What Feminism Owes to the Reformation

“Genius of a sort must have existed among [women],” writes Woolf, “but it certainly never got onto paper.” Perhaps “genius” here may be understood as a gift of perception and expression potentially available to all people—not only women but also people of color and people living in poverty—which sometimes emerges as extraordinary in a few. In the many and the few, this gift has been silenced: by the material conditions of poverty (necessitating manual and other kinds of labor other than writing) and by prejudice of the kind that assumes women and other marginalized people can have nothing to say of value to the world—and the ages. I thought about this when, while working as a missionary in Malawi, I asked my class of Malawian seminary students to write personal essays. How many pilgrims never get to write of their progress? How many stories like these will never be told?