I was a young evangelical Christian in 1968 when feminism hit me like a train I had been waiting for. When I raised questions, people told me that feminism conflicted with the Bible.
When I married, my male relatives said I wasn’t really married if I didn’t take my husband’s name.
When I finished grad school at UC Berkeley and got my first job teaching English at Cal State San Bernardino, my father asked, “Why don’t you do something worthwhile–like be an engineer?”
When I became pregnant with my first child, my aunt told someone that I wasn’t fit to be a mother.
When I had my second child, I took time off from working outside the home. I knew I couldn’t juggle both with a husband whose own job commitments prevented him from sharing childcare 50/50.
When I had a third pregnancy, unplanned, I decided to keep the baby but edit a prochoice book with the personal stories of Christian women who had chosen to end a pregnancy. I wanted to persuade other evangelical Christians to support legal access to abortion.
It was not a good idea to start a baby and a book at the same time, but Abortion–My Choice, God’s Grace was published in 1994.
One thing I knew for sure as my third child arrived: I couldn’t stay home with three kids five years old and under. I went back to teaching and hired an older woman to take care of the baby while my husband and I were at work. Our oldest was in kindergarten, and our two-year-old was in preschool.
I managed to get better jobs and then finally to earn tenure at a Catholic women’s college in Los Angeles in 1998–but the next year I learned that my two oldest daughters were “cutting.”
Later that year the US Conference of Catholic Bishops decided to enforce restrictions on any professors of religion and theology at Catholic colleges and universities who did not toe the line on the Church’s teachings against birth control, against abortion, against women becoming priests, against priests marrying, etc.
At that point, I had to re-evaluate all my choices on how to live my faith and my feminism. To find out how I changed course, read my memoir, Off Track: Confessions of a Feminist Christian.
Photo above is Letha Dawson Scanzoni with me in 2019. Her 1974 book launched the evangelical feminist movement–All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to Women’s Liberation.
Memoir and Mountains 
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