• a lesbian couple rises together on Mother's Day. The presiding minister has invited all mothers to stand and be recognized;
  

• a woman struggles throughout the liturgy with her active child. At the end of the service the woman is exhausted. She remembers little of the readings and prayers; she always dreads the sermon since she has to work especially hard to keep her child still;
  

• a group gathers on the feast day of Saint Hildegard of Bingen (who was never canonized and therefore does not appear in the liturgical calendar). The liturgy has been written by one of the women in the group.

These are just some of the innumerable ways in which women's lives shape, conflict with, enrich, disturb, own, contest, and claim space in the liturgy. Wherever liturgy and women's lives become one, a distinct ecclesial practice is born: women labor to make meaning with what we encounter as liturgy, in the crucible of our own lives. For most women, this labor is not self-reflexive, and for the majority of us, the labor we engage in remains invisible beyond the confines of our own lives. What work, then, does an insistence on gender do for our thinking about the church and its liturgy? At its most basic, such insistence on gender as a category of analysis renders visible women as liturgical subjects and agents. But such an insistence on the importance of gender in liturgical practice also provides a set of critical lenses—critical of interpretive strategies that are oblivious to gender as a fundamental marker of life and of liturgy. Such obliviousness comes to be marked as deeply problematic because these interpretive strategies, first, present seemingly ungendered facts; second, thereby render obscure a fundamental shaper of historical and contemporary practices; and third, therefore offer few guidelines for a world in which gender constructions are in crisis.

One concrete example of the work that gender-attentiveness does relates to the material realities of women's lives. These material realities are part of the cultural fabric in which the contemporary church finds itself and in which it celebrates liturgy. One particular aspect of this cultural fabric is the labor of being woman.

The Labor of Being Woman

The labor of being woman is a complex one and has not necessarily become any easier in a time when the traditional narrative of what it means to be woman has broken off. This traditional narrative of woman was shaped, for one, by the sexual division of labor. This division of labor marked women's work as that of reproduction—including the labor of "labor" (i. e., birthing) and of the nurture and care of children—and of household labor, such as food production. In this division of labor, the domestic sphere came to be coded as peculiarly feminine. This fundamental division of labor obviously did not leave liturgical life untouched. Liturgy was deeply marked by its own gendered divisions of labor, not only in public liturgical leadership, but also in liturgical place arrangements, in church architecture, in wide-ranging liturgical taboos related to women's bodily and reproductive labor, in constraints on women's voices, in gender-specific life-cycle rites, in the development of a domestic religious sphere and forms of popular religiosity peculiarly linked with women, and in the coding of women's ritual practices as magic and witchcraft.

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