Women, work, and Reinhold Niebuhr: A feminist understanding of sin

Women, Work, and Reinhold Niebuhr is a constructive mediation between Reinhold Niebuhr's emphasis on the sin of pride and his feminist critics' response that women's sin is not pride, but rather the sin of hiding. The feminist critique of Reinhold Niebuhr's hamartiology extends from the contemporary period back to 1960, when Valerie Saiving first argued that Niebuhr had misidentified the male sin of pride as the fundamental human sin. While recognizing the value of the feminist emphasis on the sin of hiding, the first part of this work proposes that Niebuhr's insistence on the primacy of the sin of pride has theological merit, and offers a constructive reading of Niebuhr.;I suggest that the term pride has a dual meaning in Niebuhr's doctrine of sin. First, as a synonym for unbelief, pride is at the root of all human sin since all sin in Niebuhr's anthropology involves a rejection of the divine security for an idolatry of the self or the other. Second, as a synonym for hubris, Niebuhr uses the term pride to speak specifically about the sin of denying one's finitude. Pride can therefore be both a designation for all human sin in general and a description of a particular type of human sin. Sin for women, as well as for men, involves a decision to follow one's own desires rather than God's will.;The second part of this dissertation uses this constructive reading of Niebuhr to gain insights into the tendency of women with children to give up paid labor to be fulltime caregivers. Here I examine three feminist responses to this trend: the structuralist response which blames the system for women's lack of employment, the choice feminist response which insists that feminism must support women's choices to be stay-at-home mothers, and the response of Linda Hirshman who chides women for making bad choices with regard to work and family. The final chapter of this work includes an analysis of each response in light of Niebuhr's anthropology and my own constructive reading of his doctrine of sin.