | 105 |
| Conclusion | 112 |
| Part II | Theological and Rhetorical Perspectives on Gender Relations | |
| 5. | Reformed Christianity and Feminism: Collision or Correlation? | 117 |
| Definitions and Restrictions of Scope | 119 |
| Basic Approaches to Christian Life and Thought | 123 |
| The Affirmation of World-Formative Christianity | 123 |
| The Importance of Experience for Christian Life and Thought | 126 |
| The Importance of Interpreting and Using Scripture according to Theological/Ethical Norms | 131 |
| Conclusion | 145 |
| 6. | God, Humanity, and the World in Reformed and Feminist Perspectives | 147 |
| God | 147 |
| The Feminist Critique of Traditional God-Language | 149 |
| Imaging God: Feminist Alternatives | 153 |
| God-Language: A Reformed Response | 156 |
| Humanity and the World | 164 |
| The Critique of Dualism and the Affirmation of Wholism | 165 |
| The Fallenness of Humanity and the World | 169 |
| Equality and Inequality of Women and Men | 177 |
| Conclusion | 182 |
| 7. | Gender Relations and Narrative in a Reformed Church Setting | 184 |
| The Importance of Narrative for Gender Relations | 185 |
| The Creation Story as a Fundamental and Rhetorical Narrative | 188 |
| How Narrative Shapes Religious Experience | 191 |
| A Story of Gender Relations | 199 |
| An Alternative Story of Creational Norms for Gender Relations | 209 |
| Evaluation of the Creation Stories | 215 |
| Conclusion | 220 |
| Part III | The Cultural Construction of Gender Relations | |
| 8. | A Critical Theory of Gender Relations | 225 |
| Sex-Role Theory: An Overview | 226 |
| Popular Definitions of "Masculinity" and "Femininity" | 226 |
| A Critique of These Definitions | 227 |
| Critical Theory as an Alternative to Sex-Role Theory: An Overview | 233 |
| Description | 233 |
| How Hegemony Works | 235 |
| Human Agency and Structural Constraints | 237 |
| How Sets of Social Relations Are Connected | 239 |
| Critical Theory and Gender Relations | 240 |
| Heterogeneity | 241 |
| Domination/Subordination | 241 |
| Human Agency | 248 |
| Application of Critical Theory: "Masculinity" and "Femininity" Revisited | 249 |
| Hegemonic Masculinity | 249 |
| Privileged Femininity | 254 |
| Application of Theory: Continuing the Game of Rope Tug | 257 |
| Challenging the Game | 257 |
| Reactions to Challenges | 258 |
| 9. | Using the Body to Endorse Meanings about Gender | 268 |
| Constructing the Female Body: Thin Is In | 269 |
| Being Thin Is No Sin | 269 |
| Pathogenic Weight Control Behaviors | 271 |
| A Historical Perspective | 273 |
| Layers of Meaning of Slimness | 276 |
| Challenging the Norm: Body Politics | 282 |
| Constructing the Male Body: Big, Strong, and Aggressive | 285 |
| The "Ideal" Male Body | 285 |
| A Historical Perspective | 287 |
| "Naturalizing" Superiority | 290 |
| Using Sport to Endorse Hegemonic Masculinity | 293 |
| At the Individual Level | 293 |
| At the Societal Level | 295 |
| 10. | Whatever Happened to the Fig Leaf? Gender Relations and Dress | 299 |
| Defining the Fashion System | 301 |
| Fashion Trends in Western Culture: A Brief History | 305 |
| Pre-fashion | 305 |
| The Emergence of Fashion | 306 |
| The Democratization of Fashion | 313 |
| Twentieth-Century Fashion | 327 |
| The Tyranny of Physical Perfection | 332 |
| The Complicity of the Church | 337 |
| Points of Resistance to the Tyranny of Fashion | 338 |
| Fashioning the Future | 339 |
| 11. | How Shall We Speak? Language and Gender Relations | 340 |
| Action through Language | 342 |
| How Naming and Defining Shape Gender Relations | 345 |
| Defining "Human Being" | 345 |
| Defining "Woman" and "Man" | 348 |
| Reclaiming Humanity for Women | 351 |
| How the Silencing of Female Experience Shapes Gender Relations | 357 |
| Direct Silencing of Women's Voices | 357 |
| Indirect Silencing of Women's Voices | 362 |
| Speaking with Respect | 384 |
| Part IV | Social Institutions and Gender Relations | |
| 12. | Private versus Public Life: A Case for Degendering | 389 |
| Late Twentieth-Century Feminism and the Public/Private Dichotomy | 391 |
| New Voices in the Debate: Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Feminism | 395 |
| Psychoanalytic Feminism: A Challenge to Freud | 395 |
| Epistemology and Ethics: Concerns of Philosophical Feminism | 399 |
| Feminist Theological Critiques of the Public/Private Split | 407 |
| Creation, Sin, and the Feminization of Agapic Love | 409 |
| The Call to Mutuality in All Spheres of Life | 412 |
| Conclusion | 414 |
| 13. | Family Justice and Societal Nurturance: Reintegrating Public and Private Domains | 416 |
| Giving Women the Privacy They Need | 417 |
| Justice in Philosophical and Biblical Perspectives | 421 |
| Distributive Justice and Gender Relations | 423 |
| Justice in Biblical Perspective | 425 |
| Applying Biblical Justice to Family and Gender Relations | 426 |
| Restoring Justice in the Family | 429 |
| Justice as a Necessary Condition of Care | 430 |
| Making the Public Realm a Sphere of Nurturance | 437 |
| The Warrior versus the Nurturer | 437 |
| The Limits and Potential of Maternal Thinking | 439 |
| Attaining Concrete Justice for the Family | 444 |
| Bringing Nurturance into the Public Sphere | 446 |
| Toward a New Architecture of Gender | 447 |
| Conclusion | 451 |
| 14. | Case Studies from India and Egypt in Class, Gender, and Surviva | 452 |
| The Divergent Lives of Men and Women | 456 |
| In Narsapur | 456 |
| In Cairo | 461 |
| The "Domestication" of Women | 465 |
| Individuality and Cooperation in the Family | 467 |
| The Ideology of the "Housewife" | 471 |
| Privileged Women and the Ideology of the Housewife | 473 |
| Lower-Class Women and the Ideology of the Housewife | 483 |
| Life Strategies | 489 |
| American Women and Gender Strategies | 489 |
| Women in Egyptian Factories | 491 |
| Mahila Mandel of Bombay | 493 |
| The Veiled Women of Cairo | 494 |
| Some Christian Observations | 497 |
| 15. | Is Someone in the Kitchen with Dinah? Gender and Domestic Work | 503 |
| Domestic Work in Historical Perspective | 505 |
| The Nature of Contemporary Domestic Work | 514 |
| Men and Domestic Work | 519 |
| Common Perceptions about men and Domestic Work | 520 |
| Men's Agency and Domestic Work | 523 |
| Women and Domestic Work | 524 |
| Domestic Work from the Viewpoint of Critical Theory | 528 |
| Possibilities for Change | 529 |
| 16. | Pink, White, and Blue Collars: Gender and Waged Work | 534 |
| Individually Oriented Explanations: Sex-Role Socialization Theory and Human Capital Theory | 537 |
| A Critique of These Theories | 538 |
| Structural Approaches | 542 |
| The Marxist Theory | 542 |
| The Organizational Approach | 543 |
| The Approach of Critical Theory: The Pervasiveness of Gender | 547 |
| Gendered Structure | 548 |
| Gendered Fobs | 550 |
| Gendered Activities | 550 |
| The Gendered Workplace | 553 |
| Human Agency: Challenging, Resisting, Coping, and Reconstructing | 563 |
| Possibilities for Change | 567 |
| Conclusion | |
| 17. | Still Living between the Times: Realism and Hope about Gender Relations | 577 |
| "I'm Not a Feminist, But .." | 578 |
| Liberal Feminism Revisited | 581 |
| Christians as "Closet Liberal Feminists" | 581 |
| Attractions and Hazards of Contemporary Liberal Feminism | 584 |
| Relational Feminism Revisited | 586 |
| European Feminism: A Better Brand? | 588 |
| The Limitations of European Relational Feminism | 590 |
| A Third Way? | 594 |
| Socialist Feminism Revisited | 594 |
| Beyond Critical Theory to Biblical Shalom | 597 |
| Final Thoughts | 600 |
| Bibliography | 601 |
| Index | 647 |
