The author reflects on her own experience as a congregational minister and in national and international positions of leadership, alongside working in Feminist Theology and the development of inclusive language in worship. As a minister and leader, she has found herself cast in a male role, and thus prevented from modeling women’s leadership in a way that might empower other women.

Hope is not passive or quietist. Despair is without energy, but hope springs out of, and gives power to life. Countless campaigners have found that hope involves struggle. Feminism shares the struggle with other liberation movements, but I want to argue that it has very specific characteristics as well. The struggle for liberation is political and sometimes physical; it is also ideological – a struggle with and for ideas, vision. All these, feminism shares with other great movements. But the struggle (...) for women to be free is existential in a way that almost no other can be. And it takes place in a broken context, constantly in need of reinventing itself. I will draw on a number of liberation movements, and also on the long history of women’s struggle to be free and powerful. (shrink)