In the past century, our society has made remarkable progress in achieving political and economic equality between men and women. Yet equality is not sameness. Too often the advances of women have come at the cost of suppressing, ignoring, and rejecting their unique capacities and challenges. How can we address the needs of women in modern society in a way that acknowledges sexual difference? What does our embodied sexual difference tell us about our moral duties, identity, and purpose? How do we understand and celebrate sexual difference without locking women into prescribed gender roles?

In working through these questions, seminar participants read the work of first- and second-wave feminists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Betty Friedan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, along with theological approaches to sexual difference. The seminar concluded with a discussion of the ways in which the women’s movement has left men with new questions about who they are and what they are called to contribute.