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Supported by a grant from the
Ford Foundation and Brandeis University

Contact the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project:

Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies
Brandeis University
Mailstop 054
P.O. Box 9110
Waltham, MA 02454

Phone 781.736.3228
Fax 781.736.2070
fse_project@brandeis.edu

How Slavery Has Shaped Our Understandings of Marriage and Friendship

Kecia Ali: Slavery and Sexual Ethics in Islam

Slavery is deeply embedded in Islamic texts and Muslim history. Indeed, even men's sexual use of unfree women is approved in the Qur'an, attested in the sunnah-that is, the exemplary practice of the Prophet Muhammad-and explicitly sanctioned by classical Islamic jurisprudence. Yet the vast majority of contemporary Muslims forcefully reject slavery as unacceptable in the modern world. This leaves Muslims with a puzzle: How is it possible to resolve tensions between Islamic law, which many Muslims still treat as authoritative, and contemporary values? Considering the early Muslim acceptance of slavery to be a product of its time that is not integral to the tenets of the faith opens the way for a solution. Rejecting the historical acceptance of slavery frees Muslims to consider the history and context behind the development of other elements of Islamic law as well, including the many linkages between marriage and slavery that are applied to women. Thus Muslims become able to treat the Qur'an as revelatory guidance rather than literal law. This is a step toward thinking through an Islamic ethics of sex.

Fay Botham: Anti-Miscegenation Statutes: Roman Catholic and Protestant Theologies of Marriage and Race

Slavery and slaveholding values are deeply disturbing and pervasive realities within the modern world. Yet, religious and non-religious people can create sexual ethics free of the slaveholding values of ownership, domination, control, obedience, and subordination; indeed, they are already on the way to doing that. Facing up to our religious and national histories of slavery is the first step. Religious toleration of slavery demonstrates the grave dangers of scriptural literalism and of using religious scripture as an absolute basis for law or public policy. Religious communities can work to undo slavery's long-term effects by examining the grave moral problems of having ignored the sexual exploitation of enslaved persons, the control of enslaved women's reproduction, and the breaking up of families. They can help their members to be fair-minded jurors by developing religious arguments against harmful racial and sexual stereotypes. Everyone can help to create the conditions for meaningful consent to sexual relations by promoting economic justice, without which marginal persons are vulnerable to sexual coercion. We can all think critically about the stories that we tell about others and ourselves, because these stories shape our moral imaginations and influence our behavior. We can promote reparations for slavery and legal segregation, including reparations for the sexual harms and harms to families inflicted in these periods. The African American community has tirelessly worked for reparations since the nineteenth century, but has never been in the social position to obtain them. Reparations are long overdue, can come in many forms, and can promote racial reconciliation, including in the area of sexuality. We can work to prevent further harm by ending all forms of slavery today, whether sexual, agricultural, industrial, or domestic. In addition, religious communities and society as a whole can eradicate the longstanding linkage between marriage and slavery by transforming our understanding of marriage from ownership and control to partnership and shared responsibility. By all of these means, we can create the material, social, and spiritual conditions for sexual intimacies that are consensual, mutual, responsible, and pleasurable.

Gail Labovitz : The Purchase of His Money: Slavery and the Ethics of Jewish Marriage

Two types of owned human beings appear regularly in rabbinic literature: the wife and the slave. Thinking of marriage as a purchase and women as ownable allowed rabbis to consider marriage, gender relations, and sexuality in terms of the legalities of property. "Free" wives and slaves were of course not of the same status at the time when this literature developed, but the legal cores of the two transactions-buying a slave and taking a wife-are highly similar. Rabbinical works, dating as far back as the beginning of the third century CE, are the foundation of practices observed by significant segments of Jewish communities to this day. These texts, along with the laws and ideas they expound, often have a vote, if not a veto, in discussions of Jewish ethics and practice. Recognizing the associations between marriage and slavery in rabbinic literature forces us to ask unsettling questions about Jewish traditions, laws, and practices today. Until we confront these questions, and reconfigure Jewish marriage on a model that does not involve metaphors of ownership, slavery will continue to exert its legacy on Jewish women. Many of us may find it easier to accept the authority of these traditions (even as we might subject them to reinterpretation) than to imagine what we might put in their place that would still allow us to feel and act "authentically" Jewish. However, feminist ethics of sexuality and relationship demand of us no less than our best effort.

Barbara Savage: The Same-Sex Marriage Debate in the African American Churches: An Historical Perspective

The Hebrew Bible, as part of ancient Near Eastern literature, considers slavery a valid social and economic institution. Abraham and the other exemplars of piety in Genesis owned slaves. God is even said to have blessed these men by providing them with slaves. How are we, today, to make ethical sense of this positive acceptance of slavery, and of God's apparent role in it? One important step is to recognize the Bible as a human document, based on other human documents. It was created within particular historical circumstances for particular political, ideological, and social purposes, and was rewritten again and again over time. If we could recognize the ways in which the Bible expresses its writers' ideals and the goals-ideals and goals specific to the age the writers lived in and tied to the customs and expectations of their time-then we could realize the impossibility of simply applying biblical laws to our own society, regardless of how they encourage exploitation or limit individual physical, social and sexual freedoms. We could, indeed, adopt the method of the biblical law writers themselves: instead of sticking to the literal dictates of the texts they inherited, these authors questioned them.

Frances Smith Foster: Call Me "Mrs.": Motherhood, Marriage, and (Sexual) Morality in Nineteenth-Century African America

Nearly a half century after legal desegregation in the United States, integration is still a concept rather than a reality for most people. Although many of those who fought for civil and women's rights believed that women and girls would "naturally" lead the way into a brave new world by forging intimate, enduring friendships, this has not happened. Why? The responsibility lies with the way we think about one another and ourselves. Slavery may be only a story to be passed on. Race may be a biologically nonsensical notion. But the definitions, narratives, and assumptions about slavery are still with us today. Sexual morality is not just about individual decisions. The stories we have long told about women of different ethnic groups shape our moral imagination and hinder the interracial sisterhood necessary for creating sexual justice for all women. Silences or omissions and selective memories or statements repeated so often that folks forget they never were facts debilitate our mutual trust and respect. Even the elements of our system that oppress and confine are justified by the words that we use. However, we need to do more than change the words, stories, and interpretations that now prevail. Feminist sexual ethics can be the first step toward changing public policy, healing individual psyches, and nurturing friendships that last.

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