Women, Let’s Not Bench Ourselves

Climate crisis, war, loneliness and despair, all the interlocking systems of oppression that dehumanize us all—these are no easy tides to shift. In the face of these challenges, we desperately need the unhindered contributions of every human being of goodwill. 

But there’s a problem. For those on the underside of all those interlocking systems—I’m speaking mostly to women here, since that’s my experience, but I imagine much of this is also true for people of color, queer folks, and others—we face difficulties as soon as we try to contribute.

It’s not right. It’s not right for us, and it’s not right for anyone. The whole community suffers when women are held back from using every bit of our ingenuity, creativity, skill, and courage toward trying to heal a very broken world. 

So this is what I’m here to say: Contributing our gifts fully to the causes we are most passionate about will not be easy. But let’s not bench ourselves. 

Feeling Deflated

I think of these hard-earned reflections from Jen Hatmaker, who has certainly lived through her fair share of all of this. In Fierce, Free, and Full of Fire, Hatmaker writes:

“When the command aimed at women is ‘be less,’ the tactics include insulting, condescending, bullying, and manipulating. The goal is to make you shrink, so the maneuver will attempt to make you feel small. Your competence will be challenged, your authority dismissed, your experience questioned, your voice silenced. The endgame is your feeling deflated enough to bench yourself” (p. 29).

I feel this. All of it. 

I felt it when I worked in college ministry at a conservative evangelical church in my twenties. 

I still feel it today—the mansplaining, the being-talked-over, the condescending:

• The well-meaning male colleague who takes my question in a meeting to mean I don’t understand the terms he used, when really I’m trying to help him clarify to the group something he left unclear.
• The male pastor-types who ask questions from an evangelical framework that doesn’t make sense to me anymore, and when it takes me a second for me to do some religious code-switching and try to answer in a way they’d understand, they get impatient or assume I don’t have an answer. (When really I have ten different answers I’m choosing between because I want to meet them where they’re at.)
• The consistent misattribution of my good ideas to others, often men. As if what I say is not heard unless it’s misremembered as being said by a man. 

I don’t really move in spaces where any of this is intentional. (One might say these are some of the forms Nice Churchy Patriarchy takes.) It can be a little subtle. But it is still there. And it is still deflating.

The Limitations of “Leaning In”

I’m not the first woman—and surely won’t be the last—to question a “lean in” mindset that tells women they can climb the corporate ladder and succeed in leadership positions if only they are ambitious enough, assertive enough, nice enough, non-threatening enough, something enough. Or, really everything enough. But also not too much.

(At least that’s my impression. To be fair to Sheryl Sandberg, I haven’t actually read her book Lean In.)

I have read Kyla Schuller’s book The Trouble With White Women, though. And Schuller’s critique of “lean in” feminism was striking to me. She contrasts Sheryl Sandberg’s approach to feminism with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s. Ultimately, for Schuller:

“As the atrocities of neoliberalism become more and more apparent in the hundreds of thousands left to die in the COVID pandemic while billionaires have doubled their wealth; in the rising seas, raging wildfires, and newly incessant hurricanes plaguing our shores; and in the state’s reliance on mass incarceration and police brutality to protect private property, more and more people look instead to a feminism that tries to halt capitalism’s death march rather than one that empowers careerwomen to claim it for themselves”  (p. 239).

That sounds about right to me. I hope so, anyway—I hope that this is what more and more of us are looking for. Something more holistic. Something more attentive to the realities of crisis in our world.

Without these broader perspectives, there’s something funky—or at least dreadfully incomplete—about telling women to “lean in.” I appreciate the insights of Schuller and others who call on women to question, at a very fundamental level, what exactly we are leaning in to. 

How can we change the systems that need to be changed, and not just settle for the ability to rise within their ranks?

Let’s Not Bench Ourselves

I don’t know that women leaning in is going to solve all our world’s problems. (Or even if it will solve all of women’s problems. After all, deprogramming from patriarchy is not that easy.)

But I’m with Jen Hatmaker on this: Women, let’s not bench ourselves.

As Hatmaker goes on to write: “You are not required to justify your space nor hustle for approval. If someone wants you to be smaller, that is their problem, not yours” (p. 29).

I don’t really want to see more and more (usually white) women rising in the ranks of corporations that are only out for their own short-term profit and not for the common good of humanity and Earth as a whole. 

I don’t want to see more and more women lean in uncritically. 

But I also don’t want to see women bench ourselves. I don’t want to see women make ourselves smaller to make patriarchally-minded men more comfortable.

The world needs all our gifts. Not necessarily exercised from the executive suite of companies that refuse to change their death-dealing ways. But exercised in whatever forms we choose to exercise them for the good of our communities. 

We can expect resistance. We expect all the tactics Hatmaker writes about—and then some. 

And we can join together and keep going. We can keep building the kind of “feminism that tries to halt capitalism’s death march,” as Schuller puts it. We can refuse to bench ourselves.

After all—and I firmly believe this, whatever your church might say—God has not benched us.