On March 14 we hosted author Kaya Oakes for a book talk about her recently published The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life's In-Betweens to Remake the World. This talk was followed by a conversation with History professor Ronit Stahl, Interim Administrative Chair of the Religious Diversity Cluster.
Transcript
Ronit Stahl:
Welcome everyone to our conversation this afternoon with author Kaya Oakes. First, I want to thank the Othering & Belonging Institute for helping to sponsor today's event and especially Robin Pearce who's been our amazing staff person to make sure everything goes according to plan. I'd also like to thank the history department for providing us space, and within the history department David Harris for being a very helpful point person. So thank you and thank you all for coming today, whether you are here in person or online, we are delighted to have you.
Ronit Stahl:
I'm thrilled to welcome Kaya Oakes to this conversation today. She is a lecturer in the College Writing Program here at UC Berkeley and has been for over 20 years. Impressive. She's the author of five books, so The Defiant Middle is her fifth book, which again is incredibly impressive. Some of her previous books include The Nones Are Alright, and notably that's nones, N-O-N-E-S, not N-U-N-S. Radical Reinvention as well as Slanted and Enchanted. She's also written for a wide variety of publications in both the religious and secular press. That range includes The New Republic, Slate, Guardian, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Sojourners, On Being, Killing the Buddha, America and The Revealer. And finally in 2021 she was awarded the best commentary rating award for the Religion News Service. And she's long been a really thoughtful interlocutor in the realm of religion. So welcome.
Kaya Oakes:
Thanks so much.
Ronit Stahl:
And today we're going to be discussing her latest book, The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life's In-Betweens to Remake the World. I just want to start by talking actually about this notion of the middle, which is both a sense of time but also a sense of place, and really that sense of being. In several places in the book you have these wonderful phrases about being in between and on the edge or being in the land of the liminal, and I'm wondering if you can just talk about how you came to this idea of The Defiant Middle.
Kaya Oakes:
Sure, yeah. So first of all, thank you for those of you who are here in person and then for everybody who's online, this is a weird time of day so I extra appreciate it. I think that this time of the afternoon is sort of a liminal space too, right? Because most of us are done teaching or working for the day, hopefully. I'm looking at my colleagues over there like, "Don't work anymore after this." Then we are going to move into our evening and so there's this ambiguous time. And I myself was turning 50 a year ago and leading up to that I began to think about how ill defined it is for women the idea of midlife or middle... When does it begin? Because I was seeing friends who were 35 saying they're middle aged. And I was seeing friends who were 70 saying they're middle aged and I'm like, "What are we talking about here?"
Kaya Oakes:
And the problem is for women there's this arbitrary physical marker of menopause where we say, "Now you're grown." But some people don't go through menopause, some people don't have the equipment to do that and so on and so forth. And that led me to this idea of women who lived in historical times that were also liminal times. So as a historian you know what I'm talking about. I went and honed in on the middle ages specifically because in the name of course, but also because there were a lot of women in the middle ages who exemplified living in between expectations of what a woman should be and the reality they were in. And that was something I think many of us are experiencing today, and that sort of what is a woman? How do we define that? Why do we define it this way with biology, let's have a conversation about that. But also let's look at these women from history who stepped out of the prescribed roles and see what they have to teach us now.
Ronit Stahl:
Yeah. There's such a fascinating array of women who then you bring up. And one of the things I really enjoyed in reading the book was the way in which you moved between the present and the past. It was a very smooth... As a historian maybe I'm just too used to reading academic texts that are way less smooth. But really, one of the things I really appreciated was the way you were able to both capture these past lives of people like Hildegard von Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Joan of Arc, but also some more recent folks like Dorothy Day and Simone Weil, Pauli Murray, a really wide range of women that as you're saying were in this space. So I guess I'm curious, the Middle Ages obviously offer in some ways a set of options, because as you note at one point we only have what is left often, we have some of their writing, but also what's left described about them by men. And how you made the choices about who you found to write about and what you said about them.
Kaya Oakes:
Yeah. So it was thematic. So I ran into this book. I signed the contract to write it in February of 2020. I've always had really great timing with the books that I had this article I worked on for months and months that came out on the day Trump was elected, and it was like you could just feel the air going out of the balloon, like no one's ever going to read, nobody did. But we went into lockdown and I had signed the book contract on this idea but I didn't have an outline, which as you know is not how you usually do it. Usually with nonfiction books you have an outline of what you're going to write, and then the publisher buys it based on that. So my publisher was very generous and bought it based on the idea but not the outline.
Kaya Oakes:
So I was in my garage at home riding an exercise bike, trying to work off my COVID angst and I came up with these themes of age and bodies and minds, and so the book rotates around those three themes. And who exemplifies women who dealt with the problem of aging or being too young, too old, and then mental health and the idea of craziness and that pejorative idea. And that gave me a through line and then I began to think about who exemplifies this, in history who are some people who exemplify youth? So Joan of Arc came up because of course she died at 14 and in her lifetime she was dismissed as crazy, visionary, et cetera, and people distanced her because of her youth. Then with aging I was thinking about figures in the Hebrew Bible, of the sister of Moses who we don't really hear much from but she's this wisdom figure. So it's a struggle because most of the writing about until very recently. Most of the writing about women was done by men. And that was centuries of women not being literate and not being allowed to be literate.
Kaya Oakes:
So I tried to think of them like you think of a character and how you get to know characters in literature. So you have the outline of this character, but then you fill in your imagination on what they would be like. So I was mentally having... This is going to sound totally bonkers. But we all lost it during the pandemic. So I'd be mentally having conversations with Julian of Norwich like, "What would you say about this?"
Kaya Oakes:
And that helped a lot. Then I was in a writing group with my friend Stephanie Calum and another friend Liz Castello, and the three of us would meet once a month on Zoom and I would just say, "Hey, I'm writing a chapter on mental health, who are some women who... ?" And they're like, "Carrie Fisher," so on and so forth. So they would just popcorn with popcorn names, and it was really great to have that community and feedback. And then in the editing process my editor came and refined that further, and she's a really great editor, so she helped me a lot with that too.
Ronit Stahl:
So interesting, I'm always fascinated by process.
Kaya Oakes:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:09:45].
Ronit Stahl:
Perhaps selfishly. I was really struck, the first two chapters really dealing with women who are too young or too old. And I was thinking about... I'd happened separately years ago to be cleaning out a file cabinet of my father's after he died, and he was a collector and a saver, especially of his kids, all sorts of things we produced at preschool and elementary school and whatnot. And there was this interview that apparently we did in first grade and it was like, "What do you want to be when... ?" And I had written or someone wrote for me, "I want to be an adult."
Ronit Stahl:
And as I thought about it I was like, "Right, because as a kid I thought adults they got to choose what they wanted to do." There was a certain independence with being an adult that you don't have as a kid. And then it turns out as an adult, at least by many of the standards as you point out, I don't conform. I'm not married, I don't have children, so I haven't hit the boxes that cultures and especially religious cultures often assume I should have.
Ronit Stahl:
So as I was reading I was just like, "Check, check," throughout the process. And I was wondering whether writing about either youth or aging, was one of them trickier than the other? Or how did you grapple with... ? Because it is, as you were saying earlier, middle aged is so ill defined and used to refer to so many different things, but then to try and capture either side of it is also tricky.
Kaya Oakes:
Yeah. Well, first of all I want to validate your life choices. I don't have children. I am married but I don't have children and I don't own a home, and so I'm a really usual 51 year old in some regards. But yeah, I think writing about younger people is harder, it's easier for me to look into my future at this point in my life than to look into my past. And I think that's because I work with students, most of my students are first and second year undergrads. Sometimes when I teach an upper division writing class, I don't work with grad students. So I know all about cringe and the idea of an instructor trying to be younger than her age or like, "Hey, have you guys heard the Lil Nas X song?" And my students are just like... Well, they're wearing masks so I can't tell, but I can feel it, I can feel that try harder thing.
Kaya Oakes:
So I really struggled in that chapter to think of what does it mean to be young today? So I don't know, right? So I talked to my niece since they're in college, I talked to people, I have friends who are younger than I am. And I really thought again historically about who are some women in history who embodied this and then I kept coming back to Joan of Arc, who I was fascinated by when I was a little girl. I was really compelled by this figure of this other person who's a child, and basically goes out and leads an army. I'm a pacifist now and so I would never be militaristic. She's unfortunately been hijacked by the alright which has embraced her as this figure of nationalism and that's really not what she was.
Kaya Oakes:
So I wanted to reclaim her in some ways but I also wanted to write about youth without trying to say, "Here's what it's like to be young today." Rather just say like, "Here's what some young women go through today, but historically here's what expectations of young women are that still exist today." So things like purity culture that are still part of our culture or expectations. In some ways the pressure on people who are 18 to come to college and know what their major's going to be and know what they want to do for the rest of their lives is ridiculous. I didn't know that I changed my majors three times in college and I went to three different colleges. And I think we need to allow girls and women, emerging women to define themselves a little bit more and that's the same thing with aging. How do you carve out this space that you say, "This is what I'm going to be at this age," rather than, "This is what society expects me to know that I want to do with the rest of my life when I'm 18." That's really not fair.
Ronit Stahl:
One of the I think really thought provoking element of the book is really the way you weave contemporary cultural commentary with also commentary on religion, and of course you've been writing about religion for a long time. And it made me wonder think about or wonder about really the choices you made in terms of when you emphasized people's religious paths, which as you note several times, sometimes there are people, and Pauli Murray comes to mind especially as someone who is talked about in the legal realm but often her role as an Episcopalian priest is just a sideline. It came up a little bit in the documentary about her obviously, it wasn't ignored. But that religion actually contributes something here. It's not just a side note or interesting detail, but actually matters. So can you tell us a little bit more about how you see particularly in this middle liminal space, what is the role of religion?
Kaya Oakes:
Right. It's complicated because again I'm looking back from today and I'm looking back from... And Ronit by the way is also a person who writes about religion and then history brilliantly, so I have her book it's called Enlisting Faith and I highly recommend it. On the whole history of Military Chaplains, which is again this really interesting military which is theoretically secular. It's like praying before football games, like that kind of thing. We'd like to think that doesn't happen, but it does. And as much as we try to pretend that religion's not part of...I mean, there's a guy out there on Sproul right now...
Ronit Stahl:
Right, Okay. [crosstalk 00:16:23]
Kaya Oakes:
... who's trying to save all of our souls. Right? And so my friend Jack Jenkins who is also a religion journalist, his thing is always religion's always in the room. We ignore it a lot of the time because it's uncomfortable or we don't have a language for it anymore, or the language for it is no longer a common language because we're divided about, which it's a long story.
Kaya Oakes:
But I think Pauli Murray is such an interesting... So there's a documentary about her that's on Netflix or Amazon, I can't remember. It was a brand new, it's by the women who did the documentary on Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And Pauli Murray was a civil rights attorney, she was a black woman who internally identified as male. She didn't come out because at the time it was harder to be non-binary or trans. So some of her writing is about her, she goes to the doctors, she's like, "Do I have testicles inside my body? Do I have testosterone?" So she's seeking affirmation in her identity. But she was a deeply religious person, and that drove a lot of her civil rights work.
Kaya Oakes:
And I think again it's like when we talk about the civil rights movement we're often like, "Martin Luther King." And like, "The reverend Doctor." So he was a Baptist minister who got into politics because of his religion and somebody was recently telling me about, I think I was getting mansplained about, "Did you know William Barber is a reverend?" And I'm like, "Yes." "He's the Reverend William Barber who is wearing his stole and a robe."
Kaya Oakes:
Yeah, so it's interesting how much to bring people who have very deep religious convictions, we don't think of them as being like a non-binary civil rights activist or... But she pursued, and I use the 'she' pronoun which she used in her lifetime, but some people prefer 'he'. But historians as you know are trying to figure out what is the language for people in the past who lived in between genders before we had a 'they' but people weren't using it like we do now. Anyway, all of that being said, Pauli Murray pursues ordination in her sixties, and she becomes one of the first women in the Episcopal Church to get ordained. So there's a picture of these, I think there were 10 or 12 of them, these 10 or 12 women, and she just looks so happy and she looks like she's got joy in her vocation, both as a lawyer and as a priest. So I think that's something we have to recognize as part of the communities that we live in.
Kaya Oakes:
So I spoke two weekends ago at First Congregational Church, which is right down the street from here, they had that big fire a few years ago. The pastor there is a friend of mine and she's a writer, and so her vocation is writing and being the pastor of this community and it was just so fun to be there with them and sit on the altar, it's like this. Except that it's in a church. But I was like, ["Maui 00:19:52], you have this really big responsibility to this community." And she's like, "Yeah, I asked for that."
Kaya Oakes:
So I think that finding ways to honor that and also to point out the problematic side of religion which you and I both have to do in our work, whether it's about feminism or politics or the military or whatever, where does religion not belong? If religion's always in the room, when is it not welcome? And I know you're working on with the hospitals and healthcare, and very many times when religion should not be in the room with healthcare.
Ronit Stahl:
Yeah. One of the things I really appreciate about your treatment of religion in the book and also in your writing more generally is the care with which you don't as assume as many do that there is this thing called religion that stands for all of religion. And that especially I think in contemporary American culture has often or frequently becomes a stand in for a certain kind of conservative politics. And one of the things you do so well is to bring out all the ways in which religion can be challenging, damaging, controlling, but also creates a whole different set of opportunities. If you look in different places or from different angles.
Kaya Oakes:
Yeah, who knew? I think it's true. It's important to hold religion accountable, but it's also important to not assume that all religion is the religious right, because they've hijacked the narrative of America, and you know this too. A lot of what we do in religion journalism is trying to take the spotlight and go like, and point it at something else, because the religious right is always trying to, "Let's be mean to trans kids in Texas and do it in the name of religion. Let's do this..." And like, "No, wait a minute. There's this other church over here that's not being mean to trans kids," can we show that? And it's really hard to wrestle that away from the people who have the most power over the narrative. So the work of people who do history on religion, do religion journalism is to try to do that, to try to say there's this other narrative and it's so not known to the world. So yeah, it's a tough job though. Try reaching an editor and say, "Hey, there's this church with a trans priest," and they go, "Yeah, okay. But Trump..." It's really hard.
Ronit Stahl:
And one of the things, you've talked partially in this book but also in other places about your own religious and spiritual journey and within the Catholic Church especially which has some less savory histories, but also as you're describing and thinking with and through women who have found places in the church, and not just in the church but because of the church, I guess I'm curious actually at both an analytic level but also at the level of writing, what your process is in terms of honoring what many of these women have found and found fulfilling and sustaining. Dorothy Day is probably the modern example, but of course you've got also women from, um, the Middle Ages who were also operating within a world where the Roman Catholic Church was the church and that put a lot of constraints on their life, but also they found other paths. I'm curious also if it made you rethink certain ideas or how they changed your thinking in thinking about their own journeys.
Kaya Oakes:
Yeah. I think one of the really cool things that came out of writing this book for me was redefining the idea of solitude as a vocation. So I don't know if you know the work of Fenton Johnson. He used to teach at SF State, he's a novelist, but he's gay and he grew up right next to Thomas Merton, this very famous monastery in Kentucky. So all his life he was around this tradition of solitary and silent monks but he became a Buddhist. So he has a book about this process, how did this gay kid from Kentucky who grew up near a Catholic monastery become a Buddhist. And he has a new book on the history of solitary, so not necessarily people who were living alone in a cell.
Kaya Oakes:
So Julian of Norwich was an anchoress so she lived in this little building that was attached to the side of a church, it was anchored to the church and they called it a cell, it's basically a room. So somebody brought food, one window looks out into the village square, like we do here, and the other one looks into the church. So that was her vocation was to live in both solitude but she was in the communities in some ways, the window was open, people would come, ask her questions.
Kaya Oakes:
And the more that I lived with that idea during the pandemic when I was sitting alone at home. I was like, "You know, I'm really good at this." All of my life I had felt really strange or apologetic about, it's not the whole introvert thing, we've had that conversation, it's beyond that. It's to women saying I like being alone. And the pandemic helped me realize that I can actually do this. And I think it was that wisdom tradition that comes from even further back in the Catholic Church to the desert mothers and fathers that go out into the desert and essentially starve themselves to see what would happen, and have these weird mystical experiences.
Kaya Oakes:
And it's some trippy if you ever read their writing. It's like, "Man, this really is crazy stuff." So in some ways it's like the wisdom tradition was a psychological experiment of how long can I survive on my own? And then all of a sudden the whole world was doing that, and some people handled it really well and were like, "This isn't that bad, I can do this." And some people really struggled. So I think all of us were in the liminal space, but I also realized that that that idea of I'm going to be on my own and embrace solitude as a power space for me, as a space of creativity, as a space of spiritual growth was something I got from these Catholic mystics, these Christian mystics.
Kaya Oakes:
Now there are of course people in other religious traditions who did that too, in Judaism, in Hinduism, in Buddhism, in Islam. Everybody has a story in native American traditions of somebody going off alone to have their experience, and then they come back with some wisdom. But how many times was it a woman and they're like, "What were you doing out there by yourself? Now that you're back you can clean up the mess." So many of us are reentering the world now like, "Oh, you're back? Great. There's this giant mess that we need you to clean up." But yeah. So that was a big one.
Kaya Oakes:
And I wrote late last year. This year or last year? I ended up writing a story on this monastery that's up in the Berkeley Hills that a lot of people don't know is there. So there's actually a monastery up in North Berkeley with these four monks who are Christian mystics, and they live up there in this little house. They have no web presence or it's very small web presence. You have to find out about it to go there. And I was like, "This is the..." I loved writing that piece. So that kind of story really interests me because it's a corrective again to the evangelical religious right.
Ronit Stahl:
Yeah. It's interesting to me also the way... So there's the solitude angle, and then the chapter on barrenness, which also has a desert element and women who don't have children. And I was really struck at the ways in which growing up, I grew up Jewish and the biblical figure who always comes up is Hannah, and Hannah wept because she was barren. But what you then flag is wait a second, we have people, these biblical figures, these biblical women, like Miriam, Esther, Purim is coming up, you've got Esther and Vashti, these women who play these important roles, whether or not they're hailed as significant, but do so not because they're childbearing or child rearing, but because of other kinds of power and authority.
Ronit Stahl:
And I just found that really interesting to rethink or what are the ways in which you're reshaping some of the biblical figures. And of course as you point out, Mary is often smoothed out by the church. When in fact you could think of her as much more iconaclastic than the image of Mary as the figurine or really just the figure of Mary as often presented. Could you just talk a little bit more about the way in which these biblical women came into this text, and give us material to think about and think with, for again this notion of this middle or liminal space.
Kaya Oakes:
Yeah, not being Jewish myself I didn't know the Purim story. And again it took a friend and I have Jewish family now because one of my siblings converted and is raising their children in the Jewish tradition. They belong to a synagogue, all that stuff. And I've been to all these bar mitzvahs and somehow I just had not gotten that story. And then when I went back and paid more attention to that I was like, this is so cool, that this woman who is described as... There's no mention. The Bible's obsessed with lineage, so whenever you get a woman, they're like, "She's the mother of blah blah and the mother of blah blah..." And there's none of that with Esther, she's just Esther. So we can assume she doesn't have children and so the fact that she saves her people is really amazing.
Kaya Oakes:
So just sitting with people who you... The statistic is these days at 1 in 10 women don't have children and that's growing. So more and more people are either making that decision or just circumstantially not getting there, whatever happens. It doesn't happen for everybody but the problem is it's always been a little bit of a shame stigma attached to that. An embarrassment and I really wanted to find people again who thrived. So our Christian tradition is like Mary she's blessed, she receives this amazing gift, but when you read her prayer and she's Jewish too, so when you read her prayer in the Bible, it's called the Magnificat.
Kaya Oakes:
And the first part is like, God's great, this is cool. Okay. And then she goes, God's going to set the world upside down, he's going to send the rich away, he's going to raise up the poor. What God wants for the world is this upside down kingdom, and woe to the rich, which Jesus repeats later on. I always want to get a bumper sticker that says that and drive around my gentrified neighborhood in Oakland and see how people react, "Woe to the rich." It sounds like Bernie Sanders.
Kaya Oakes:
But I was recently on this podcast with these two women who grew up evangelical and they're like, "In our church we only made the first half of Mary's prayer when she talks about how great it is to be chosen by God." And I'm like, "So you never got to the revolutionary part?" And they're like, "No." I'm like, "Okay." So I think many of us were stuck there in my own generation, and then deliberately people were not being taught about this. Then also the fact that it's an immaculate conception, she didn't actually have sex and somehow got pregnant. There's a lot of weird... But now it's like wait a minute, so we celebrate when single women do the same thing and when families are made. And it's so interesting how you can rethink these models of people who were 'barren' and weeping and so on and so forth, but actually those people do a lot of cool stuff. So that's the second part of the narrative that gets glossed over, like my evangelical podcast friends.
Kaya Oakes:
And that was really interesting to me as someone who doesn't have children myself. I recently was talking to a friend of mine who's an Anglican priest, and she chose not to have children too. And she said, it's really funny a lot of times people will interrogate her and like, "Who's going to take care of you when you're old?" And she's like, "As a person who goes to nursing homes to visit very lonely old people whose children never come visit them, I'm just not going to say that's a good reason to have kids." So I think we're having more conversations like that. And Rebecca Solnit has probably my favorite comeback ever, when people ask you if you have children and you say no. You say, "Would you ask a man that?"
Ronit Stahl:
Great. And as you point out of course, within the Catholic Church, women, religious sisters, they do not have children, priests do not have children, and yet it remains this real third wheel in some ways. I'm pretty sure it was you, but I could be mixing up people in my Twitter feed. Noted I guess a couple weeks ago that even the current pope who is often considered progressive in many domains, climate change, other things, but when it came to the status of the family and having children, even though he, an unmarried priest, does not have children, it was still that's where the emphasis is. So that tension within religious traditions over there are these figures that have been tremendously important, and also.
Kaya Oakes:
Yeah. It's like again looking back and combing through history and finding the outliers and saying, "How can I make this person into a role model who's been forgotten by history or looked over by history" Or only had half of their story told."
Ronit Stahl:
And we're going to take questions from the audience. So start to think of your questions, whether you're on Zoom or here. As you think about your questions I just want to get back to, you wrote this book during the pandemic, which to me seems just a tremendous feat unto itself. I mean yes we had our-
Kaya Oakes:
I had to do something.
Ronit Stahl:
I know, but I do just want to really recognize that as a really huge accomplishment. But also both because you're a writer and you teach writing. So talk just a little bit more about your writing process. As you said earlier, you got the contract without a full outline or a draft. But then I love hearing about how people write and how they revise and so I'd love to just hear if you're willing to talk a little bit about just what your process is.
Kaya Oakes:
Yeah. I want to plug something first, which is that my department college writing program hosts an event every year called Berkeley Writers At Work, hosted by John Bean who's here. John is a playwright and also writer, and we co-teach creative writing together sometimes when there's not a pandemic. And every semester we pick a person from a different department, and you interview them about their writing process. And it's really just about how do people here at the university write. How long has this been going on?
John Bean:
It'll be 26 years.
Kaya Oakes:
26 years, and many of these were films. So if you want to see like Ron Takaki or did you do Robert Reich's...
John Bean:
Yes.
Kaya Oakes:
Yes, or most recently it was Scott Saul, who's a historian who teaches in the English department here at Berkeley. Please check those out. But for me, my process is very sloppy and I don't recommend it. So thankfully none of my students are here. So when I teach them things like always have an outline and do your research ahead of time. And I'll be on Google at 2:00 AM after having woken up in a sweat, just thinking who is that person in the Bible who did this? And being on Twitter going, "Does anybody know the answer to this question? I urgently need this fact." But I'm very process driven in the sense that I need deadlines to operate. So one nice thing about having to write books on a schedule is that you don't get the second half of your advance unless you turn in the manuscript.
Kaya Oakes:
So there's a financial incentive, but there's also a publication date and the publisher has invested... You see the cover way before the book comes out, you have to get people to endorse the book before you've even finished writing it. A lot of this is operating on years into the future. So this little amoeba of an idea that you have has to become a living being. So I'm very driven by, "I have to finish this thing, I don't have a choice and I'm just going to sit here and work until I'm done." So when I'm not working on deadlines, I have to set my own deadlines for things like writing articles. So I'm journalist also, and those are also deadline driven and they're also news cycle driven. So the news cycle's changing so fast like your story like me publishing that.
Kaya Oakes:
So done this research. I've got to talk about this because I had loved researching this, I wrote this article about this black Catholic Church in Oakland where I lived. And they have this display, it's on San Pablo in Alcatraz, if any of you have ever been, of crosses in the yard. And every time someone is killed in Oakland by gun violence they put a cross in the yard. You know what I'm talking about Michelle. And somebody had complained about it, and somebody in the neighborhood had said, this is disturbing and it's bringing down the real estate value. And I said, there's got to be a deeper story here. How did this get started? Who started it? What does it mean now? And that neighborhood is gentrifying and it's mostly white people, so the church has become a commuter church and people are driving in from Antioch and Marin City and all over the place because they can't afford to live in Oakland anymore.
Kaya Oakes:
So I really wanted to tell this story but through their point of view so I spent months on this. And journalism is really about finding the person who's going to tell you the arc of the story. So who's the person? The community's going to tell you how to tell their stories. So you interview lots of people, you find a narrative arc. So what's the climax? And then how do you build up to that? So the climax is are they going to get to keep doing this every year and put these crosses out there? Of course they are. But I needed to build the tension. And I really loved writing that piece and then it comes out on the day Trump's elected and nobody reads it.
Kaya Oakes:
So did I waste my time? My process was very driven by this idea as opposed to this book. A lot of my work is driven by, I met this person or I read about this person and I think people need to know about them. And that's why I write. It's not ego driven. Everything's ego driven in the sense that I have an ego. But I do really consider myself somebody who my purpose in life is to hold a microphone to somebody's face, whether that's Joan of Arc or the people at St. Columbus Church and to help them get their story out there. I didn't waste my time, they were really happy about it, it brought attention to them. It was really sweet. I came to mass there a week later and the priest had me stand up and it was just like, that was not a waste of time because it meant something.
Kaya Oakes:
So my process is, again, it's a messy process, but I always have the end goal in sight. So one of the things I always tell my students. The other advice I give them I don't live by and that's okay, because I also tell them everybody has their own process and you have to find your own. But one of the things I always say is you have to earn your ending. So that for me is very much true. I know where a book's going to end. I have that in my mind. From the beginning I know where an essay's going to end and I try to get there just however I can get there. So yeah.
Ronit Stahl:
That's great. The messiness of writing is I think something that most people who write can share and I have personally never been able to outline anything if you ask. So anyone who can has my deep respect.
Kaya Oakes:
So another thing I teach my students is to outline the draft after you write it. And they're like, "Oh, this is a mess. I can fix this." So that's often what editors do.
Ronit Stahl:
I'm a big fan of the reverse outlines, absolutely. So I do want to give a chance for questions from the audience. If you're online on Zoom, please put your questions in the chat and Robin will read them out loud on your behalf, and those of you in the room with us today, just raise your hand.
Speaker 3:
Hi, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. Actually interested in both of your commentary, your storytelling, you're as an historian. It feels to me and this is a very biased perspective, but if you look at it as a spectrum, we have the secular heroes and the religious heroes who are the majority mainly males or described males. And then it feels like women were always really good at being in between where this secularity was interlaced with you know, more of spirituality would not... And that was not allowed by any of the sites. So I was wondering if it's true, if this in between of intellect spirituality with science or with other types of knowledge, is historically mainly family. And what's your comment about that? If you discovered someone's archetypes that stood in the middle and that actually could raise some special change.
Ronit Stahl:
Yeah. That's a really interesting question. How do people stand in between. If I'm getting your question right, and also to repeat it back to people watching online, why is it that historically that there's a separation between intellectual scientific equals male and then emotive spiritual equals female. Is that and like...
Speaker 3:
But also on the other side, male also that the pope is powerful, very religious. As long as it's powerful it seems to be male and that [crosstalk 00:45:32] have to be destroyed.
Kaya Oakes:
Right. So men are always in power. Then so historically women who try to assume power and step out of their, what's the word I'm looking for. It's getting late in the day now. Their place.
Ronit Stahl:
From their private, and that [crosstalk 00:45:55] was private.
Kaya Oakes:
Yeah. Yeah. So one of my favorites and she's the epigraph of the book is Mary Ward. So Mary Ward was an English nun, N-U-N. And she wanted to start a religious order that was a female version of the Jesuits. So the Jesuits is the religious order that Pope Francis is part of and they're super intellectual. They run Georgetown, Fordham, all these really high ranking universities, but there's no women Jesuits. So in some religious orders like Franciscan, St. Francis always had women and men following him.
Kaya Oakes:
But they were all men and they were very militaristic, St. Ignatius who founded the order was a veteran of war, and Mary Ward wanted to start a religious order of women who would be intellectually teaching other women how to read and write and it didn't work. She was put into prison for this and she was persecuted for it. And she eventually did start a religious order but the institutional church wouldn't let her be what she had dreamed of. But she really pushed for this and she really stepped out of, and like Hildegard and other women, she traveled to Rome at a time when women traveling alone in and of itself was very unusual, and she went directly to the source to make this request. So I've found her history very inspiring and very interesting to read. But have you run across examples in your own research?
Ronit Stahl:
Yeah. No, I think it's a really good question about where... As you mentioned the word archetype and where particularly as you were, I think also gesturing out that they are hero figures and if there are men it tends to be about power and intellect. And when it's women heroines it does tend to have a family orientation. I'm having trouble coming up with a really great example, but I would say one of the things historians do do is think about patterns. And I think that when we think about women who have taken on leadership roles, whether in religious communities or in political communities, in society.
Ronit Stahl:
And you get at this a little bit in the book that even with whether it's Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren, these women on the verge of the possibility of these powerful political roles that they do tend still to have to be able to make a case for themselves as being good women in a way that is socially and culturally accepted as wives, as mothers, grandmothers, that this is important for framing who they are. And there are certainly women who have been in positions of great power in all lot of different fields, but they are still unusual, right? They're not yet the typical people, and sociologically when women enter professions, it's also when professions tend to be then perceived as losing status.
Ronit Stahl:
Teaching, nursing, I have spaces in fact where nuns, N-U-N-S were actually particularly active in the United States, then places that tend where male teachers in the early United States had been pursued. That was an important role as women became the teaching force, the nursing force.
Kaya Oakes:
Yeah. It's really interesting to me to hear to this day stories from women who are coming to universities to interview for tenure track jobs who are visibly pregnant, that they're greeted with anxiety by their committees. And I have a friend who was pregnant while she was in grad school here. And that is treated us is kind of like, "Oh my God, is she going to give birth right in front of us?" And like, "Will you need maternity leave?" Okay. How are we going to handle that? Oh my God. So be traditional, be a traditional woman, but not in our face. Don't put it in. So don't nurse. Like the breastfeeding debate, why aren't we having that in 2022? It's like it's a boob, it makes milk, babies eat it. That's how it works. Why are we having to hide that thing still? But I think it is that sense of a lot of I don't know if everybody watches Broad City, it's a sitcom. It's very silly in some ways, but it's also very good on women and archetypes and about particularly millennials.
Kaya Oakes:
And there's an episode where the two pot smoking New York millennial Jewish comedians, it was hilarious, who are the two main characters. They go to work for Hillary Clinton when she's running for president and everybody's calling the office and all day they're answering the phone going, "No, she's not a witch." That's the running joke. Like, "No, she's not a witch. Okay. She's not a witch." But that actually really made me laugh because that was the narrative that people ran with her. That she was Lady Macbeth. So that archetype of she's a villainist schemer and they did it again with Warren, putting little snake emojis and calling her a snake. And it's just again just the same old stereotypes that we have today.
Kaya Oakes:
I'd be fascinated. And I don't think we'll see it in my lifetime to see a woman without children become president unless something happens to Biden and Harris gets it because she's a stepmother. So people didn't know what to do with her either. They're like, "Well, look at these kids that she helped raise, that call her mama," and that's cute. That shows that she has a maternal side. She didn't get married until she was 15, something. So she wasn't going to have biological children. And that was a choice she made and that's okay. So yeah. So we avoid the conversation a lot of the time.
Ronit Stahl:
And I think also even over the past few decades where you have seen more women in religious leadership roles, there's also still that same tension over who are they? Can they fulfill all the roles we're expecting them to fulfill?
Kaya Oakes:
Absolutely. People always say whenever you meet people who find out you're Catholic and you're a feminist, they're like, "Why don't you become a Episcopalian? They have women priests." And I'm like, "I have friends who are Episcopal priests, they still all have sexism." It's not it's stopped just because they started and it's the same in the rabbis. So a friend of mine is a female rabbi and I'm like, "Do you ever get mansplained?" She looks at me. She goes, "What do you think?" [laughter].
Robin:
We have some questions online. I know we probably have more in the room. Sorry because of you. My back was two. This is one question going back to the very beginnings, actually a question for you Ronit. But Shannon she said, "I think I heard you say that religion doesn't have a space or role in healthcare. Was that correct what did I miss here? Could you elaborate? So would you a like a chance to tell us about your forthcoming book?
Ronit Stahl:
Yeah, this is a space that Kaya and I have previously been in conversation about. So I am working on a project about religious healthcare. So there is a long history of religion and healthcare. The debate is really over whether there should be as much religion in healthcare as we see in the United States, where there are huge religious healthcare systems, some of which more or less actively use religious doctrine to determine care. So it's a big sprawling project that hopefully in a few years I'll have a book to share, but the center and I think what was being referred to earlier was that this is a real debate, and we have both have a tremendous amount of religion in healthcare today, but that is not uncontested. So what I'm looking at is how religious hospitals and religious healthcare systems frame themselves as religious, or sometimes they frame themselves as not really religious, and how debates over religious healthcare have evolved and developed over the past century or so.
Robin:
We'll do maybe one more in person then we'll go back to online.
Ronit Stahl:
Yeah.
Speaker 7:
I wanted to ask you about how you came up with some of the themes that you chose for your chapter headings. Did it just come to you or did you find out as you were writing? Did it help you choose which women's stories to focus on? How did those categories help you write or think about this in general?
Kaya Oakes:
Yeah. So the question is how did I come up with the themes in the book? And it's a chicken-egg question. So like I talked about before, how I often know how a book or an essay is going to end, so I have that trajectory in my head, even if I don't have an outline, I know I'm going to get to the end, but I really didn't know with this book because the world flipped out. But I did know that what I sat down and I thought about was what are the ways that women are expected to be? So that was how I came up with the themes and I thought we're expected to be nurturing. And mothering is part of that. We're expected to be caring and compassionate and we're expected to be calm and not to get angry.
Kaya Oakes:
And then I realized that all of my life I'd been struggling with those things personally, but that there were also again, this is where talking to other women. When you think about anger and you think about women, what comes to mind? And I thought about the Greek myths and the Maynards who are these raving, again, we go back to archetypes of these raving women who would go up and have these sacrifices. They would sacrifice a bull and dance around and people were terrified of them because it was this epitome of what happens when... So we expect women not to get angry because when they do it's very dangerous. So that was how the themes led to the illustrations. So what do we expect women to be? Who exemplifies somebody who's stepped outside of that expectation?
Kaya Oakes:
How do I tell that person's story? Then another thing that came up was this decision and I think in academic writing, increasingly we have to think about this too. How much do we want to position ourselves? So I was thinking about people Gloria Anzaldua and how she was so brilliantly able to bring her own narrative into writing about feminism and identity and bell hooks of course she just passed away and who I teach in my writing classes also would bring, I experienced this thing as a black woman. So here's a story about my life and now I'm going to give back to my narrative. But somebody asked me that too recently at an event, why did you include bits and pieces of your own story because it'd be hypocritical not to if I just edited that out and didn't say I don't have children.
Kaya Oakes:
And then I write a whole chapter about women who don't have children. I have to tell people what my lens is because... And I think in academia we need to be more honest about that in academic writing too and encouraging students. Also I know we do a lot of that in our department of encouraging students to think about their positioning, their experiences and how that changes their point of view on texts that they're reading. But I had to do that too. So that shaped the themes as well. So of course my personal experience came into it and then of course somebody on the internet is always like, "I just couldn't relate to it." I'm like, "Well, that's too bad." But thank you for that question.
Robin:
Great. Let's do one more online. Sorry. And then we'll go back. Stephanie writes, how would you describe the spirituality of the middle or liminal space of bivocationality as you have encountered in historical or contemporary women? Question two, how would you describe the generativity gaps of overlapping vocations that might seem mutually exclusive but find their embodiment in women with compounded commitments?
Kaya Oakes:
Wow. Okay. Where to start with that. What was part one again? Sorry.
Robin:
It's all right. Yeah. How would you describe the spirituality of the middle or liminal space of bivocationality?
Kaya Oakes:
Okay. So how do you spiritually live in the middle in bivocationality? I think a lot of us at the university can speak to that because many of us have I've been thinking a lot since we came back to in-person teaching about the difficulty of how we had to move. We became very different teachers on Zoom. Our whole style of teaching changed and we're very challenged by that. And I think that speaks to the idea of spirituality too because a lot of clergy have struggled with again, Zoom church or Zoom synagogue and Zoom temple.
Kaya Oakes:
And how do you minister to people through a camera? How do you spiritually sit with people? So bivocationality again is leaving out... Those of us who have a spiritual bent or a religious bent, are always stuck in between secular and sacred and... So I've thought of a lot about people who live in both and then come back to Pauli Murray again, because Murray really exemplifies that, again, that tension of being somebody who was a lawyer who was in civil rights movement, but had a deep religious life.
Kaya Oakes:
So how did that impact the way Pauli Murray lived out and first had to live out the vocation of a lawyer in order to understand that she needed to be a priest. And she did that in midlife, and made that transition in midlife. So I think she's a great model for many people who are interested in these questions, and I encourage people to read more about her and watch the documentary. And then I forgot what the second part of the question was. I'm sorry.
Robin:
It's a tough question. How would you describe the generativity of overlapping vocations that might seem mutually exclusive, but find their embodiment in women with compounded commitments?
Kaya Oakes:
Okay. Yeah. So again, I think each of us exists in a, we're a Venn diagram and I think that we need to just understand that that changes with time and then with women it's like parenting is maybe one of your bubbles and then career is another, and then maybe taking care of aging parents is another and where are you in the middle of that? Or maybe you're a writer and someone who teaches writing, but you also really care about the environment. So where do you meet in the middle of that? I think as I think about the Venn diagram I also think about how it can move. It's not static. So how we too much identify one day with more of one part of ourselves than another. And for women there's especially that extra challenge of because there are social cultural expectations of what we should be, how much do we feel this pressure to conform to those expectations on one day versus another. So that is a fluid experience throughout our lives that changes. And I hope I answered that question. Sorry. That was a challenging question. I did my best, Yeah.
Ronit Stahl:
Thank you. Questions in the room?
Speaker 8:
I'll give you my question then also give a my point of view. So you want to maybe understand a little bit about where my questions coming from. At what point in the book do you talk about women were not able to be okay in ourselves? Or I think some of this about how do we create new forms of religious life in the framework of discernable forms of religious life are constructed in a patriarchal system. So Juliana of Norwich was an important mystic was put there by the male structure and even women religious communities in this country, a lot of it came out of women not being able to be parts of other parts of societies that these became refuges, but they're still dealing with the constraint and the rules to run up to the Vatican and that kind of space.
Speaker 8:
So how can we dream a new form of religious life? And informed by places like Incarnation Monastery, which is a more inclusive space in some ways – it's four men there but people who say their prayers together and they do the best they can with inclusive language and there's just an acceptance there. Point of view is I go to mass at St. Louis Incarnation but also I'm in Berkeley because I'm here for Episcopal seminary, but I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church.
Kaya Oakes:
Oh, you're my target audience
Speaker 8:
I was able to get to the point of I started discerning the priesthood and the person who has guided me and was my patron of being received at the Episcopal Church is Pauli Murray.
Ronit Stahl:
Wow.
Kaya Oakes:
Okay.
Ronit Stahl:
Really your target audience.
Kaya Oakes:
Yeah.
Speaker 8:
So I'm here because I feel I'm going to take a lot of... We're swimming in similar waters but thinking of the nuns and the nones and what is that in a world that is so broken? I do think there is something in the best of sense of faith and a common sense of transcendence if there's something more that we don't have to accept from the filthy rotten system as Dorothy Day would speak of. And what are we going to build together? I think some ways a liberal progressive culture or any culture, even of the right in a polarized way is so bent on defending territory and breaking things down that we've lost a sense of what it's to build something as a collective.
Kaya Oakes:
Thank you. And I think you're absolutely right. We do need a new form of religious life because if religion's going to survive in the USA in particular, it needs to show up. So one of the other things that Maui [Basket 01:05:47] who's the pastor at... She always says, "Church, act like a church." So how as churches don't do a very good job in America anymore of being visible, because there's almost this embarrassment about that. So I go to pride and I see churches marching in pride and I think that's really amazing and cool but I also know that some people boo them, and say, "What are you doing here? Why are you here?"
Kaya Oakes:
So there's this conflict there. I think the bay area we really exemplify this problem in a lot of ways, which is that there's a lot of good welcoming churches that want to make a better world that want to show up at the protests and get arrested and do the Dorothy Day thing and live with the poor and serve the homeless. But it's difficult for them to break through the static again, of the narrative that religion is hijacked by the religious right. So I think a new form of religious right, religious right, religious life.
Kaya Oakes:
I think the pandemic showed us a lot of that. A lot of it's individualistic. So a lot it's more meeting people one on one and seeing what their needs are and how do you create community out of mutual need. So I've been really interested in the mutual aid movement. So when your neighborhood doesn't have enough food, you put a refrigerator on the street and you put it out there and you tell people they can come get food. When your neighborhood doesn't have enough books, you put a little free library. So why are all the little free libraries in wealthy neighborhoods? That's the other question I have living in the Bay Area. But yeah, how do we marry that desire and need for community with the fact that people want to be known and seen as individuals and not as a formless mass of you're my congregation rather than your individuals who I've been called to serve. The fact that churches are shrinking and this is cross all religions. Synagogues, mosques, everything's shrinking.
Kaya Oakes:
So fewer people go to a worship service. And again, the pandemic highlighted again people's need to still be in community. So there's fewer people who come to the zoom church but they get to know one another, they really know one another's individuals. It becomes that sort of project. So I think things like that in Latin America, during the 1970s they had base communities. So if you don't know this I'm not going to go through the whole story because I don't want to keep everybody here until the end of the day. So the death squads were killing priests and nuns who were there to help these communities. So they would get together and have church without a clergy member and they called it a base community. Communauté de base. My French is terrible.
Kaya Oakes:
But they would be, again, a mutual aids society/church. That's what we need. We need churches that are mutual aid societies. But that also welcome us as individuals. I think that problem of... The other problem is people feel that they have to be reformed and formed to be part of religion. And I'm always like, yeah, you can believe some of it, but you don't have to buy every word. who believes that God wrote every word in the Bible like fundamentalists? But that's really a small minority of people. So I will talk offline sometime. I'll get your email. But I think that's a really good question. What form is religious life going to take in a country where religion has a very specific end goal in mind which is electing people to office. That's very dangerous too.
Ronit Stahl:
Question.
Kaya Oakes:
Earlier today I said Ronit let's end early. So yeah, well we can do one more question.
Speaker 10:
I've been thinking about the fact that I have really a difficult time just finding a definition of religion. So I was just going to say do you have a working definition?
Kaya Oakes:
That's a good question too because I always think of religion as a house where things that we believe and maybe your house is small or bigger than mine. And maybe only the middle of a tiny house and my... Here in the Bay Area it still costs a million dollars but it's [crosstalk 01:10:43]. But that religion is the case, the compartment into which we put these things that we believe and it just depends on, it's another Venn diagram. It's culture, it's race, it's your country you live in. I've been so interested in the religious dimensions of course of Russia and Ukraine and with the different churches doing different things and good church, bad church. So we got this whole narrative now of the Ukrainian church is good and the Russian church is bad and that's fascinating to me. But again, so religion it's things that you believe and it's a structure that you put those beliefs into. That's how I would define it.
Speaker 10:
That's really, really helpful.
Kaya Oakes:
Okay.
Speaker 10:
Especially when talking to my atheists.
Kaya Oakes:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yes. I have some atheists too. [laughter].
Speaker 10:
[crosstalk 01:11:46].
Kaya Oakes:
Anyway, thank you all. Especially Ronit and Othering Belonging, everybody who's here gets a book which I think is super generous of you. If you don't want the book you can just leave it in a little free library in a low income neighborhood. And thank you all so much and [crosstalk 01:12:08].
Ronit Stahl:
... for joining us today and for writing this book. Thanks to OBI, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, [crosstalk 01:12:20].
Kaya Oakes:
That was writing programs. Who sponsored this event too.
Ronit Stahl:
The history department. And for those who are interested in religion, the pandemic, wellness questions of community they'll be all on Zoom events on Thursday, March 31st, again at four o'clock. I know a challenging time but rifts and revelations how the pandemic has transformed religion in the United States and how religion has transformed. The changes in religion, society in the US over the past two years due to the pandemic. So if you need information about that, feel free to talk to me or to Robin if you're on the OBI LISTSERV or the BCSR LISTSERV, you'll get the registration for it. We'd love to see you. But again, thank you all for coming today and I hope to see you at another event and read the book.
