Full Ebook of The Routledge Handbook of Religion Gender and Society 1St Edition Caroline Starkey Editor Online PDF All Chapter

The Routledge Handbook of Religion
Gender and Society 1st Edition Caroline

Starkey (Editor)
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-routledge-handbook-of-religion-gender-and-societ
y-1st-edition-caroline-starkey-editor/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
The The Routledge Handbook of Religion Medicine and

Health Routledge Handbooks in Religion 1st Edition
Dorothea Lüddeckens
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-the-routledge-handbook-of-
religion-medicine-and-health-routledge-handbooks-in-religion-1st-
edition-dorothea-luddeckens/
Routledge Handbook of Religion and Politics 3rd Edition

Jeffrey Haynes
https://ebookmeta.com/product/routledge-handbook-of-religion-and-
politics-3rd-edition-jeffrey-haynes/
The Routledge Handbook of Property, Law and Society 1st

Edition Nicole Graham
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-routledge-handbook-of-property-
law-and-society-1st-edition-nicole-graham/
The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to

Religion 1st Edition Yair Lior
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-routledge-handbook-of-
evolutionary-approaches-to-religion-1st-edition-yair-lior/
The Routledge Handbook of Geospatial Technologies and
Society 1st Edition Alexander J. Kent
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-routledge-handbook-of-
geospatial-technologies-and-society-1st-edition-alexander-j-kent/
Epistolary Narratives of Love Gender and Agonistic

Politics An Arendtian Approach Routledge Research in
Gender and Society 1st Edition Maria Tamboukou
https://ebookmeta.com/product/epistolary-narratives-of-love-
gender-and-agonistic-politics-an-arendtian-approach-routledge-
research-in-gender-and-society-1st-edition-maria-tamboukou/
Gender and the Law 1st Edition Judith Bourne Caroline

Derry
https://ebookmeta.com/product/gender-and-the-law-1st-edition-
judith-bourne-caroline-derry/
The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study

of Religion 2nd Edition Steven Engler
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-routledge-handbook-of-research-
methods-in-the-study-of-religion-2nd-edition-steven-engler/
Routledge Handbook of Russian Politics and Society,

Second Edition Graeme Gill (Editor)
https://ebookmeta.com/product/routledge-handbook-of-russian-
politics-and-society-second-edition-graeme-gill-editor/
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF
RELIGION, GENDER AND SOCIETY
In an era which many now recognise as ‘post-secular’, the role that religions play in shaping
gender identities and relationships has been awarded a renewed status in the study of societies and
social change. In both the Global South and the Global North, in the 21st century, religiosity
is of continuing significance, not only in people’s private lives and in the family, but also in the
public sphere and with respect to political and legal systems. The Routledge Handbook of Religion,
Gender and Society is an outstanding reference source to these key topics, problems and debates in
this exciting subject area. Comprising over 40 chapters by a team of international contributors,
the Handbook is divided into three parts:
• Critical debates for religions, gender and society: theories, concepts and methodologies
• Issues and themes in religions, gender and society
• Contexts and locations
Within these sections, central issues, debates and problems are examined, including activism,
gender analysis, intersectionality and feminism, oppression and liberation, equality, bodies and
embodiment, space and place, leadership and authority, diaspora and migration, marriage and
the family, generation and aging, health and reproduction, education, violence and conflict,
ecology and climate change, and the role of social media.
The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Gender and Society is essential reading for students and
researchers in religious studies and gender studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for
those in related fields, such as cultural studies, area studies, politics, sociology, anthropology and
history.
Caroline Starkey is Associate Professor of Religion and Society, School of Philosophy,

Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds, UK.
Emma Tomalin is Professor of Religion and Public Life, School of Philosophy, Religion and
the History of Science, University of Leeds, UK.
ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOKS IN RELIGION
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE

Edited by Candi K. Cann
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION AND ANIMAL ETHICS

Edited by Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF MORMONISM AND GENDER

Edited by Amy Hoyt and Taylor G. Petry
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF ISLAM AND GENDER

Edited by Justine Howe
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION AND JOURNALISM

Edited by Kerstin Radde-Antweiler and Xenia Zeiler
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION AND CITIES

Edited by Katie Day and Elise M. Edwards
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF HINDU-CHRISTIAN RELATIONS

Edited by Chad M. Bauman and Michelle Voss Roberts
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION, MEDICINE AND HEALTH

Edited by Dorothea Lüddeckens, Philipp Hetmanczyk, Pamela E. Klassen and Justin B. Stein
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION, MASS ATROCITY, AND GENOCIDE

Edited by Sara E. Brown and Stephen D. Smith
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION, GENDER AND SOCIETY

Edited by Caroline Starkey and Emma Tomalin
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-

Handbooks-in-Religion/book-series/RHR
THE ROUTLEDGE
HANDBOOK OF RELIGION,
GENDER AND SOCIETY
Edited by Caroline Starkey and Emma Tomalin

Cover image: Getty images
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Caroline Starkey and Emma
Tomalin; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Caroline Starkey and Emma Tomalin to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-60190-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-16140-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-46695-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429466953
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
List of contributors ix
1 Introduction: the continuing relevance of religion for understanding

gender roles, identities and relationships in society 1
Emma Tomalin and Caroline Starkey
PART 1
Critical debates for religions, gender and society: theories, concepts
and methodologies 17
2 Gender in religion, religion in society: the agency and identity

of Christian women 19
Esther McIntosh
3 The feminism conundrum: a contested term for the study of religion

and gender 37
Chia Longman
4 Oppression or liberation? Moving beyond binaries in religion and

gender studies 52
Line Nyhagen
5 Gender, religion, and postcolonialism: the Birhen sa Balintawak and

masculinities in the Philippines 67
Peter-Ben Smit
6 Buddhist nuns and civil activism in transitional Myanmar 88

Sneha Roy
v
Contents
7 Reclaiming public and digital spaces: the conundrum of acceptance

for the feminist movement in Pakistan 103
Sehrish Mushtaq and Fawad Baig
8 Social media and online environments: Muslim and Mormon

bloggers in the United States of America 119
Rosemary Hancock
9 Space, boundaries and borders in the study of religion, gender and society 136
Orlando Woods
10 Bodies and embodiment: the somatic turn in the study of religion

and gender 149
Mariecke van den Berg
11 Narrative approaches to religion and gender: a biographic study with

Christian young men 161
Joshua M. Heyes
12 When my work is found wanting: power, intersectionality,

postcolonialism, and the reflexive feminist researcher 175
Dawn Llewellyn
PART 2
Issues and themes in religions, gender and society 191
13 Butch lesbians, femme queens and promiscuous clergy: queering the

body politics of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa 193
Megan Robertson
14 Gender variance and the Abrahamic faiths 208

Susannah Cornwall
15 Migration and law in the Middle East and North Africa 222
Nadia Sonneveld
16 Religion and intimate life: marriage, family, sexuality 234

Sarah-Jane Page
17 Age, gender and de-churchisation 249

Abby Day
18 Gender, religion and childhood: towards a new research agenda 261

Rachael Shillitoe and Céline Benoit
vi
Contents
19 Mothers, bodhisattvas and women of tomorrow: religiously connoted

gender roles in a Buddhist vocational school in Japan 275
Aura Di Febo
20 Articulating the neoliberal motherhood discourse: visions of gender

in Japanese new religions 289
Paola Cavaliere
21 Women, religion and the state: a gendered analysis of the Catholic

Church, the state and the rise of Evangelical Protestantism on
women’s roles and women’s rights in Brazil 307
Kim Beecheno
22 Religion, gender justice, violence, and peace 321

Atalia Omer
23 Religion and sexual violence 339

Johanna Stiebert
24 Religion, gender and international development: searching for game

changers in the midst of polarization 351
Brenda Bartelink
25 A decological way to dialogue: rethinking ecofeminism

and religion 365
Elaine Nogueira-Godsey
PART 3
Contexts and locations 385
26 Religion and gender in Europe: thinking through politico-social and

theoretical challenges 387
Nella van den Brandt
27 Religion and masculinities in Europe 402

Stephen Hunt
28 The legacy of colonialism and the regulation of gender in

North America 415
Danielle Marie Dempsey
29 Troubling the demonic: anti-Blackness, heterosexual Black

masculinity, and the study of religion in North America 428
Ronald Neal
vii
Contents
30 Religion and gender dynamics in Latin American societies 442

Ana Lourdes Suárez
31 Latin America—religion, gender, masculinities and sexual diversity 457

André S. Musskopf
32 Women, religion and social inequality in India: intersectionality,

nationalism and religious change 470
Emma Tomalin
33 Hindu muscular nationalism: politicized Hinduism and manhood

in India 486
Sikata Banerjee
34 ‘A monster had eaten me whole’: religiously inspired charitable

organisations (RICOs) as ‘retreat’ for women in contemporary
urban China 499
Hollie Gowan
35 Masculinities and religion in Southeast Asia 514

Teguh Wijaya Mulya and Joseph N. Goh
36 Reform, continuities and conservatism in the Middle East and

North Africa 526
An Van Raemdonck
37 Toward a comprehensive approach to understanding the construction

of Islamic masculinities in the Middle East and North Africa 539
Anwar Mhajne
38 Exploring tensions: gender and religion in Sub-Saharan Africa 551

Elisabet le Roux and Nadine Bowers Du Toit
39 Religions and masculinities in Africa: power, politics, performance 566

Benjamin Kirby and Adriaan van Klinken
40 Women and religion in Oceania 576

Anna Halafoff and Kathleen McPhillips
41 Masculinity, religion, rugby and society in Oceania 593

Joshua Roose
Index611
viii
CONTRIBUTORS
Fawad Baig
University of Central Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan
Fawad Baig is Associate Professor at Faculty of Media and Communication Studies, University
of Central Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. Prior to this, he has been working as Producer Programmes
at Pakistan Television (PTV), Lahore centre, for 14 years. He holds a PhD in media and com-
munication from Technische Universität Dresden (TUD), Germany. He also earned a PhD in
computer science from University of Education, Lahore, Pakistan. His research interests include
comparative media systems, political parallelism, political communication and e-learning.
Sikata Banerjee
University of Victoria, Canada
Sikata Banerjee is Professor of Gender Studies. She is the author of several articles as well as
monographs including Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India (2005);
Muscular Nationalism: Gender, Violence, and Empire in Ireland (2012); and Globalizing Muscular
Nationalism: Gender, Nation and Popular Film in India (2016).
Brenda Bartelink
University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Brenda Bartelink is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies. She
is an ethnographer and qualitative researcher on the intersections of religion, secularity, gen-
der, sexuality and health. In various projects she has researched these themes in the context of
cultural encounters between religious and secular actors, with a focus on actors in Sub-Saharan
Africa and Europe. Her empirical work informs reflections on how cultural encounters are
shaped by and given meaning in the context of (inter)national discourses on development,
migration, diversity and inclusion.
Kim Beecheno
Centre for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society, Dept of Theology, Uppsala
University, Sweden
Kim Beecheno is currently a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at Uppsala University, with
a project examining intersections of race/racism, gender, class and identity in Brazilian
ix
Contributors
neo-Pentecostal social media. She holds a PhD in sociology of religion from King’s College
London, and her research areas of interest include the growth of Pentecostalism in Latin Amer-
ica, religion and welfare, digital religion, critical race studies/whiteness, gender and religion.
Céline Benoit
Aston University, UK
Céline Benoit is Senior Teaching Fellow at Aston University. She is currently working on
projects on Religious Education and Worldviews, seeking to foreground pupils’ and teachers’
voices. Her research interests include the construction of childhood, children’s perspectives on
religion/non-religion, early childhood and primary education, and the sociologies of child-
hood, education and religion.
Nadine Bowers Du Toit

Faculty of Theology, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Nadine Bowers Du Toit is an Associate Professor in ‘Theology and Development’ /Diaconia (Dept.
Practical Theology & Missiology) at the Faculty of Theology, University of Stellenbosch. The
majority of her research has focused on the intersection between religion, poverty and inequal-
ity with a special focus on the role of local congregations and Faith Based Organisations (FBO’s)
in addressing these pressing concerns within the South African context. She is currently the vice
president of the International Academy of Practical Theology and serves on the board of two Non-
Profit Organisations and as the Director of the Unit for Religion and Development Research.
Paola Cavaliere
Osaka University, Japan
Paola Cavaliere is Associate Professor of Japanese Studies at Osaka University, Graduate School
of Human Sciences. She specialises in gender, religion and disaster studies with Japan as a case
study. She investigates disaster-related gender and religious dimensions of vulnerability and resil-
ience through an analysis of women’s practices in contemporary faith-based volunteer groups
contributing to post-disaster activities in Japan.
Susannah Cornwall
University of Exeter, UK
Susannah Cornwall is Associate Professor of Constructive Theologies and Director of EXCEPT
(Exeter Centre for Ethics and Practical Theology). Her research focuses on gender, sex and
sexuality and religion. Her most recent book project is a constructive Christian theology of
gender diversity.
Abby Day
Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Abby Day is Professor in Race, Faith and Culture in the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths,
University of London, with a background in anthropology, sociology and publishing. Her teach-
ing, research, writing and supervisions cover religion, gender, media, generations and critical
criminology. She contributes regularly to media discussions on politics, gender and equality.
Danielle Marie Dempsey

University of California, Riverside, USA
Danielle Marie Dempsey holds a PhD in religious studies from the University of Califor-
nia, Riverside, where she currently works as a lecturer. Her research focuses on queer and
x
Contributors
transgender studies and postcolonial critique, especially within American religious histories and
with attention to power structures such as institutional and colonial Christianities.
Aura Di Febo
The University of Manchester, UK
Aura Di Febo completed a PhD in Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester in 2019.
Her thesis focused on religiously inspired social care in contemporary Japan. She is currently an
early career fellow within the UKRI project ‘Religion and Minority: Lived Religion, Migra-
tion and Marginalities in Secular Societies’, a collaborative initiative of the University of Man-
chester and Tōyō University (Tokyo).
Joseph N. Goh
School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia, Malaysia
Joseph N. Goh is Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies. He holds a PhD in gender, sexuality and
theology and is the author of numerous publications, including Doing Church at the Amplify
Open and Affirming Conferences (2021), Becoming a Malaysian Trans Man (2020), and Living Out
Sexuality and Faith (2018).
Hollie Gowan
University of Leeds, UK
Hollie Gowan (PhD) is a teaching fellow in religions and global development at the School of
Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, University of Leeds. Her interests centre on reli-
gion, gender and development with a focus on the contemporary Chinese context.
Anna Halafoff
Deakin University, Australia
Anna Halafoff is Associate Professor in Sociology of Religion in the School of Humanities and
Social Sciences at Deakin University, Australia. She is also a member of the Alfred Deakin Institute’s
Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (CRIS) Consortium, and AVERT (Addressing Violent
Extremism and Radicalisation to Terrorism) Research Network. Anna is a Chief Investigator on
two Australian Research Council Discovery Projects on the Worldviews of Generation Z Austral-
ians and on Religious Diversity in Australia. Her research interests include interreligious relations,
religion and education, preventing violent extremism, contemporary spirituality, gender and Bud-
dhism, and Buddhism in Australia. She is the author of The Multifaith Movement: Global Risks and
Cosmopolitan Solutions, and co-author (with Andrew Singleton, Mary Lou Rasmussen, and Gary
Bouma) of Freedoms, Faiths and Futures: Teenage Australians on Religion, Sexuality and Diversity.
Rosemary Hancock
University of Notre Dame, Australia
Rosemary Hancock is a Sociologist of Religion at the University of Notre Dame Australia and
is the co-convenor of the Religion and Global Ethics focus area in the University’s Institute for
Ethics and Society. She has an interest in the intersection of religion with politics, grassroots
activism and civic engagement; and religion and gender online.
Joshua M. Heyes
Canterbury Christ Church University, UK
Joshua M. Heyes holds a PhD in education from the University of Birmingham. His published
research covers a range of issues around sexuality education including gender, religion and
xi
Contributors
youth. He is currently a research fellow on the Epistemic Insight Initiative based at Canterbury
Christ Church University.
Stephen Hunt
University of the West of England, UK
Stephen Hunt is Associate Professor in the Sociology of Religion. His principal academic
interests are largely Contemporary Christianity, New Religious Movements, and Religion and
Sexuality/Gender. His many publications reflect these concerns with recent works including
the edited volumes Christianity, Handbook of Contemporary Christianity: Movements; Institutions
and Allegiance; and Handbook of Mega Churches (Brill publishers). He continues his scholarly
pursuits in retirement.
Benjamin Kirby
Benjamin Kirby is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds.
His research explores questions of religious politics and urban mutuality from the vantage point
of African cities. He is especially interested in religious infrastructure as a site for studying global
entanglements.
Adriaan van Klinken

Adriaan van Klinken is Professor of Religion and African Studies at the University of Leeds,
and Extraordinary Professor in the Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice,
University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His research focuses on Christianity, gender
and sexuality in contemporary Africa. His books include Transforming Masculinities in African
Christianity: Gender Controversies in Times of AIDS (2013) and Kenyan, Christian, Queer: Religion,
LGBT Activism and Arts of Resistance in Africa (2019).
Elisabet le Roux
Unit for Religion and Development Research, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Elisabet le Roux is Research Director of the Unit for Religion and Development Research at
Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Over the past 12 years she has secured funding and deliv-
ered a range of evaluation and formative research projects in 22 countries across four continents,
with a particular focus on gender equality, gender-based violence and women’s participation
and with a critical lens on the roles of religion and culture.
Dawn Llewellyn
University of Chester, UK
Dawn Llewellyn is based in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the Uni-
versity of Chester, UK. Her work focuses on religion and gender, particularly in contem-
porary Christianity. She is the author of Reading, Feminism, and Spirituality: Troubling the
Waves (Palgrave, 2015), and she has co-edited Religion, Equalities and Inequalities (with Sonya
Sharma, 2016) and Reading Spiritualities (with Deborah Sawyer, Ashgate, 2008). She is the
series editor (with Sian Hawthorne and Sonya Sharma) of Bloomsbury’s series in Religion,
Gender, and Sexuality and together they are co-editing the Bloomsbury Handbook in Religion,
Gender, and Sexuality.
xii
Contributors
Chia Longman
Ghent University, Belgium
Chia Longman is Associate Professor in Gender Studies and Anthropology at Ghent University
where she directs the Centre for Research on Culture and Gender and MA in Gender and
Diversity. Her research interests include women’s contemporary religious practices in Western
Europe, ranging from orthodox religions to new spiritual and well-being culture.
Esther McIntosh
University of York St. John, UK
Esther McIntosh is an Associate Head in the School of Humanities. Her research spans feminist
theology, ethics and philosophy of religion. She is author of John Macmurray’s Religious Philoso-
phy: What It Means to Be a Person (2011); and co-author, with Sharon Jagger, of the report Sup-
porting Trans and Non-Binary Staff and Students (2021).
Kathleen McPhillips
University of Newcastle, Australia
Kathleen McPhillips is a sociologist of religion and gender with expertise in the field of insti-
tutional child sexual abuse in religious organisations. She leads the Interdisciplinary Trauma
Research Network at the University of Newcastle and has published extensively in this area.
Anwar Mhajne
Stonehill College, USA
Anwar Mhajne is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stonehill College. Her research
focuses on gender, religion, social movements and Middle Eastern politics. Her work has been
featured in The International Feminist Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Religion and
Politics, Foreign Policy, The Conversation, Times of Israel and Haaretz, among others.
Teguh Wijaya Mulya

University of Surabaya, Indonesia
Teguh Wijaya Mulya is a lecturer in the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Surabaya,
Indonesia. He holds a PhD in education from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He
specialises in research in the areas of sexuality, gender, religion, youth and education. His work
is inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, post-structuralist feminism and discourse theories.
Sehrish Mushtaq
Lahore College for Women University, Lahore, Pakistan
Sehrish Mushtaq is Lecturer at the Department of Mass Communication in Lahore College for
Women University, Pakistan. Prior to this, she worked as an independent filmmaker and Pro-
ducer Programmes in Pakistan Television (PTV), Lahore centre. She holds a PhD in Media and
Communication from Technische Universität Dresden (TUD), Germany. Her research interests
include conflict reporting, peace journalism, digital technologies and media systems.
André S. Musskopf
Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora—Department of Religious Studies, Brazil
André S. Musskopf holds a bachelor’s (2001), a master’s (2004) and a doctorate (2008) degree
in systematic theology from Escola Superior de Teologia/Faculdades EST. He is a lecturer
xiii
Contributors
in academic, religious, grassroots and social movements’ events in Brazil and internation-
ally and has published several books and articles. Full CV available at http://lattes.cnpq.
br/0540785104686451.
Ronald Neal
Wake Forest University, USA
Ronald Neal is Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Religions at Wake Forest
University. He is a theorist of religion and culture whose primary area of teaching and research is
African American religious studies. He also teaches and does research in other areas including world
religions, religion and popular culture, religion and political culture, and gender studies in religion.
Elaine Nogueira-Godsey
Methodist Theological School in Ohio, USA
Elaine Nogueira-Godsey is an assistant professor of theology, ecology and race at the Methodist The-
ological School in Ohio, U.S.A. Her research focuses on ecological ethics and decolonial methods
of research and teaching in the study of religion and ecofeminist theology. Her publications include
‘Towards a Decological Praxis’ and ‘Tangible Actions Toward Solidarity: An Ecofeminist Analysis of
Women’s Participation in Food Justice’. She is co-chair of the Women’s Caucus AAR/SBL.
Line Nyhagen
Loughborough University, UK
Dr Line Nyhagen is Reader in Sociology at Loughborough University, United Kingdom. Her
research focuses on religion (Christianity and Islam), gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship and
feminism. She is the author (with B. Halsaa) of Religion, Gender and Citizenship: Women of Faith,
Gender Equality and Feminism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Atalia Omer
University of Notre Dame, USA
Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for
International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of
Notre Dame in the United States. She is also a senior fellow at the Religion, Conflict, and
Peace Initiative at Harvard University’s Religion and Public Life program. She earned her PhD
in religion, ethics and politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard
University. Her research focuses on religion, violence, and peacebuilding as well as theories and
methods in the study of religion. She was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017
to complete a manuscript titled We Cannot Eat Peace: Twitter Prophets & The Harmony Business.
Among other publications, she is the author of When Peace Is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace
Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and
Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press,
2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding
(Oxford University Press, 2015).
Sarah-Jane Page
Aston University, UK
Sarah-Jane Page is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Aston University. She focuses on how religion
intersects with gender and sexuality. She co-authored Religion and Sexualities (Routledge; 2020,
with Heather Shipley) and Religious and Sexual Identities (Ashgate; 2013, with Andrew Yip).
xiv
Contributors
Megan Robertson
Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, University of the Western Cape, South
Africa
Megan Robertson (PhD) is a postdoctoral fellow under the auspices of the Desmond Tutu
SARChI Chair in Religion and Social Justice (Grant No. 118854). She is also an associate
lecturer in the Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice at the University of the
Western Cape.
Joshua Roose
Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University, Australia
Joshua Roose is a political sociologist and Senior Research Fellow in Politics and Religion at
the Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University, Melbourne. His research
focuses on the intersection of masculinities and political and religious violent extremism as
well as law, politics and religion. He is currently a chief investigator on an Australian Research
Council funded study The Far Right: Intellectuals, Masculinity and Citizenship (2021–2023) and
sits on the editorial board of the journal of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism
(ICCT)—the Hague.
Sneha Roy
University of Wales Trinity Saint David (UWTSD), UK
Sneha Roy is pursuing her PhD in social anthropology at UWTSD, specialising in women’s
participation in political activism, religious leadership, proscribed violence and interreli-
gious dialogue. She is a former Commonwealth scholar, a fellow of KAICIID International
Dialogue Centre, a fellow of Mindanao Peacebuilding Institute and a youth advocate with
UNESCO.
Rachael Shillitoe
University of Birmingham, UK
Rachael Shillitoe is a research fellow at the University of Birmingham, working on a project
exploring public perceptions of the relationship between science and religion. Her research is
primarily in the sociologies of religion and childhood and education studies.
Peter-Ben Smit
Faculty of Religion and Theology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Faculty of Humanities,
Utrecht University; Faculty of Theology, Universit of Pretoria, The Netherlands
Peter-Ben Smit holds doctoral degrees in New Testament studies (University of Bern) and Anglican
studies (General Theological Seminary, New York), as well as the degree of habilitation in church
history and the history of Old Catholicism (University of Bern), researching gender, especially
masculinities, in early Christianities and the reception of such texts, as well as the religious history
of the Philippines. His publications include titles such as Old Catholic and Philippine Ecclesiologies
in History (Brill, 2011) and Masculinity and the Bible—Survey, Models, and Perspectives (Brill, 2017).
Nadia Sonneveld
Leiden University, the Netherlands
Nadia Sonneveld is Associate Professor at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance
and Society. In her work, she focuses on gender, law and migration in the Middle East and North
Africa, where she has done extensive socio-legal fieldwork. Her last work is ‘Male and Female
xv
Contributors
Judges Dealing with Minor Marriages in Morocco: Towards a Relational Understanding of

Family Law,’ https://brill.com/view/journals/haww/18/2-3/article-p162_3.xml?language=en.
Caroline Starkey
Caroline Starkey is Associate Professor of Religion and Society in the School of Philosophy,
Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research focuses on
religion in contemporary Britain, particularly Buddhism, and her interests include gender,
ordination, conversion, and materiality (including religious dress). With Emma Tomalin, she
conducted the first national survey of Buddhist and Jain buildings in England (funded by His-
toric England) and her current research focuses on space, place and minority religions in Brit-
ain. Her monograph, Women in British Buddhism: Commitment, Connection and Community, was
published by Routledge in 2020.
Johanna Stiebert
Johanna Stiebert is a German-New Zealander and Professor of Hebrew Bible. Her primary
specialism lies in the intersection of the Hebrew Bible with ideological- and gender-critical
approaches, as well as with activism. She co-directs the Shiloh Project, which explores rape
culture, religion and the Bible.
Ana Lourdes Suárez

Catholic University of Argentina, Argentina
Ana Lourdes Suárez holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, San Diego, and
a PhD in anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires. She teaches research methods and
social theory in undergraduate and graduate programs at UCA, where she also coordinates the
interdisciplinary program Living Conditions and Religion. Her last book is Religiosas en América
Latina: memorias y contextos.
Emma Tomalin
Emma Tomalin is Professor of Religion and Public Life at the University of Leeds. She
has published widely on the topic of religion, gender and development, including the fol-
lowing books - (2011) Gender, Faith and Development. Rugby: Oxfam, Practical Action
Publishing; (2013) Religions and Development. London and New York: Routledge; and
(2015) The Handbook of Religions and Global Development. London and New York:
Routledge. She co-edits the Routledge Research in Religion and Development book
series, which now has 19 volumes. She is the co-chair of the Joint Learning Initiative on
Faith and Local Community ( JLI) learning hub on Anti-Human Trafficking and Modern
Slavery.
Mariecke van den Berg

Radboud University Nijmegen and VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Mariecke van den Berg is Endowed Professor of Feminism and Christianity at Radboud Uni-
versity in Nijmegen and an assistant professor of interreligious studies at VU University Amster-
dam. Her research interests include religion, gender and homosexuality, religious conversion
and feminist public theology.
xvi
Contributors
Nella van den Brandt

Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Nella van den Brandt holds a PhD in comparative sciences of cultures from Ghent Univer-
sity, Ghent, Belgium. From 2016 until 2021, she worked on a postdoctoral research part of
the NWO-funded project ‘Beyond Religion Versus Emancipation’: Gender and Sexuality in
Women’s Conversions to Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Contemporary Western Europe’ at
Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
An Van Raemdonck
Centre for Research on Culture and Gender, Ghent University, Belgium
An Van Raemdonck is a social anthropologist and Arabist with extensive fieldwork experience
in the Middle East and Belgium. She holds a PhD in comparative science of cultures (Ghent
University) and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies (KU Leuven University). Her research inter-
ests include contemporary Islam in the light of globalization, postcolonial theory, migration and
diversity in Western urban context, gender and religion/secularism.
Orlando Woods
Singapore Management University, Singapore
Orlando Woods is Associate Professor of Humanities at Singapore Management University.
His research focuses on religion, cities and digital cultures in/and Asia. He holds BA and PhD
degrees in geography from University College London and the National University of Singa-
pore, respectively.
xvii
1
INTRODUCTION
The continuing relevance of religion for
understanding gender roles, identities and
relationships in society
Introduction: setting the scene

The following 40 chapters in this volume are testimony to the enduring role of religion in shap-
ing attitudes and behaviours with respect to gender roles, identities and relationships in ways
that have an impact upon people’s ability to participate in the activities of their religious tradi-
tions fully and equally, as well as their opportunities and status within their local communities
and wider societies. The chapters are also testimony to the enduring role of religion in people’s
private lives, both freely chosen as well as imposed, in ways that help and hinder the navigation
of the challenges they face, as they variously comply with and resist the gendered impact that
religion has upon their self-identity and experience of the world. While religious traditions
and the contexts within which they are lived and experienced are diverse and multifaceted, the
chapters in this volume demonstrate common themes across traditions and regions in terms of
how they impact upon women and men. Religious traditions typically include adherence to
opinions and diktats about how men and women are expected to behave in their families and
society at large, about their sexual behaviour and orientation, as well as their family arrange-
ments, and is the case in the Global North as well as the Global South.1 Although this affects
both men and women, religions have a strong tendency to normalise and naturalise women’s
inferior status compared to men, as well as their dependency upon them, and to link this to
biological or sexual differences. While the profound impact that this has had and continues to
have upon the lives of women across the globe is well known, following more than 50 years of
women/gender and religion scholarship that have unpacked these dynamics, the importance of
considering religion and gender together is often not reflected in social and political analysis
that seeks to improve women’s lives. Furthermore, it is often considered in ways that reinscribe
sexist and colonialist views of women in the Global South as lacking agency and as victims of
religious traditions from which they need to be rescued. Even where religion is not such an
explicit social force, as Edwards shows with respect to her work on the image of the biblical
Eve in advertising, such biblical imagery reinforces deep-seated cultural attitudes towards the
dangerous allure of women’s sexuality and their role as sexual temptresses, where ‘instead of
offering women new or alternative ways of viewing themselves, advertising rehashes old images
and old stereotypes’ (2008: 81).
1 DOI: 10.4324/9780429466953-1
However, religions and their gendered impact is not only with respect to their apparent
androcentrism but, as McIntosh writes in Chapter 2, they also tend to ‘demarcate religious
practice and observance along binary and heteronormative lines’ (p. 20), therefore also excluding
and marginalising LGBTQI+ people. And indeed, progress along one axis of inclusivity does
not secure it in another. As Megan Robertson shows in Chapter 13, the Methodist Church
of South Africa proudly elected its first woman bishop in 2019, celebrating ‘it as a sign of . . .
progressive inclusivity’ (p. 193), yet has not extended this to queer people, both clergy and lay.
Finally, it is also important to look at the ways in which religion shapes gender identities, roles
and relationship for men, not only those who are LGBTQI+, but also those who are het-
erosexual. As Neal demonstrates in his powerful chapter, a combination of feminist responses
to religion since the 1960s, coupled with the colonial/racist attitudes within Christianity, has
played a large role in the demonisation of heterosexual black men in the USA, impacting upon
their portrayal in the media and the arts and their treatment by law enforcement and the state,
as well as the kinds of masculinity they perform (Chapter 29).
In order to accommodate this diversity of impacts that religion has upon peoples’ adoption
of masculine and feminine behaviour and expression of their sexuality, this volume engages a
conceptual lens that is shaped by considerations of gender analysis and intersectionality. A focus
on gender draws attention to the role that religion plays in contributing to the social construc-
tion of ideas about how men and women should behave in terms of their social roles and
sexuality, as well as the role that it can play in challenging such powerful social structures in
settings where religion is strong. A focus on intersectionality ensures that factors such as race/
ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender, age and religion are considered in combination, while, as
McIntosh writes,
exposing gendered oppression or exclusion that is legitimized by religion as well as

that which is occasioned by outward expressions of religious identity, while guarding
against the temptation towards othering, especially universalizing the other and repre-
senting the other as homogenous victim rather than particular agent.
(Chapter 2, p. 21)
Despite predictions from within sociological studies from the 19th century about the decline
and eventual disappearance of public, and eventually also private, religion as an inevitable mark
of modernity, religious institutions and actors continue to exert influence and pass judgement
upon the most personal and intimate ‘gendered’ aspects of people’s lives. As Vincett et al. write,
the fact that secularisation theory2 ‘has largely been propounded by white, male Judeo-
Christian (in culture and faith) academics’, typically writing about the European experience, has
meant that it has ‘tended to be blind to the experiences of other groups’ (2008: 3), including
women, LGBTQI+ people and those not located in Europe. During the first wave of feminism,
in the late 19th to early 20th century, while the founding fathers of sociology were predicting
the decline of religion, women were continuing to battle against the impact of a sexist church
that shaped their private and public lives in ways that went unnoticed and/or were deemed
unimportant by male social theorists. For instance, as the feminist sociologist Skeggs writes,
‘when women appear in one of the founding fathers, Durkheim’s texts, they do so as a disrup-
tion to the central categories of his analysis, and thus are made to disappear in order for him
to re-establish and maintain the internal consistency of his theory’ (2008: 2; Lehmann 1994).
Moreover, as Vincett et al. write, ‘existing measures continue to find that women’s religious
involvement exceeds men’s across different nations, religions and types of society’ suggesting a
certain type of male bias to secularization theory (2008: 5).
2
Introduction
Secularisation theory has also been criticised for its Eurocentrism, ignoring high levels of
religiosity in the USA, a case of ‘religious exceptionalism’ where church attendance remained
high despite ostensibly secularising forces (Tiryakian 1993). So, too, with evidence from much
of the Global South where religion has shown little sign of diminishing in both its private and its
public manifestations, despite the efforts of many postcolonial states to implement ‘secularism’ as
the preferred approach to governance. Even in Western Europe, which saw a steady decline in
church attendance during the 20th century and the lessening of the hold of religion on public
institutions, by the 1990s sociologists had noticed a ‘resurgence of religion’ in the European
public sphere as well as a higher level of religious observance of women compared to men
(Casanova 1994; Trzebiatowska and Bruce 2012). While in Chapter 26 Nella van den Brandt
questions the ‘false impression’ that religion ever entirely disappeared from Western Europe,
she also draws attention to dynamics in Europe which require renewed attention to the nexus
between religion, gender and society. This includes the arrival since the post–World War II
period of ‘guest workers and postcolonial migrants from North Africa, the Middle East, Central
Asia, and Indonesia, often, but not always, with Islamic backgrounds’ as well as the strengthening
‘conservative Christian backlash to women’s equality and sexual diversity’, sometimes aligning
with nationalist and populist movements, particularly in Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe
(p. 393). Even with these ‘new’ dynamics in Europe, which push against liberalising trends, it is
also the case that more liberal Christian churches, including sections of the Anglican Church,
remain compromised over the tensions created by women’s ordination and same-sex marriage
(see, for example, Davie and Starkey 2019; Davie 2015; Clucas 2012; Shaw 2015).
The efforts to name and describe this apparent ‘(re)appearance’ of religion in public life, in
terms of the ‘deprivatisation of religion’ (Casanova 1994), ‘desecularisation’ (Berger 1999) or the
emergence of the ‘post-secular’ (Habermas 2008), are again manifest within sociological fields
dominated by white males and we argue are largely unsatisfactory since they remain attempts to
revise partial social theories about religion and social change that were already narrow and exclu-
sivist. One impact of the dominance of secularisation theory has been the marginalisation of con-
sideration of religion from social and political analysis in fields such as international development,
foreign policy and peacebuilding (i.e. if religion is in decline or has in some instances disappeared
then it is not a significant variable and can be ignored). The gender-biased and Eurocentric/
colonialist imprint of secularisation theories on how religion has been researched in academia and
approached by social reformers and policymakers is a theme taken up in a number of the chapters
(e.g. Omer, Chapter 22; Bartelink, Chapter 24; Nogueira-Godsey, Chapter 25). For instance,
as Stiebert writes in Chapter 23, ‘religion must certainly be a significant part of any attempts to
understand and account for sexual violence’ and is ‘ignored at our peril’ (p. 345). The dominance
of theories of secularisation has had the effect of downplaying the role that religion has upon the
gendered social and self-identities of women, non-heteronormative and gender-variant people
(groups about whose behaviour and identity religious traditions have a great deal to say). Had
such theorising also included the voices of women, LGBTQI+ people and those from the Global
South, would secularisation theory have gained the currency it did in the form that it did? With
this question in mind, one could be forgiven for viewing secularisation theory as normative and
political rather than descriptive and interpretive, reflective of a European post-Enlightenment
patriarchal worldview to serve ‘European modernity and its secular project’ (Carrasco Miró 2020:
95; Asad 2003). Rather than viewing this as a ‘resurgence of religion’ per se (cunningly confound-
ing and outwitting earlier trajectories of secularisation), we suggest instead that global theories of
secularisation have been progressively weakened as the avenues of sociological scholarship have
widened to include a more diverse range of contributions. This includes contributions from and
about women, who have higher levels of individual religiosity on the whole compared to men
3
and upon whose lives public religion has a more invasive impact, and those seeking to challenge
the ‘coloniality of secularism’ (Carrasco Miró 2020: 93; Asad 2003). The challenge to secularisa-
tion theory is as much the result of a paradigm shift, brought about by the impact of increasing
numbers of women and people of colour carrying out scholarship on their experiences of reli-
gion from a gendered and decolonial perspective, as it is a result of male social theorists them-
selves realising that their theories needed revising and ‘no longer’ fitted the evidence.
Just as scholarship about secularisation reflected the perspective of a narrow range of largely
male actors, scholarship on religion did the same. As McIntosh writes in this volume in Chapter 2,
‘the post-Enlightenment/academic study of religion was more concerned with its rationalizing
approach than with that which it was omitting [ . . . where. . .] the field of religious data explored
assumed that the male experience accounted for the experience of all practitioners’ (p. 19). In fact,
the androcentric, heteronormative and colonialist bias in the development of theories of secularisa-
tion as well as scholarship on religion at least up to the 1970s are two sides of the same coin, with
those who sit outside this privileged vantage point ignored as either producers or subjects of knowl-
edge. Where there was scholarship on non-Christian religions, this tended to be carried out via
an orientalist/colonial approach by white men that took ‘Christianity to be the norm’ and which
sought ‘to civilize that which it defined as “other” and primitive’ (p. 19). By the 1970s, marking what
is often noted as the ‘second wave of feminism’, ‘as universities started to offer courses in women’s
studies and the influence of feminism spread to scholars of religion’ (p. 19), feminist responses to
patriarchal religion took off first in North America and then spread to Europe. While this femi-
nist response was on the whole secular and viewed religion as problematic for women’s rights and
empowerment, ‘feminist theologies’ began to emerge by the late 1960s in the work of figures such
as Mary Daly (1968) and Rosemary Radford Ruether (1983), who called for a revisioning of the
way that religion is gendered and disadvantages women. Edited and single-authored volumes on
topics concerned with ‘women and religion’ were published. Many of these sought to establish the
feminist credentials of the founders of religions, which were argued to have later became corrupted
by surrounding patriarchal cultures, the ways that women are oppressed by their religious traditions
and the ways that they are resisting them, developing what have been called ‘religious feminisms’,
which reinterpret religious traditions from within in the light of contemporary feminist thinking
(e.g. see Longman, Chapter 3; Llewellyn, Chapter 12; Bartelink, Chapter 24 e.g. Barlas 2002; Holm
and Bowker 2001; Franzman 1999; Klein, 1995; Gross 1993; Sharma 1994).
Although by the 1980s scholarship on feminist theology and alternative feminist spiritualities
was thriving, it was criticised for failing to integrate the perspectives of women from the Global
South whose commitment to their religious traditions had persisted, but also in many cases had
experiences that were also overlaid by a history of European colonialism. There was a tendency
within women and religion scholarship for women in the Global North to view those in the
South as victims of their religious traditions, who needed ‘saving’ by feminist religious discourse
(Pui Lan 2002). With the development of postcolonial theory, which is often taken to be marked
by the publication of Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism while there were also many women writing
in this field, women in the South too began reflecting and writing on their gendered experi-
ences of religion from a postcolonial perspective inspired by the scholarship of women such as
Gayatri Spivak (1988) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984). As the literature on ‘religious
feminisms’ became more numerous and diverse, coinciding with the ‘third wave of feminism’
(1980s–), we find studies not only seeking to challenge the ‘coloniality of secularism’ but also of
dominant approaches to women and religion that impose Western norms (Donaldson and Pui-
Lan 2002). In probably the most cited text across all of the chapters in this volume is the Politics
of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject by the late Saba Mahmood (2005), where she
‘explores conceptions of self, subjectivity and agency among urban Egyptian women’s practices
4
Introduction
of Islamic piety that defy the secular-liberal paradigm that undergirds much of western, includ-
ing feminist, thought’ (Longman Chapter 3). What the repeated citation of this text indicates
is an increased willingness to consider that concepts such as agency or empowerment in rela-
tion to gender and religion should not be defined narrowly or without consideration of local-
ised voices, even if these voices challenge dominant preconceptions of behaviour and attitude
(Avishai 2008). Of course, although it might be gratifying that more complex manifestations of
ideas such as ‘agency’ are increasingly commonplace in the contemporary study of religion and
gender, it does not follow that awareness of these alternative perspectives removes the tensions
for (feminist) researchers writing about those who might hold very different viewpoints about
social roles, hierarchies and relationships, which the chapters in this volume variously attest to.
Approach and structure of the volume

The previous discussion has set the scene for the approach that this volume takes. First, it adopts
a conceptual lens that is shaped by considerations of gender analysis and intersectionality. It aims
to move beyond a bias towards a focus on women in gender studies to also include material on
men and masculinities as a relatively overlooked area. Second, the volume includes contribu-
tions from, and discussion of the work of scholars in, the Global North and the Global South,
with respect to chapters that focus on religion, gender and society in particular locations as
well as theoretical and methodological contributions that need to move beyond a Eurocentric
focus. Third, the chapters in this volume seek to capture both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ styles
of religion and their impact on the construction of gender identities, but also they aim to
move beyond this binary. While both extremes are part of the subject matter of this volume,
we present original research that problematises this binary and considers, for example, why
women might choose to stay in or join apparently ‘conservative’ traditions as well as the ways in
which they appear to be complicit in perpetuating styles of religiosity that are in conflict with
liberal values of gender equality. Fourth, and linked to this, the volume seeks to not essential-
ise the contribution of particular religions to the construction of gender identities, roles and
relationships, but instead seeks to adopt a multidimensional and intersectional approach where
the study of ‘religions’ cannot be isolated from social, political and geographical factors and
contexts. Fifth, the overall focus of the volume is contemporary and sociological, rather than
historical, textual or theological/philosophical. Historical discussions and material on texts,
theologies and philosophies are included to contextualise contemporary social formations and
to help in understanding the religion and gender nexus in contemporary societies. Finally, no
handbook can be comprehensive in terms of coverage, and whereas many texts on this topic
have taken an approach that focuses on the contribution of individual religions to construct-
ing gender identities, our volume enables readers to explore this through the lenses of ‘critical
debates for religions gender and society: theories, concepts and methodologies’, ‘issues and
themes in religions, gender and society’ and ‘contexts and locations’. The authors selected for
the volume reflect careful work on behalf of us as editors. Whilst we approached some authors
because we were already aware of their contributions to the field, we were keen to include
work from scholars at earlier stages in their careers, as well as research from scholars who might
have received less attention in the Anglophone academy and who were writing from within the
geographical areas we were hoping to feature. This resulted in numerous emails and exchanges
with scholars from across the world, with each often recommending others. We also put out a
call for papers on social media, and through email networks, when we identified specific gaps
that we wanted to fill. The result is a volume of religious, geographical, cultural and political
variety, which reflects a complex and multidimensional field.
5
Part 1: Critical debates for religions, gender and society: theories,

concepts and methodologies
Part 1 is comprised of 11 chapters that address critical debates in the study of religion, gen-
der and society through an examination of different theories, concepts and methodologies
to lay out the key debates as they have developed and to take stock of where they are today.
These debates incorporate concepts of space and place, bodies and embodiment, the digital and
online, agency and identity, activism and the public sphere, oppression and liberation, postco-
lonialism, methodology and reflexiveness. In ‘Gender in Religion, Religion in Society: The
Agency and Identity of Christian Women’, Esther McIntosh starts the volume by reminding
us of the androcentric and colonialist agenda behind the academic study of religion. It was not
until the 1970s that this began to shift as the emergence of women’s and feminist studies began
to influence how religion was approached in the academy. As a correction to the ways in which
‘the feminist study of religion has too often resulted in damaging universalizing, homogenizing
and essentializing categories’ (Chapter 2, p. 20), McIntosh urges, ‘we cannot separate religion
and society as fields of study. We can only study religion in society, and in so doing we must
acknowledge our own biases and starting points’ (Chapter 2, p. 21).
In the next chapter, ‘The Feminism Conundrum: A Contested Term for the Study of Reli-
gion and Gender’, Chia Longman asks, ‘What does it mean to study religion, gender and
society in a distinctively feminist way?’ (Chapter 3, p. 37). The tensions between religion and
feminism have permeated the study of religion, gender and society and despite the ‘post-secular
turn in feminist theory’ she argues that ‘religion remains a conundrum for feminism’ (Chapter 3,
p. 37). While women and LGBTQI+ people have not fared well at the hands of patriarchal
religions, she notes the ‘lack of exchange across disciplinary divides contributing to persistent
limitations in our theories and methodologies’ (Chapter 3, p. 37). Widening these exchanges
is at the heart of this volume, which although it has a sociological focus it also includes con-
tributions from scholars working across different disciplines, including from religious studies,
women’s/gender studies, theology, biblical studies, anthropology, sociology, political science and
development studies. In ‘Oppression or Liberation? Moving beyond Binaries in Religion and
Gender Studies’, Line Nyhagen builds on Longman’s analysis of the feminism-religion conun-
drum by specifically interrogating how feminist scholars writing on religion and gender have
focused on the relationship between ‘structure and agency’. She critically assesses the limitations
of both structural and agentic perspectives, outlining ‘examples of more complex analyses of
religion and gender that seek to overcome the oppression-liberation dichotomy’ (Chapter 4,
p. 53). This necessitates, she argues, engaging ‘with critical realist perspectives, theories of inter-
sectionality and the “lived religion” approach within the sociology of religion’, to move beyond
the ‘oppression vs liberation dichotomy’ to enable ‘more complex analyses of relations between
agency and structure’ (Chapter 4, p. 53).
Building on Nyhagen’s call for a ‘lived religion’ perspective that addresses the limitations of
binaries in religion and gender studies, the three chapters that follow explore critical perspec-
tives through examples grounded in lived experience and seek to shed new light on debates that
often become stuck in rigid patterns. In ‘Gender, Religion, and Postcolonialism: The Birhen sa
Balintawak and Masculinities in the Philippines’, Peter-Ben Smit examines the ways in which
gender and postcolonialism have been related in academic studies, where ‘colonial structures
frequently lead to toxic or otherwise destructive gender constructions’ and ‘postcolonial theory
seeks to address this on a broad scale’ (Chapter 5, p. 81). While studies have tended to concentrate
on this with respect to its impact on women and the negative impact of conservative Christian-
ity, more recently masculinities are also being considered. Taking the Filipino example of the
6
Introduction
representation of Mary and Jesus as the Birhen sa Balintawak (Mother of Balintawak) and her
‘Holy Child’, he ‘shows the subversive potential of religious traditions when it comes to con-
structing “alternative” genders, in this case masculinities’ (Chapter 5, p. 67). This example dem-
onstrates how the ‘indigenous appropriation of traditional colonial religious repertoire’ means
that colonial religion ‘becomes indigenized and the property of the colonized, rather than of
the colonizers’ (Chapter 5, p. 68).
Also drawing on examples of ‘lived religion’, in ‘Buddhist Nuns and Agency in Myanmar’,
Sneha Roy discusses the tension between structure and agency through the lived experiences
of thilashins (ordained Buddhist women in Myanmar). While subservient to the male monastics
within their tradition and the patriarchal structures of Buddhism, these women have been key
figures in movements responding to political instability in Myanmar, including in the most
recent 2021 uprisings following the military coup. They view their activism as a way to strat-
egise their agency and identity, thereby challenging the simplistic binary between structure and
agency. Where their ‘civil voluntarism establishes a dialectical relationship between constraint
and agency’ as they engage in activism ‘against the unjust discernments of the state’ and ‘those
they categorise as a threat to the propagation of sangha and sāsana [Buddhist community and
teachings]’ (Chapter 6, p. 99).
In ‘Reclaiming Public and Digital Spaces: The Conundrum of Acceptance for the Feminist
Movement in Pakistan’, Sehrish Mushtaq and Fawad Baig examine the construction of the
notion of the public sphere and public spaces as discursive and real locations to which, in a
liberal society, all individuals regardless of gender, religion, class and race ought to have equal
access. In reality, however, women in many societies are not able to participate equally with
men in public spaces and are instead relegated to the private, domestic realm, with religious
narratives playing a role in the maintenance of this public-private binary. A key aim of femi-
nist movements is to reclaim public spaces, to enable women to assert their human rights and
to engage in democratic processes to secure their demands. In recent years, digital spaces have
increased women’s scope to resist and challenge patriarchy, in conjunction with offline activities,
while at the same time ‘digital spaces are also gendered in nature and have reinforced traditional
gender roles’ (Chapter 7, p. 105). Taking the example of the ‘Aurat March’ (women’s march)
in Pakistan, the authors examine how feminists have been using digital spaces, as well as the
physical act of marching and protesting, to further their aims and to reclaim agency, alongside
consideration of the online responses they received from members of the public. Also looking
at women’s agency online, Rosemary Hancock in ‘Social Media and Online Environments:
Muslim and Mormon Women Bloggers in the United States of America’ discusses the find-
ings from her study of blogging by 13 Muslim and Mormon women in the USA. The study
demonstrates that the offline world of religious communities also plays a role in shaping activity
online, despite the opportunities that the internet provides for challenging authority, including
religious authority. She concludes, ‘the complexity of the debates on women’s agency within
religion is evident in the blogs in this study’ and ‘agency, both in terms of resistance and as
embedded in conservative religion, both forms of agency ‘can exist within the same religious
community simultaneously’ (Chapter 8, p. 119).
Spatial considerations are a focus of the next two chapters. In ‘Space, Boundaries and Bor-
ders in the Study of Religion, Gender and Society’, Orlando Woods focuses on theoretical
advances brought about by the ‘spatial turn’ in the study of religion, where the ‘conceptual tools
of space, boundaries and borders help to unravel the “fluidity and instability in social identities”
(Dwyer et al. 2008: 121)’ including gender (Chapter 9, p. 140). He examines how religiously
gendered bodies use space to resist secular norms when, for instance, women wear the Muslim
veil in secular settings such as France. At the same time, other women strategically use public
7
spaces to signify their refusal to conform to religious ideals, again through their choice of cloth-
ing. Beyond such symbolic acts in real spaces, Woods also examines the impact of women cross-
ing physical borders when they migrate. Taking the example of Muslim women from Harari
communities in Ethiopia migrating to Toronto, Canada, he notes that rather than bringing
‘about a liberalisation of gender roles . . . the reverse was observed’ where religious roles and
spaces for both men and women became more prescriptive and polarised (Chapter 9, p. 145).
This focus on space and bodies is also reflected in the chapter by Mariecke van den Berg:
‘Bodies and Embodiment: The Somatic Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender’. She notes,
‘Centuries of Protestant domination in the West and beyond has left us with a tendency, both in
the study of religion and in Western society as a whole, to favour doctrine over ritual, belief over
practice, faith over the body and the senses’ (Chapter 10, p. 149). Moreover, feminist theory
has tended to have an uneasy relationship with the body, where there has been a reluctance to
engage with it out of concern not to play into binaries (e.g. body/mind) that serve to disadvan-
tage women. Van den Berg argues, ‘it is possible to retell the story of the body differently’ and
to avoid the extremes of denying or essentializing women’s bodies where
feminist theory has developed an intersectional framework that enables critical reflec-
tion of and critique on dualist thinking that constructs women, people of colour and
sexual minorities as inferior, without reproducing negative attitudes towards the body
and emphasizing the fluidity and changing nature of bodies.
(Chapter 10, p. 152)
The final two chapters in the ‘critical debates’ section take us to methodological consid-
erations around how we research gender and religion. In ‘Narrative Approaches to Religion
and Gender: A Biographic Study with Christian Young Men’, Joshua M. Heyes examines the
role of a ‘narrative approach’ as an ‘activist orientation to religion and gender research’. While
‘nested’ within other approaches taken by religion and gender scholars, including ethnography,
discourse analysis and visual methods, narrative approaches are focused on ‘how humans make
meaning.’ Specifically using a ‘biographic narrative interpretive method (BNIM)’ to find out
more about how the connections between Christianity and masculinity are experienced and
understood by young men who are part of independent evangelical churches in urban areas of
England, he demonstrates how the narrative method ‘supports the important project of widen-
ing the range of ways that gendered religious lives can be communicated and known about’
(Chapter 11, p. 172).
In Chapter 12, ‘When My Work Is Found Wanting: Power, Intersectionality, Postcolonial-
ism, and the Reflexive Feminist Researcher’, Dawn Llewellyn examines the critical theme of
reflexivity and its significance for feminist scholarship on religion and gender, especially follow-
ing the postcolonial turn. Through a critical and honest examination of the limits of reflexivity,
Llewellyn explores ‘how I have tried, sometimes come close, and sometimes failed to action
reflexivity rigorously’ (p. 176) and the impact of her methodological decisions and omissions.
Although reflexivity is often viewed as the feminist answer to ‘identifying and highlighting
how power is distributed’ through research, Llewellyn questions the ways it has been applied in
scholarship on religion and gender, including in her own work on Christian women and child-
lessness (Chapter 12, p. 176). Llewellyn strongly makes the case for the ongoing importance of
reflexivity in research, including giving attention to where her reflexivity has been insufficiently
intersectional and why ongoing attention to ‘multiple expressions of advantage’, including in
relation to race, gender, disability, age, and class, needs to remain a critical feature of feminist
research in religion (Chapter 12, p. 181).
8
Introduction
Part 2: Issues and Themes in Religions, Gender and Society

Part 2 of the book includes 13 chapters on key issues and themes in the study of religion,
gender and society. We begin this section with two chapters that draw attention to the ways in
which religion shapes normative understandings about acceptable gender roles, gender identity
and sexual orientation that confound a simple binary between progressive and conservative.
In ‘Butch Lesbians, Femme Queens and Promiscuous Clergy: Queering the Body Politics of
the Methodist Church of Southern Africa [MCSA]’, Megan Robertson juxtaposes the way
that the MCSA views itself as liberal and progressive, when in 2019 it welcomed its first
woman bishop, against an earlier event in 2009 when the Church excommunicated a female
minister for her decision to marry her same-sex partner. This, she argues, demonstrates how
‘the Church’s progressive gender activism is deeply limited by the kind of woman, and indeed
clergy, it envisages for its transformative agenda’ (Chapter 13, p. 204). In her chapter ‘Gender
Variance and the Abrahamic Faiths’, Susannah Cornwall examines how within Judaism, Islam
and Christianity there are both more conservative and more liberal attitudes towards gender
transition and that theological conservatism about gender roles and sexual orientation does
not necessarily entail a conservative attitude towards altering the sex one was assigned at birth.
While approaches to pastoral care for trans people can be mixed, each religion has conceptual
space for consideration of gender variance (Chapter 14).
The next two chapters take marriage and the family as their starting points. In ‘Migration
and Law in the Middle East and North Africa’, Nadia Sonneveld examines the legal aspects of
South–South migration in the Middle East, with a particular focus on the impact of religion-
based family laws within Catholicism and Islam on the position of migrants with respect to
major life events, including marriage and childbirth. She demonstrates how, for Catholic and
Muslim Syrian refugees, ‘family laws in the region strongly distinguish on the basis of gender
and religion’ (Chapter 15, p. 223). She also deals with the ways in which religion in combination
with legal frameworks can serve as a source of discrimination for people of different genders
and sexual orientations. Sarah-Jane Page, in her chapter ‘Religion and Intimate Life: Marriage,
Family, Sexuality’, explores the relationship between religion and ‘intimate life’ in the UK, with
special attention to marriage. While heterosexual couples ‘typically understand marriage as a
marker of adulthood that is expected of them from their families and religious communities’,
despite some ambivalence towards the gendered constraints of marriage, the situation is more
complex for queer couples (Chapter 16, p. 244). For instance, although changes in legislation
in the UK mean that marriage between same-sex partners is now allowed, same-sex marriage
is not currently legally permitted on Church of England premises.
The next two chapters take the theme of different generations as their starting point. In
‘Age, Gender and De-churchisation’, Abby Day adopts a ‘lens of generational clash and change’
to compare the religious observance of elderly Anglican women in the UK and Canada and
their Baby Boomer generation offspring. While the role of the Baby Boomers in the ‘gen-
erational decline in Euro-American Christianity’ is well known, much less attention has been
paid to their religiously inclined mothers and how they navigate changing dynamics within
the Anglican Church and the secularisation of society more broadly (Chapter 17, p. 249). Fol-
lowing this, Rachael Shillitoe and Céline Benoit focus on ‘Gender,‌‌Religion‌a‌ nd‌‌Childhood:‌
‌Towards‌ ‌a‌ ‌New‌ ‌Research‌ ‌Agenda’‌and address the lack of research that focuses on children as
active agents and as able to speak for themselves with respect to their religious identities. Taking
the family and school settings as a starting point, they examine the factors that impact upon
the interactions between religion and gender identities and call for further research that looks
at diverse family types (i.e. ‘single-parent families, same-sex parents and households with carers
9
or nonfamily members as the primary carers’), as well as informal educational settings (such as
after-school clubs), and broadens its focus beyond a European and North American context
(Chapter 18, p. 270).
Also looking at an educational setting, this time a college for high school graduates (18–
20 years old), Aura Di Febo writes about a school set up by Risshō Kōseikai, a lay Buddhist
organisation, in 1994, called Hōju Josei Gakuin Jōhō Kokusai Senmon Gakkō. In her chapter,
‘Mothers, Bodhisattvas and Women of Tomorrow: Religiously Connoted Gender Roles in a
Buddhist Vocational School in Japan’, she examines the role of this school in training ‘women
that could contribute to contemporary society’ through the nurturing of Buddhist feminine
values of ‘compassion and docility’ thereby reinforcing ‘conservative ideals of femininity centred
on the notion of women as carers’ (Chapter 19, p. 276). However, Di Febo demonstrates that it
would be limiting ‘to read these dynamics as mere reproduction and interiorisation of structures
of subordination’ and that ‘acceptance of conservative gender norms allows these women also
to gain some agency over their personal development, interpersonal relationships and social
participation’ (Chapter 19, p. 276). Thus, this example of Buddhist vocational education is both
a ‘potential resource for female empowerment’ and a site for the ‘reproduction of conservative
social norms’ (Chapter 19, p. 276). Paola Cavaliere in ‘Articulating the Neoliberal Motherhood
Discourse: Visions of Gender in Japanese New Religions’ also looks at Risshō Kōseikai but
alongside two additional Japanese ‘new religions’, one Buddhist (Sōka Gakkai) and the other
not linked to any particular religious tradition, although sometimes drawing upon Buddhist
language (God Light Association (GLA)). She examines how women in Japan are increasingly
expected to perform intensive mothering roles alongside participation in the neoliberal market-
place and how these ‘Japanese new religions become places where moral conversations on how
to achieve both goals can take place’ (Chapter 20, p. 289).
The theme of how religion can shape women’s expected roles in society continues in
‘Women, Religion and the State: A Gendered Analysis of the Catholic Church, the State and
the Rise of Evangelical Protestantism on Women’s Roles and Women’s Rights in Brazil’. Kim
Beecheno outlines that when Brazil saw its first democratically elected civilian president in
over 20 years take office in 1985, some of the inequalities between men and women established
by Catholic teachings began to be challenged. A National Council on Women’s Rights was
set up and in the new constitution in 1988 men and women ‘became constitutionally equal in
rights and status for the first time’ (Chapter 21, p. 313). More women entered the workplace,
fertility rates fell and women were more likely to gain a university education. More recently,
however, the rise of what Beecheno calls ‘Christian fundamentalism’ in the form of the growth
of conservative Evangelical Protestantism coupled with the election of the far-right President
Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected in January 2019, seriously threatens the rights of women and
LGBTQI+ people.
The final cluster of chapters in part 2 of the volume each explore the importance of think-
ing about religion alongside gender in different activist and policy fields. In ‘Religion, Gender
Justice, Violence, and Peace’, Atalia Omer examines relationships between gender, religion, vio-
lence and peace. On the one hand, religion tends to be left out of discussions about gender, peace
and violence, not least because of its association with hetero-patriarchal patterns of domination,
violence and exploitation. On the other hand, scholarship on religion, conflict and the practice of
peace has tended to avoid the topic of gender, for appearing as ‘gratuitous, luxurious, and unre-
lated to the hard realities at hand’ (Chapter 22, p. 323). Importantly, there is a ‘continuum of vio-
lence’ for women in war and peace. Through a series of narratives, she demonstrates the ‘layered,
multidirectional, and cross-fertilizing’ relationships between gender, religion, violence and peace
(Chapter 22, p. 321). Also focusing on violence against women, Johanna Stiebert in her chapter
10
Introduction
‘Religion and Sexual Violence’ similarly discusses how religion is left out of discussions about
gender-based and sexual violence. Examining sexual violence in religion texts, in religiously
motivated wars and in religious institutions, she advocates the term ‘religious sexual violence’ as a
‘legitimate designation for a complex and variegated phenomenon’ (Chapter 23, p. 339).
In ‘Religion, Gender and International Development: Searching for Game Changers in the
Midst of Polarization’, Brenda Bartelink examines how, in the field of international develop-
ment, religion tends to be approached with caution and in particular seen as an impediment to
women’s rights. This polarisation between religion and gender is not an invention of the inter-
national development sphere, but has instead been imported from wider political and feminist
discourses. Through exploring ‘voices in the middle’—religious feminism and gender program-
ming by religious NGOs—who ‘work across religious/secular binaries’, Bartelink demonstrates
how these actors play an important role in negotiating women’s human rights in a polarised
world (Chapter 24, p. 357).
In ‘A Decological Way to Dialogue: Rethinking Ecofeminism and Religion’, Elaine Nogueira-
Godsey writes about the ecofeminist recognition that there is a ‘connection between gender
and sexual oppression and the destruction of the Earth’ that emerged in the 1970s. Although
largely dismissed by Northern feminists by the 1990s for its apparent essentialisation of women
as close to nature and its connection with spirituality/religion, she argues that the dismissal of
the significance of religion and gender to the liberation of women and the earth itself is reflec-
tive of the ‘dominator-subordinated mode of relationships’. The dismissal of ecofeminism is
as much a product of a Northern feminist bias that views religion as irrational and an inferior
mode of knowledge, thereby reinscribing masculine and colonialist oppression, as it is a concern
about essentialising women (Chapter 25, p. 365).
Part 3: Contexts and Locations

Our final set of chapters, part 3 of the volume, are organised around locations, with two chap-
ters focusing on each of the following settings—Europe, North America, Latin America, South
Asia, East/Southeast Asia, Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania (16
chapters in total). The first chapter in each setting focuses on an overview of issues around
gender, religion and society in that location, and the second focuses on issues to do with men/
masculinities, gender and religion.
In ‘Religion and Gender in Europe: Thinking through Politico-social and Theoretical
Challenges’, Nella van den Brandt outlines how, despite the secularisation of Europe fol-
lowing the Enlightenment, many commentators now draw attention to an apparent ‘return
of religion’, including from Muslim immigrants, but also increasing Christian conservatism,
particularly in Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe, that exists in part as a reaction against
‘gender studies and policymaking that aims at enlarging and supporting the equal opportuni-
ties and empowerment of women and LGBTQ persons’ (Chapter 26, p. 392). She argues that
‘future discussions about religion and gender in Europe should be interdisciplinary, concep-
tual, comparative, and intersectional’ and that we have to focus on ‘de-compartmentalising
our discussions in order to arrive at innovative and nuanced understandings of gender and
religion’ (Chapter 26, p. 394). Through an examination of the representation of women
leaving religiously orthodox communities in two films, both of which promote the view
that the only option for women is to move away from their static and orthodox traditions to
adopt the values of a modern liberal society, she criticises the binary between orthodox and
liberal. Rather than change and accommodation being possible within orthodox traditions, a
situation that actually reflects the complex lived reality, such representations tend to rely on
11
oversimplifications. In ‘Religion and Masculinities in Europe’, Stephen Hunt similarly takes

a Europe-wide approach, rather than focusing on one country or region of Europe. Like van
den Brandt, he identifies rising nationalist/populist forms of politics, drawing on conserva-
tive religious frameworks as presenting a challenge to liberal and secularising influences in
Western Europe since the Second World War and Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of
communism. He explores the gender gap in male and female religiosity, the way that conven-
tional established religious authorities have shaped hegemonic visions of masculinity that are
now being challenged by non-conventional forms of masculinity offered within the ‘spiritual
marketplace’ of new religions, and the types of masculinity within newer migrant ethnic and
religious groups (Chapter 27).
Danielle Marie Dempsey picks up the European story in North America in her chapter
‘The Legacy of Colonialism and the Regulation of Gender in North America’, which exam-
ines how European colonisation forcefully introduced Christianity in the region along with
‘strictly regimented gender norms, which simultaneously served to reinforce whiteness, cis-
maleness, and heterosexuality, the effects of which are still visible in North American religions
and society today’ (Chapter 28, p. 415). The mistreatment and mass murder of non-white
communities in North America was justified with reference to the Bible and although today
‘settler colonialism’ has been replaced by the nation-state, ‘the deep-seated relationship between
colonialism and Christianity remained’ (Chapter 28, p. 415). She argues that this ‘structurally
entrenched relationship calls into question narratives of nationhood, citizenship, and whether
people of non-dominant genders and non-Christians in North America are truly a part of or
apart from “American” society’ (Chapter 28, p. 415). Ronald Neal in ‘Troubling the Demonic:
Anti-Blackness, Heterosexual Black Masculinity, and the Study of Religion in North America’
focuses on an ‘American imaginary’ that portrays black men in demonic terms and the impact
of religion and colonialism on this. He demonstrates how this demonic imaginary is at work
in portrayals of black men in cultural production as well as policy frameworks. In particular he
draws attention to the role that ‘the biblical justification of slavery and the Eurocentric nature
of the study of religions since the 19th century’ have had upon constructing a binary between
civilised/uncivilised as well as the contribution of feminist and queer scholarship to the portrayal
of heterosexual black men in demonic terms (Chapter 29, p. 429).
In ‘Religion and Gender Dynamics in Latin American Societies’, Ana Lourdes Suárez
addresses how the Catholic Church in Latin America has prohibited women ordaining and tak-
ing on leadership roles. Instead, the ‘women religious’, the nuns or sisters who chose to commit
their lives to the Church, perform roles that are shaped by the patriarchal Church and reflect
women’s caring gendered roles in society more broadly. Despite the independent role that many
‘women religious’ carved out for themselves in working with the poor, a key element of the
liberation theology ‘option for the poor’ in the 1980s, they were unable to gain leverage within
the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and remained subordinate to male priests. Feminist theol-
ogy from the 1970s began to have an impact upon how some ‘women religious’ viewed their
position and they developed a more critical voice, while others became part of a ‘conservative
counter-offensive’. In recent decades Catholicism has lost its earlier dominance with the rise
of Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity as well as religious change also occurring at the
margins of institutional churches through ‘New Age, neo-pagan, neo-Indian, neo-esoteric, and
self-styled religiosities’ (Chapter 30, p. 449). While Pentecostalism in particular is challenging
the ‘increasing flexible understandings in gender issues in wider Latin American society’ the rise
of ‘new spiritualities’ has brought with it a questioning of traditional gender roles and identities.
She ends her chapter with a discussion of the #NiUnaMenos (Not One Less) movement, which
has become a vehicle for campaigning against femicide as well as for other gender activism issues
12
Introduction
linked to patriarchy, which in turn is underpinned by the Catholic tradition in Latin America.
André S. Musskopf begins his chapter, ‘Latin America—Religion, Gender, Masculinities and
Sexual Diversity’, by discussing violence against women and the reaction to this in a song by
Chilean activist group Colectivo Lastesis, ‘The Rapist Is You’. This song makes a statement
about ‘the role of men, the need to question and review how gender and sexual relations are
organized and how institutions produce, maintain and reproduce those systems’ (Chapter 31,
p. 458). Musskopf explores the trajectory of the academic study of ‘gender, masculinities and
sexual diversity in relation to religion and theology in Latin America’ as a response to the sce-
nario expressed by Colectivo Lastesis.
In ‘Women, Religion and Social Inequality in India: Intersectionality, Nationalism and Reli-
gious Change’, Emma Tomalin examines the impact of Hinduism and Islam in India, a setting
with high levels of socio-economic inequality, on women’s religious and social lives. Moreover,
although high levels of religiosity in India also coincide with high levels of gender inequality, the
impact of religion needs to be considered in intersection with a broad range of factors, includ-
ing ‘amongst others, caste, class, ethnicity, politics, geographical location and occupation/
livelihood’(Chapter 32, p. 471). In addition to these intersectional factors, the impact of religion on
women’s lives in India is also a product of the relationship between religions, particularly ‘where
the rise of Hindu nationalism shapes how other religions respond and reconfigure. . . “result-
ing in the politicization of gender identities and the co-option of women’s bodies as symbols
and repositories of community and national identity” ’ (Desai and Temsah 2014: 7; Chapter 32,
p. 471). Sikata Banerjee also picks up the important theme of Hindu nationalism and focuses
on its impact on Hindu masculinities. In her chapter ‘Hindu Muscular Nationalism: Politicized
Hinduism and Manhood in India’, she explores the role of the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party (or BJP), currently in government in India, which ‘has been marked by the use of
a particularly aggressive and martial interpretation of manhood’ (Chapter 33, p. 486). She traces
the evolution of muscular Hindu nationalism to one of the founding fathers of the movement,
V.D. Savarkar, in the colonial period, and then draws on interviews and archival material from
India and Britain to unpack this ‘message of muscular Hindu nationalism focused on retriev-
ing Hindu pride and strength’ and to explore its impact on women and religious minorities
(Chapter 33, p. 487).
Hollie Gowan, in her chapter ‘ “A Monster Had Eaten Me Whole”: Religiously Inspired
Charitable Organisations (RICOs) as “Retreat” for Women in Contemporary Urban China’,
points out the ‘ “daunting silences” when it comes to religious studies and gender studies focus-
ing on the Chinese context’ (Chapter 34, p. 499), despite the fact that women make up the
majority of religious adherents there. She is interested in better understanding the motivations
and experiences of women who join RICOs and the impact that this has upon the way that they
make sense of their lives against the pressure of and tension between traditional and modernising
forces. Teguh Wijaya Mulya and Joseph N. Goh in their chapter ‘Masculinities and Religion in
Southeast Asia’ begin by outlining some of the diverse ways that religion shapes masculinities
globally: from the portrayal of ‘stronger masculine imageries of the divine . . . commensurate
with more conservative and traditional ideologies of gender’ (Chapter 35, p. 514); to an ‘appre-
ciation for “gentler” masculine traits’ expressed for instance through men embracing Buddhist
mindfulness to ameliorate ‘overwhelming masculine anxieties in contemporary Western socie-
ties’; and the ambivalent stance across religions towards ‘men who embody gender and sexual
diversities’ (Chapter 35, p. 515). Their chapter adds to this corpus of work, with attention to
masculinities and religion in Southeast Asia through six themes: ‘everyday performances of
masculinity, competing versions of masculinity, sacred intermediaries, nation-state, and sexuality
and violence’ (Chapter 35, p. 522).
13
In ‘Reform, Continuities and Conservatism in the Middle East and North Africa’, An Van
Raemdonck takes a region-wide look at the ways that region has shaped gender roles in the
MENA region while at the same time avoiding ‘such methodological pitfalls in which religion
is either predominantly emancipatory or disempowering, or either ignored or reified as an all-
encompassing conceptual lens’ (Chapter 36, p. 526). She looks at the colonial and postcolonial
shaping of the family, the important social role of young people and the impact of changing
moralities around love and new (reproductive) technologies, as well as attempts to re-traditionalise
society and how Islamic feminism has responded to this. Also writing on the MENA region but
with a closer focus on Egypt, Anwar Mhajne, in ‘Toward a Comprehensive Approach to Under-
standing the Construction of Islamic Masculinities in the Middle East and North Africa’ (Chap-
ter 37), is critical of the ways in which some scholars and analysts of the MENA region rely on
problematic theories about masculinity and invoke a racialised narrative of toxic Arab Muslim
masculinity. She discusses the historical roots of such racialised narratives, and the way that they
are used to account for social problems in the MENA region, as reflecting colonial structures.
The chapter concludes with a discussion of recent trends in the study of Islamic masculinities.
In ‘Exploring Tensions: Gender and Religion in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Elisabet le Roux and
Nadine Bowers Du Toit explore three key tensions that arise at the intersection between reli-
gion, gender and society in the region. First, they examine ‘the tensions between religion and
culture’ through looking at how Christianity, Islam and African Traditional Religions interact
with culture in ways that are ‘both liberative and oppressive with regards to gender and develop-
ment issues’ (Chapter 38, p. 552). Second, they explore the ‘tension between women’s agency
and women’s complicity in gender oppression’, a key focus in this volume overall. Third, they
examine ‘the tension between men and women’s participation in establishing gender equity’
and the challenges of engaging with patriarchal structures in religions in order to bring about
change (Chapter 38, p. 551). Benjamin Kirby and Adriaan van Klinken take a closer look at the
impact of religion on men in their chapter ‘Religions and Masculinities in Africa: Power, Poli-
tics, Performance’, which points to the ways in which African masculinities are often portrayed
in terms of ‘crises’. Despite problems with the alarmist nature of such a depiction, they suggest
that religion is one of the ways which men navigate ‘social, cultural, economic, and political
change’ (Chapter 39, p. 566). They provide an overview of the topic of religions and masculini-
ties in Africa and draw on their ethnographic research in Zambia and Tanzania in terms of the
three themes of ‘power, politics, and performance’ (Chapter 39, p. 567).
The final region discussed in the volume is Oceania, and the section begins with Anna Hala-
foff and Kathleen McPhillips’ chapter ‘Women and Religion in Oceania’. They acknowledge
the ‘rich histories of cultural, religious and linguistic diversity’, from the original Indigenous
peoples to later explorers, colonisers and economic migrants (Chapter 40, p. 576). They provide
a historical overview of the religion, gender and society nexus in the region and then discuss
two case studies of Christian and Buddhist women in Australia. They focus on ‘structural vio-
lence’ against women in the region and the role that religion plays in this, as well as how it is
being addressed by both men and women, ‘at times with the support of both offline and online
international social movements campaigning for gender parity’ (Chapter 40, p. 576). Joshua
Roose, in his chapter ‘Masculinity, Religion, Rugby and Society in Oceania’, also notes how
‘it is difficult to talk uniformly about matters of religion or masculinity in the region’ and that
‘One must think creatively to seek to distil the concepts of masculinity and religion into a cohe-
sive and substantive discussion’ (Chapter 41, p. 593). Cleverly taking the theme of sport as the
focus, rugby specifically, he argues that the ‘Rugby playing fields, clubrooms and boardrooms
are arguably the key site of interaction between men (and increasingly women) of the constitu-
ent nations of Oceania’ (Chapter 41, p. 593). Young men from the Pacific islands see rugby as a
14
Introduction
route out of poverty as they take up positions in New Zealand or Australia, in a sport where for
players from Indigenous backgrounds in particular the ‘intersection of religion and masculinity
is powerful’ (Chapter 41, p. 593). He discusses the sacking of the Australian Wallaby’s fullback,
Israel Folau (of Tongan heritage), following his ‘posting of religiously inspired anti-homosexual
Twitter messages’ (Chapter 41, p. 594). This brought to the surface tensions between ‘the toler-
ance for public displays of religion by Pacific Island rugby players’ and ‘secular Australia driven
by neoliberal economic imperatives’ and became ‘the key case central to the development of
freedom of religion legislation in Australia’ (Chapter 41, p. 594).
What the chapters in this volume demonstrate amply is the richness and variety inherent in
any study of religion, gender and society in both global and local manifestations. Despite the
dominance of secularisation paradigms, it is clear that there remains a powerful role for religion
in shaping contemporary gendered expectations and experiences, and this is showing no sign of
abating, even in so-called secular contexts. The chapters in this volume demonstrate the ongo-
ing need to understand the complexities, tensions and local specificities of religion and gender
in the contemporary world and the importance of questioning any universalised understandings
of concepts such as agency, oppression, power and liberation.
Notes
1 Although on the whole unsatisfactory designations, the terms Global South and Global North are
socio-economic and political categories that make a distinction between countries that are more eco-
nomically developed in the ‘North’, and incidentally more secularised, and those that are less economi-
cally developed in the ‘South’, and incidentally tend to have higher levels of religiosity. The designation
does not neatly align to the geographical spaces of the northern and southern hemispheres, and some
‘developed’ countries are in the South and vice versa. However, it seeks to replace the outdated colo-
nialist language of first and third world, or developed and developing countries, for suggesting a norm
to which other countries had to catch up to, in order to be viewed as progressive and modern (see Lees
2021). There is a move towards replacing this language with the designation ‘minority’ and ‘majority’
worlds, to reflect the regions where smaller and larger populations reside, but this is less well known to
date (see https://borgenproject.org/tag/majority-world/).
2 This is written in the singular to refer to a body of theories about secularisation that assumes the
decline of religion both in the public sphere and in people’s private lives is an inevitable outcome of
modernity and modernisation, rather than to suggest that there is only one theory about secularisation.
Bibliography
Asad, Talal (2003) Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Avishai, Orit (2008) ‘ “Doing religion” in a secular world: Women in conservative religions and the ques-
tion of agency’, Gender & Society, 22(4), pp. 409–433.
Barlas, Asma (2002) “Believing women” in Islam: Unreading patriarchal interpretations of the Qur’ān. Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press.
Berger, Peter L. (1999) The desecularization of the world: Resurgent religion and world politics. Washington, DC:
Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Carrasco Miró, G. (2020) ‘Encountering the colonial: Religion in feminism and the coloniality of secular-
ism’, Feminist Theory, 21(1), pp. 91–109.
Casanova, José (1994) Public religions in the modern world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Clucas, R. (2012) ‘Religion, sexual orientation and the equality act 2010: Gay Bishops in the church of
England negotiating rights against discrimination’, Sociology, 46(5), pp. 936–950.
Daly, Mary (1968) The church and the second sex. New York: Harper & Row.
Davie, Grace (2015) Religion in Britain: A persistent paradox. 2nd Edition. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
Davie, Grace and Starkey, Caroline (2019) ‘The Lincoln letters: A study in institutional change’, Ecclesial
Practices, 6(1), pp. 44–64.
15
Desai, Sonalde, and Temsah, Gheda (2014) ‘Muslim and Hindu women’s public and private behaviors:
Gender, family, and communalized politics in India’, Demography, 51(6), pp. 2307–2332.
Donaldson, Laura E. and Kwok, Pui-Lan (2002) Postcolonialism, Feminism and religious discourse. New York:
Routledge.
Dwyer, C., Shah, B. and Sanghera, G. (2008) ‘ “From cricket lover to terror suspect”—challenging repre-
sentations of young British Muslim men’, Gender, Place & Culture, 15(2), pp. 117–136.
Edwards, Katie (2008) Sex and the garden: Representations of Eve in postfeminist popular culture. PhD
thesis, University of Sheffield.
Franzman, Majella (1999) Women and religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gross, Rita M. (1993) Buddhism after patriarchy: A feminist history, analysis, and reconstruction of Buddhism.
Albany: SUNY Press.
Habermas, Jurgen (2008) ‘Notes on post-secular society’, New Perspectives Quarterly, 25(4), pp. 17–29.
Holm, Jean and Bowker, John (eds) (2001) Women in religion. London and New York: Continuum.
Klein, Anne C. (1995) Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, feminists and the art of the self. Boston, MA:
Beacon Press.
Lees, N. (2021). The Brandt Line after forty years: The more North–South relations change, the more
they stay the same? Review of International Studies, 47(1), 85-106. doi:10.1017/S026021052000039X
Lehmann, J.M. (1994) Durkheim and women. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Mahmood, Saba (2005) Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton, NJ and Oxford:
Princeton University Press.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (1984) ‘Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses’,
Boundary, 2(12/13), pp. 333–358.
Pui-Lan, K. and Donaldson, L.E. (eds) (2002) Postcolonialism, feminism and religious discourse. London and
New York: Routledge.
Pui-Lan, Kwok (2002) ‘Unbinding our feet: Saving brown women and feminist religious discourse’. In
Pui-Lan, K., and Donaldson, L.E. (eds) Postcolonialism, feminism and religious discourse. London and New
York: Routledge. pp. 62–81.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford (1983) Sexism and god-talk: Toward a feminist theology. Boston, MA:
Beacon Press.
Said, E.W. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Sharma, Arvind (1994) Religion and women. Albany: SUNY Press.
Shaw, J. (2015) ‘Conflicts within the Anglican communion’. In Thatcher, A. (ed) The Oxford handbook of
theology, sexuality and gender. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 340–356.
Skeggs, Beverley (2008) ‘The dirty history of feminism and sociology: Or the war of conceptual attrition’,
The Sociological Review, 56(4), pp. 670–690.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988) Can the subaltern speak? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tiryakian, Edward A. (1993) ‘American religious exceptionalism: A reconsideration’, The Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science, 527, pp. 40–54.
Trzebiatowska, M. and Bruce, S. (2012) Why are women more religious than men? Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Vincett, Giselle, Sharma, Sonya and Aune, Kristin (2008) ‘Introduction: Women, religion and seculariza-
tion: One size does not fit all’. In Aune, Kristin, Vincett, Giselle, and Sharma, Sonya (eds) Women and
religion in the west: Challenging secularization. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp. 1–22.
16
PART 1
Critical debates for religions,

gender and society
Theories, concepts and methodologies
2
GENDER IN RELIGION,
RELIGION IN SOCIETY
The agency and identity of Christian women
Esther McIntosh
Introduction
Despite the early contention of the secularization thesis that traditional1 religion, at least in
industrialized nations, was in terminal decline, postmillennial (and premillennial) discourse fre-
quently refers to the resurgence of religion (for example, Zeidan 2003; Thomas, 2005; Troy
2012; Riesebrodt 2014). Religion, in political discourse, is back on the agenda; consequently,
the significance of religion for effective international relations and development policy is
increasingly being recognized (see Tomalin 2015).
Moreover, sociological studies consistently maintain that women are more religious than
men, especially with regards to affective religiousness (for example, Walter and Davie, 1998;
Stark 2002; Sullins, 2006; Trzebiatowska and Bruce, 2012; Pew Research Center 2016). Soci-
ologists have suggested a variety of explanations for this difference from the claim that male tes-
tosterone results in greater risk taking (Miller and Hoffman 1995)—whereas women are more
prudential regarding any possible afterlife—to the claim that ‘feminine’ traits (whether biologi-
cal or social) are linked with religiosity (Thompson 1991). Further claims include the sugges-
tion that women’s connection with childbirth (Martin 1967), and their limited presence in the
‘secular’ and ‘rational’ workplace, leads to community-seeking in religion (Luckmann 1967), as
well as the assertion that women experience greater existential angst in relation to poverty, debt
and aging and, hence, seek solace in religion (Norris and Inglehart 2008). Whatever the reason
for the apparent ‘gender gap’2 in religiosity, any study of religion that excluded the experience
of women would not be representative of its practitioners and would, therefore, be inadequate.
Yet, the post-Enlightenment/academic study of religion was more concerned with its
rationalizing approach than with that which it was omitting (for example, see Capps 1995).
By adopting a scientific method and seeking to understand religious practice as human activity,
the supposedly neutral and objective study of religions followed an androcentric and colonialist
agenda ( Joy 2001). Not only did historians and sociologists employ ‘religion’ as a category by
taking Christianity to be the norm and seeking to civilize that which it defined as ‘other’ and
primitive (Fitzgerald 2000), the field of religious data explored assumed that the male experi-
ence accounted for the experience of all practitioners (Gross 1996). This approach began to
shift in the 1970s, as universities started to offer courses in women’s studies and the influence of
feminism spread to scholars of religion.
19 DOI: 10.4324/9780429466953-3
Esther McIntosh
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gives the following definition of feminism: ‘a person who believes
in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes’ (2014: 47, emphasis original). A feminist
approach to the study of religion, therefore, seeks to expose inequality: both the androcen-
trism hidden in the insider/outsider approach to the field and the androcentrism embedded
in religion(s) that a purely phenomenological account of the data ignores (Saiving 1976; King
1995; Warne 1998). Consequently, by highlighting the manner in which women have been
excluded from aspects of orthodox religion or have been socialized to accept positions of sub-
servience legitimated by a gendered construction of religious hierarchy and power, feminism
teaches us that we cannot examine gender and religion, as if gender is an additional extra in the
field of study; rather, we must examine gender in religion.
Nevertheless, even while critiquing binaries of male/female and emphasizing the impor-
tance of women’s experience, the feminist study of religion has too often resulted in damaging
universalizing, homogenizing and essentializing categories. For instance, the White woman has
been represented as on a path to liberation, while the Black or Asian woman has been portrayed
as a victim in need of feminist emancipation.3 Hence, while the effort of colonizers in India to
abolish sati bore the hallmarks of imperialist White men trying to save Brown women (Spivak
1988), feminist scholars of the Christian religion, such as Mary Daly, assumed Hindu widows
were victims of patriarchal violence without fully studying the context in which the ritual takes
place. Similarly, Daly’s condemnation of female genital mutilation (FGM) bears the hallmark
of a White woman trying to save Black/African girls rather than serious engagement with the
contexts in which FGM operates (Daly 1978).
Furthermore, attempts by feminist practitioners of religion and feminist theologians to
reconstruct or reread history, so as to uncover the forgotten women rendered invisible by their
exclusion from male-authored texts, tend to claim that religions intended equality rather than
sexism; an original position that was distorted by patriarchal societies and their notions of men’s
and women’s innate abilities, which infused religion with inequalities (see Holm and Bowker
1994). Such an approach assumes that we can transplant ourselves from our socio-historical
location and access the original intention of an ancient religion; this is a limited and problematic
form of foundationalism.
By troubling the assumption that notions of gender—masculinity and femininity—are
reducible to biology—male and female, feminism disputes the presumption that the valori-
zation of men over women is due to men’s ‘natural’ masculinity. On the contrary, feminism
reveals that it is not masculinity per se that is prized in androcentric religions: it is the
masculine male who is valorized over the masculine female and over the feminine male
(Castelli 2001).4 Systemic sexism undervalues femininity, whilst demarcating women as
inferior based on a false connection between ‘female’ and ‘feminine’. In addition, by con-
trasting male and female, masculine and feminine, as complementary opposites, androcen-
tric religions valorize heterosexuality over homosexuality. Yet, the increasing awareness of
persons who self-identify as non-binary and/or transgender effectively ‘queers’ notions of
biological sex, sexuality and gender, thus presenting a challenge for religions that demar-
cate religious practice and observance along binary and heteronormative lines (Munt and
Jenzen 2012).5
Trans and non-binary persons are not unique to the 21st century: eunuchs, hijra and two-
spirit persons exist in ancient as well as modern communities, often in poverty; nevertheless,
there is increasing visibility of LGBTQI+ persons in campaigns for rights across the globe.6
Achievements in recognition, however, are frequently countered by a rolling back of rights as
found, for instance, in Brunei, Indonesia, Kenya, Russia and Uganda. Regressive backlashes,
such as these, are often bound up with repressive social regimes that claim authority over the
20
Gender in religion, religion in society
interpretation of religious texts, in attempts to justify discrimination of women and LGBTQI+

persons as divinely ordained and in keeping with holy scriptures.
Hence, we cannot separate religion and society as fields of study. We can only study religion
in society, and in so doing we must acknowledge our own biases and starting points. All schol-
ars have a role in the production of knowledge; we cannot ‘bracket out’ our identity. We are
either beneficiaries or victims of an imperialist and colonialist heritage; we cannot ignore White
privilege, cis privilege, class privilege, able-bodied privilege or heterosexual privilege. Thus, we
cannot separate the study of religion from the political motivations that drive it.
Consequently, the study of gender in religion in society must take account of intersectionality—
of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender, age, disability and religion—exposing gendered
oppression or exclusion that is legitimized by religion as well as that which is occasioned by
outward expressions of religious identity, while guarding against the temptation towards other-
ing, especially universalizing the other and representing the other as homogenous victim rather
than particular agent (Crenshaw 1989; King 1994).
In what follows, I consider the manner in which the various waves of feminism, and criti-
cisms thereof, have contributed to shaping the study of the Christian religion, especially wom-
en’s participation therein. As particular metaphors of contention, I examine the concepts of
female sacrifice and the maleness of divine imagery operating within Christianity to hold back
equality for female practitioners. Conversely, I explore the (re)turn to Christian fundamentalism
in America, focussing on the possibilities and limitations it affords for expressing female agency:
power in women’s ministries is precarious and achievable only along certain racial and heter-
onormative lines. At its heart, evangelical Christianity presents women with a clearly defined
role in which motherhood is elevated and relationality is central; this has certain benefits and
represents an especial challenge to feminist critiques of gendered roles. In Adichie’s words, ‘The
problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are.
Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if
we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations’ (2014: 34, emphasis original).
Making (some) women visible: the first wave (bridging the 19th and
20th centuries)
With the rise of first-wave feminism and its focus on suffrage in industrial societies, awareness
grew of the marginalization of women in the Christian religion and in society. At the Women’s
Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke out
against the inequality of the sexes found in Christianity. In particular, she challenged the scrip-
tural legitimacy of that inequality and accused the male hierarchy of (mis)interpreting sacred texts
to justify male dominance. She states, ‘The canon law, the Scriptures, the creeds and codes and
church discipline of the leading religions bear the impress of fallible man’ (Stanton 1974 [1898]:
pt I, 13). Galvanized by the realization that the 1870 revision of the Authorized Bible would take
place without deeming it necessary to consult any women, thus repeating the patriarchal and
misogynistic interpretations of the past, Stanton and her team of women drew up The Woman’s
Bible. In the text, the women identify biblical passages that speak of the equality of women and
men; they challenge women to use their own mental agility to determine which of the con-
tradictory and competing creation myths ‘is more worthy of an intelligent woman’s acceptance’
(Stanton 1974 [1898]: pt I, 18), and they conclude that the Christian subordination of women
is wholly founded upon male misinterpretation of biblical material. In a damning indictment of
the Church of England, Stanton asserts, ‘the most bitter outspoken enemies of women are found
among clergymen and bishops of the Protestant religion’ (1974 [1898]: pt I, 13).
21
Esther McIntosh
Raised as a Presbyterian Calvinist, Stanton was well versed in the Christian assertion that women
should be submissive, on the grounds that they are not deemed capable of exercising rationality
equivalent to that of men. As an adult, she rejected institutionalized Christianity holding its curtail-
ing of women’s agency to be incompatible with female emancipation. Together with the Quaker
(Religious Society of Friends) Susan B. Anthony, her campaign for suffrage gathered pace, but not
without promoting White supremacy; Stanton argued that White women should have the right to
vote before Black men. Despite meeting Sojourner Truth, whose ‘Ain’t I a Woman’ speech7 defied
racial and gender inferiority, Stanton chose racism over inclusion to further her cause.
Reform and accessibility: the second wave (1960s–1980s)

Almost a century later, as second-wave feminism rose in prominence, Mary Daly caused major
controversy in 1968 with the publication of The Church and the Second Sex. Like Stanton and her
horror at the idea that the revision of the Bible could take place without consulting women, Daly
was equally dismayed when the 1965 meeting of Vatican II in Rome did not mark a significant
turning point for the inclusion of women in Catholic Christianity; on the contrary, only a few
women were present and they were not permitted to speak. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s
earlier critique of the position of women as ‘the second sex’ (published in 1949), Daly brings to
the fore the opposing duality that is to be found in the Christian image of woman as the source
of sin and the idealized virgin mother, Mary. In her exceptionally bold work, in which Daly calls
out the sexism of Christian sources, she also offers a positive account of scriptural passages that
express equality, such as Genesis 1:27 ‘God created man in his image. In the image of God he cre-
ated them. Male and female he created them’ and Galatians 3:28 ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek,
there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus’
(1985 [1968]: 192). Despite this valiant attempt to capture equality in the source material, Daly
ultimately finds the patriarchy of the Bible and of institutionalized Christianity overwhelming
and irredeemable. Hence, in Beyond God the Father, she states, famously, ‘if God is male, then the
male is God’ (Daly 1973: 19). Following through on this conviction, she faced a legal challenge
for excluding men from her Women’s Studies classes at Boston College, USA. In her defence,
she argued that women, having been socialized to defer to men, require women-only spaces in
which to speak openly, without which their educational opportunities are curtailed.
Women had, thus far, been written out of history by male authorship; sacred texts had been
penned and interpreted by men who paid little attention to the participation of women or to
the impact on women of religious requirements associated with women’s bodily functions, such
as menstruation and childbirth. Moreover, women were frequently excluded from or expected
to remain silent during rituals, segregated from men in religious buildings, subjected to more
restrictive dress codes and denied access to higher-status roles within their religion. A feminist
rereading of history attempts to recover missing women, to reveal ‘herstory’, to ask questions
about women’s roles and experiences—their agency and identity—in religions across the globe
(Gross 1977; King 1987).
This stage of the feminist influence on feminist theology, therefore, can be seen as a process
of conscientization: an awakening to the silencing of women, the oppressiveness of male God-
language and a reclamation of positive images and role models. A pioneering practitioner in this
respect is Carol Christ, whose early work on goddess symbolism opens up avenues of conversa-
tion and religious expression (1979). She states:
Religions centred on the worship of a male God create ‘moods’ and ‘motivations’ that
keep women in a state of psychological dependence on men and male authority . . .
22
Religious symbol systems focused around exclusively male images of divinity create
the impression that female power can never be fully legitimate.
(Christ 1979: 275)
Alternatively, the symbol of the goddess represents the freeing of women from dependence
on men: it is an ‘affirmation of female power, the female body, the female will, and women’s
bonds and heritage’ (Christ 1979: 276). In addition to rendering female power and authority
legitimate, drawing on religious traditions ancient and modern, goddess spiritualities affirm
women’s bodies and bodily functions by replacing menstrual taboos with new rituals; in contrast
to patriarchal religion, goddess spiritualities value the wisdom of the aging ‘crone’ and cel-
ebrate women’s relations to one another as sisters and daughters. As a corrective to an historical
emphasis on female bondage to fathers and husbands, goddess spiritualities foreground female
agency; their signature is aptly captured in the finale of Ntozake Shange’s multi-award winning,
provocative choreopoem with the lines, ‘i found God in myself/ & i loved her/ i loved her
fiercely’ (1975/1997: 87).
Similarly, for the purpose of their own preservation, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (1983)
argues that Christian women should leave the institutionalized church, and its embedded sex-
ism, forming an ekklēsia of women and making use of goddess imagery. Women-church does
not equate to the oppression of men but rather to the survival of women through the denuncia-
tion of the androcentric interpretation of their religion that gives false theological legitimacy to
their subordination in home and church. In women-church, Fiorenza explains:
Rather than defining women’s relationship to God by their sexual relationship to men
and through the patriarchal structures of family and church, a feminist Christian spir-
ituality defines women’s relationship to God in and through the experience of being
called into the discipleship of equals, the assembly of free citizens who decide their
own spiritual welfare.
(1983: 349)
Fiorenza’s account is contrary to the complementarity thesis found in patriarchal religions;

that is, the narrative that women and men are different but equal, and, therefore, that male
domination and power over subordinate and obedient females is both natural and divinely
ordained. For women to have full access to participation in the roles and rituals of their religion,
the complementarity thesis has to be contested; Nawal El Saadawi is a formidable pioneer who
does exactly that. In Egypt in 1977, she courageously published The Hidden Face of Eve giving
voice to the suffering of women in the Arab world.8 Even though ‘The great religions of the
world uphold similar principles in so far as the submission of women to men is concerned’ (El
Saadawi 1980: 428), she asserts that patriarchy rather than religious ideology is the primary
cause of female oppression, and yet, she declares, ‘where the cause of women was concerned,
they [religions, explicitly Christianity and Islam] added a new load to their already heavy chains’
(El Saadawi 1980: 428).
Although religious studies and women’s studies have existed in parallel to a large extent—
scholars in women’s studies frequently ignore the influence of religion on women’s status and
roles—theologians and scholars of religion learned from women’s studies a distinction between
sex and gender that proved useful for explaining and highlighting women’s lowly status in reli-
gions and societies. Thereafter, awareness of the patriarchal construction and transmission of
knowledge informed the interrogation of the supposedly value-neutral status of epistemology
(more recently referred to as ‘epistemic injustice’, see Fricker 2007). Nancy Chodorow, for
23
Esther McIntosh
instance, uses the work of Robert Stoller to support the claim that ‘sex’ is a biological category
onto which ‘gender’—understood as femininity and masculinity—is socially inscribed (1978).
Such inscription informs the claim that women, as a sex-based group, are ‘natural’ nurturers,
due to their childbearing capacity, which, in turn, supposedly renders the characteristics of
femininity—subservience, gentleness, humility, caring—innate. Likewise, in patriarchal societies,
men, as a sex-based group, are assumed innately masculine and expected to exhibit dominance,
strength, aggression and rationality. Consequently, in patriarchal religions and societies, women
are portrayed as inferior to men who are regarded as being superior because of these gendered
traits. Chodorow, however, contends that these restrictive definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, as
masculine and feminine, superior and inferior respectively, can be corrected through resocializa-
tion; she calls this ‘(de)gendering’ (1978: 24).
On the one hand, distinguishing between sex and gender helpfully challenges gendered
stereotypes of feminine and masculine behaviours. On the other hand, it assumes that the
body is neutral and passive in respect of role socialization; whereas, in reality, biological dif-
ferences contribute to the marginalization of women in patriarchal religions and societies:
menstruation, for instance, as a function associated with female bodies, is associated with
shame, modesty and cleansing rituals. Furthermore, the sex/gender distinction gives an overly
simplistic impression of the valorization of masculinity over femininity in patriarchal socie-
ties and religion; that is, the implication is that, via resocialization, women can throw off the
shackles of femininity and no longer be deemed inferior to men. On the contrary, the same
behaviours have rather different social significance depending upon which body enacts them.
Like the suffragettes, women seeking ordination have been lambasted for the masculine behav-
iour they supposedly display by speaking in public and rejecting domesticity. Women avoid
being reproved, therefore, insofar as they express their agency in gender-conforming ways (see
Manne 2017; Bowler 2019).
Critiquing the second wave: intersectionality

During second-wave feminism, two clear problems emerge which require redress within and
beyond religious studies: the first concerns the uncritical acceptance of the binary female/male
and its heteronormative assumptions; the second concerns the preoccupation with the concerns
of White middle-class women in the minority/one-third world embedded in the slogan ‘the
personal is political’ (Hanisch 1970).9 Betty Friedan’s landmark monograph The Feminine Mys-
tique shifted the goalposts for bored American housewives with its radical critique of the social
pressure on women to find fulfilment as wives, mothers and homemakers; she labels their dis-
satisfaction ‘the problem that has no name’ (1963: 5). Friedan’s proposed solution is the promo-
tion of self-actualization through meaningful work and mental stimulation. She receives sharp
criticism for her narrow focus. bell hooks10 writes:
Friedan’s famous phrase, ‘the problem that has no name,’ often quoted to describe the
condition of women in this society, actually referred to the plight of a select group
of college-educated, middle- and upper-class, married white women—housewives
bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted
more out of life. . . . That ‘more’ she defined as careers. She did not discuss who would
be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home. . . . She did not speak
of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored
the existence of all non-white women and poor women.
(hooks 1984: 1–2)
24
As hooks implies, the labouring classes had always worked, in poorly paid jobs; moreover,
Black women frequently worked as maids for wealthier White women. Hence, the bore-
dom of the White middle class and its proposed solution is bound up with the outsourcing
of domestic duties to poorer Black women. In the service of supposedly delicate and fragile
White women, Black women are stereotyped as hardy and inexhaustible caregivers. Black
women are thus subjected to discrimination on the grounds of gender, race and class; these
multiple layers of oppression are referred to by Kimberlé Crenshaw as ‘the intersectional expe-
rience’ (1989: 140).
Crenshaw and hooks were not alone in calling out second-wave feminists for exhibiting class
privilege and racial blindness; alongside the White feminist critique of Christian patriarchy in
the US at this time, African-American women, such as Delores Williams and Jacquelyn Grant,
were exposing their experience of the triple oppression of race, sex and class within Christian-
ity. Rather than refer to themselves as feminist theologians, they coined the term ‘womanist’, a
Black folk expression used by Alice Walker (1983). Williams’ work (1993) lays bare the biblical
stories that evidence the multiple layers of oppression tied to androcentrism and social domina-
tion; she exhorts Christians to reread those stories from the perspective of America’s history
of slavery and economic exploitation. For the African-American woman, the story of Abram
and Sarai (Gen. 16:1–16; 21:9–21), rather than relaying an innocuous story of God’s provision
of a child, tells of the slave and concubine, Hagar, forced to be a surrogate mother and then
abandoned, with God’s sanction. By rereading the biblical text in this way, Williams (1993)
holds up to view the Whiteness of patriarchal God imagery, beseeching Black women to find
God in themselves; she demands an answer to the question ‘who do you say God is?’ Similarly,
in a ‘coalition’ with White feminists, such as Rosemary Radford Ruether (1983), who inter-
rogates the notion of a male saviour saving women, Jacquelyn Grant (1989) shapes a Christology
from the position of racial oppression, scrutinizing the utilization of the image of the suffering
Christ—Jesus on the cross—to keep Black women in positions of subordination. From this
point forward, womanist theology draws on the image of a Black female Christ (Christa) as one
who identifies with and frees Black women from their pain.
Proactive women from a wide range of perspectives—including Dalit (Swarnalatha Devi),
Mujerista (Ada María Isasi-Diaz) and Latina (Ivone Gebara)—produced their own analyses of
religious androcentrism drawing on personal and local experiences.11 Despite advocating for the
academic study of women in religions and for greater recognition of female academics engaged
in those studies, second-wave feminists tended to view African and Asian women as victims,
caught up in irrational and oppressive religious and cultural practices. Academia was guilty of
essentializing the experience of colonized women as ‘other’, whilst portraying White women
and men as their liberators; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls this the ‘epistemic violence of
imperialism’ (1988: 28). Theological resistance to this imperialistic violence came from Hong
Kong, Korea and Ghana in the works of Kwok Pui-Lan, Chung Hyun Kyung and Mercy Amba
Oduyoye, to name a few (King 1994). Their adeptness at constructing theologies that resonate
with and empower previously colonized, frequently exploited and oppressed people contributes
to a radical shift in the conversation from generalizations to particularities, from imperialism
to postcolonialism, from the mainstream to those whose religious practice exists outside of
orthodox spaces.
Liberation from oppression is central to the concerns of the feminist movements, but, as
shown earlier, the means by which liberation is pursued can fail to encompass all oppressed
groups. In addition to gender, race and class, sexual orientation can add a further layer of inter-
sectional prejudice and oppression. Much of the analysis of sexism in society interrogates the
status of women in heterosexual relationships leaving lesbians, bi and queer women out of the
25
Esther McIntosh
field of reference; an exclusion that is exacerbated by patriarchal religions in which homosexuals

and bi, trans and queer persons are regarded as sexually deviant and sinful.
While fundamentalist forms of Christianity rail against the immorality of homosexuality,
liberal forms are more inclined to turn a blind eye than to campaign for equality. Hence, in
her 1985 presentation on ‘Lesbian Feminist Issues in Religion’ at the American Academy of
Religion, Carter Heyward asserts, ‘the feminist and gay/lesbian demand (not request) that
women and homosexual persons be affirmed (not tolerated) poses a challenge not only to the
good ordering of liberal social relations, but also a threat to the essence of liberal religion’ (1987:
37). Liberal religion, she explains, adopts a ‘live and let live’ approach, which is insufficient for
redressing historical and persistent discrimination. In other words, women’s agential expression
of queer sexuality is curtailed when this aspect of their identity renders them unequal, maligned
or ignored by their religion.
Locating the study of religion

In the global north, the study of religions expanded substantially in the 1960s.12 Academic
institutions tended to house religious studies departments within theology departments; this
meant that ‘religions’ were studied in opposition to Christian theology as ‘other’, and, further,
that the conception of ‘religion’ was marked by a false distinction between the religious and the
non-religious/secular. Thus, in Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s words:
[T]he Secular Modern West has postulated that human nature is fundamentally secu-
lar. . . . Religion, then—a Western concept—is conceived as an addendum, something
that some people have tacked on here and there in various forms, for one or another
reason. This ideology has forged a series of concepts in line with its own basic presup-
positions and in terms of which it could explain to itself the data of other ideologies,
other cultures, other ages; could interpret without disturbing its own central convic-
tions, the rest of humankind.
(1983: 8)
Whether ‘religion’ is employed to mean the quest for salvation, belief in the supernatural/
transcendent, ritual and myth, or doctrine and liturgy, the construction of religious studies as
a scientific or analytic discipline, intended to enhance understanding of diverse cultures and
practices, smuggled in theological categories. Rather than critiquing Christianity and the con-
cept of secularism, religious studies made ‘religion’ an object of study, and in so doing, made
‘being a Hindu something extra and above simply being human in a particular cultural and
historical and linguistic situation’ (Fitzgerald 2000: 43). Consequently, the beliefs and practices
of cultures other than Christian ones became the focus of analytic studies whose starting point
was a Protestant assumption that religion is a private matter, whereby the individual assents to
a set of propositions.
Under the guise of the phenomenological and analytic study of religions, then, the peoples
of the global south have been the subjects of supposedly objective data collection; in reality,
Timothy Fitzgerald insists, ‘The construction of “religion” and “religions” as global, cross cul-
tural objects of study has been part of a wider historical process of western imperialism, colo-
nialism, and neocolonialism’ (Fitzgerald 2000: 8). As an imperialist and colonialist enterprise,
religious studies shared with Christian missionaries the application of categories that are at odds
with the object of study; as a result, unfamiliar practices and beliefs have been deemed primitive
and superstitious, inferior to those of the educated ‘outsiders’. On the one hand, postcolonial
26
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
presence could awaken them from their attention to the fight; when
on a sudden they all faced her, and fear of punishment began now a
little to abate their rage. Each of the misses held in her right hand,
fast clenched, some marks of victory; for they beat and were beaten
by turns. One of them held a little lock of hair torn from the head of
her enemy, another grasped a piece of a cap, which, in aiming at her
rival’s hair, had deceived her hand, and was all the spoils she could
gain; a third clenched a piece of an apron; a fourth, of a frock. In
short, every one, unfortunately, held in her hand a proof of having
been engaged in the battle. And the ground was spread with rags
and tatters, torn from the backs of the little inveterate combatants.”
Space does not permit me to describe the efforts by which Miss
Jenny brought about the moral reform of the combatants. She
recounts to them her mamma’s system of bringing her up, with
especial reference to her studies up to the age of six; and the other
girls, brought to see the error of their ways by a recognition of the
unhappiness which their faults have always brought upon
themselves, recount the stories of their lives also. Fairy tales and
society plays are brought into the service of morality, and the
teaching to be deduced from them is expounded. And although at
the end of a fortnight Miss Jenny’s ministrations are ended by her
leaving school,
“all quarrels and contentions were banished from Mrs. Teachum’s
house; and if ever any such thing was likely to arise, the story of
Miss Jenny Peace’s reconciling all her little companions was told to
them: so that Miss Jenny, though absent, still seemed (by the bright
example which she left behind her) to be the cement of union and
harmony in this well-regulated society. And if any girl was found to
harbour in her breast a rising passion, which it was difficult to
conquer, the name and story of Miss Jenny Peace soon gained her
attention, and left her without any other desire than to emulate Miss
Jenny’s virtues.”
But perhaps it may be imagined that this story does not really
represent the system of education which we know from biographies
and letters did after all either produce, or allow to emerge, women of
strong character and considerable intellectual attainments.
For further light, turn to Miss Edgeworth’s two stories of Mlle.
Panache, the bad French governess, and Mlle. de Rosier, the good
French governess.
“Mrs. Temple had two daughters, Emma and Helen; she had taken
great care of their education, and they were very fond of their
mother, and particularly happy whenever she had leisure to converse
with them; they used to tell her everything that they thought and felt;
so that she had it in her power early to correct, or rather to teach
them to correct, any little faults in their disposition and to rectify
those errors of judgment to which young people, from want of
experience, are so liable.
“Mrs. Temple lived in the country, and her society was composed
of a few intimate friends; she wished, especially during the education
of her children, to avoid the numerous inconveniences of what is
called an extensive acquaintance. However, as her children grew
older, it was necessary that they should be accustomed to see a
variety of characters, and still more necessary that they should learn
to judge of them. There was little danger of Emma’s being hurt by
the first impressions of new facts and new ideas; but Helen, of a
more vivacious temper, had not yet acquired her sister’s good sense.
We must observe that Helen was a little disposed to be fond of
novelty, and sometimes formed a prodigiously high opinion of
persons whom she had seen but for a few hours. Not to admire was
an art which she had yet to learn.”
Helen enters upon this part of her education when she is between
eleven and twelve years old.
After this it creates a sensation of relief to hear Miss Edgeworth, in
describing the pupils of Madame de Rosier, declare of Favoretta, the
youngest, aged about six years old, that “At this age the habits that
constitute character are not formed, and it is, therefore, absurd to
speak of the character of a child six years old.” It would almost seem
that in making this assertion Miss Edgeworth was delivering heretical
views, and we have seen that the author of “Jemima Placid,” at any
rate, disagreed with her.
Turning from fiction to real life to confirm it, we find the following
advice given by the Countess of Carlisle, in 1789, to young ladies on
their first establishment in the world. In her preface she says that the
book is intended for those who have been educated. That this
implies moral education more than anything else is made evident.
The young married woman is, however, recommended to cultivate
her mind, and the advice takes practical form.
“If abundance of leisure shall allow you to extend your studies,”
says Lady Carlisle, “let arithmetic, geography, chronology, and
natural history compose the principal part.”
The brain which has not been trained in mental gymnastics in
early youth, unless unusually active, loses its powers. Narrow-
mindedness is a correct name for a psychological fact. That there
were broad and vigorous-minded women at this period who probably
owed much to their teachers there is no doubt. But, for the most part,
these were women who by their social position came in contact with
able men, and saw life from many points of view. The easy access to
personal acquaintance with leaders of thought, statesmen, practical
workers, and cultured and refined women, gives to the aristocracy
and the upper middle classes an education and training which never
cease, and which make a University training an amusing episode
rather than a necessity.
In the middle classes the circumstances and duties of a woman’s
life are entirely different. After marriage, a limited income and
maternal and domestic duties limit a woman’s social education, and
if her mental powers have not been fully developed by education it is
difficult for her to resist the tendency to become absorbed in her
purely personal worries and cares; brain atrophy sets in, and with it
old age, the closing up of the mental avenues to new impressions
and feelings.
Thus any child at a Board school can be taught arithmetic, and
most children at a high school can make progress in geometry and
algebra, but even capable middle class women, who begin these
subjects for the first time in early middle life, are frequently found to
be mentally incapable of the reasoning processes involved.
In one hundred years the age of childish irresponsibility has been
raised from six to about twelve, and in the extra six years thus
granted imagination and individuality have been left free to develop
themselves.
During the last twenty years another change has taken place. The
duties of the young person have altered. Formerly at the age of
eighteen, in the young person’s fiction, she was expected to relieve
her invalid mother of household cares and brighten her aged father’s
declining years. But mothers in 1899 refuse to become decrepit and
take to the sofa merely because their daughters are grown up, and
fathers only require to be amused occasionally in the evening. The
new mother may be considerably over thirty-five, bordering on fifty
perhaps, but she neither feels aged nor looks it, and is rather
inclined to look beyond her home for full scope for her powers when
thus set free from maternal cares. And, given intelligence, length of
years guarantees experience.
One of the tortures of the Inquisition was to place the victim in a
room, the walls of which grew nearer to each other every day until, at
last, they closed in on him and crushed him to death. In the same
way intelligent life gradually grows fainter and fainter as the brain
decays for want of exercise. A daily mental constitutional is
necessary to prevent the accumulation of what W. K. Clifford called
mental fat; mental gymnastics are needed to prevent stiffening of the
brain. When not only our habits but our ideas have become fixed,
then we have grown old. An octogenarian may be young, if he has
preserved the faculty of modifying his conceptions in
correspondence with new evidence.
Mental activity, provided there is no overstrain of the nerves, gives
freshness and interest to life, and to be fresh and interested is to be
young. It is because girls have been taught to use their brains, and
women have been encouraged to keep them in repair, that this old
stereotyped conception of the necessary failure of power after thirty-
five years of age has become absurd. At what age the value of a
woman’s increased experience is counterbalanced by diminished
physical power I do not pretend to judge. Women differ, and their
social opportunities differ. I merely transpose my text and say, “Do
not let your intellect lazily decline upon generalisations, formalised
rules, and laws of nature; but rather let it remain braced and keen to
watch the world accurately and take every appearance on its own
merits.”
MRS. STETSON’S ECONOMIC IDEAL.
March, 1900.
The argument of Mrs. Stetson’s book, “Women and Economics,”
may be briefly summed up as follows:—
(1) Man is the only animal species in which the female depends on
the male for food.
(2) The married woman’s living (i.e., food, clothing, ornaments,
amusements, luxuries) bears no relation to her power to produce
wealth, or to her services in the house, or to her motherhood.
(3) The woman gets her living by getting a husband. The man gets
his wife by getting a living.
(4) Although marriage is a means of livelihood, it is not honest
employment, where one can offer one’s labour without shame. To
earn her living a woman must therefore make herself sexually
attractive.
(5) The result of this is that, while men have been developing
humanity, women have been developing femininity, to the great
moral detriment of both men and women.
(6) The disastrous effects of this undue cultivation of sex
differences can only be prevented by the wife being economically
independent of her husband.
(7) This economic independence should be secured by the wife
earning her living by performing paid work for some person or body
other than her husband.
(8) The performance of maternal functions is not incompatible with
the performance of such remunerative services outside the family.
(9) The servant functions of preparing food and removing dirt are
not necessarily domestic functions, and could be better performed by
professional cooks outside the home, and professional cleaners
visiting the home or taking the work from the home.
(10) The nursemaid functions of minding small children can be
better performed, with greater advantage to the children, in the
crêche and kindergarten than in the domestic nursery.
(11) The wife can therefore advantageously be relieved from the
continuous supervision of the kitchen, the living rooms, and the
nursery, as she has already been relieved of the burden of the family
washing, dressmaking, tailoring, and manufacture of underclothing.
(12) She will then be free to earn her own living outside the home.
(13) By so doing she not only will prevent the evils which have
arisen from the wife’s economic dependence on her husband, but
she will develop her human faculties. For what we do modifies us
more than what is done for us.
The fifth, sixth, and seventh propositions are those on which the
whole argument hinges. Mrs. Stetson’s energy of expression and her
contempt for convention have deservedly secured for her a re-
consideration of old problems thus presented in a new form. The
ability with which she supports her conclusions is obvious. Her logic
needs more careful examination.
Her first argument I dismiss as quite irrelevant. Granted that at
least some men support their female kind, and that no brutes do,
nothing follows. I trust that there are many thousand characteristics
which may be predicated of man which must be denied of brutes.
Granted also her next argument, that what the wife obtains from
her husband bears no relation to her power to produce wealth, or to
her services in the house, or to her motherhood. Marriage, as Mrs.
Stetson maintains, should not be a business transaction, and
therefore the less commercial the relations of husband and wife to
each other, the less will service on one side be balanced against
service on the other side. The basis is the reverse of the economic
basis; the honest business man tries to get the largest amount for
himself obtainable without cheating his co-bargainer, trusting to the
latter to guard his own interests, and to see that what he gets is
worth to him what he gives for it. In any normal marriage the desire
on each side is to secure to the other the greatest amount of good at
a reasonable cost to themselves, the difference between persons
determining more than anything else what they consider a
reasonable cost. Stepniak, in a struggle with the English language,
once gave a very happy definition, which most practical people
would accept. “Marriage,” he said, “is to love and put up with.” Now
these are just the two acts that no one expects from the parties to a
commercial contract.
I therefore grant Mrs. Stetson’s second argument, and put it aside,
as being, like the previous one, beside the question.
Thirdly, “The woman gets her living by getting a husband. The
man gets his wife by getting a living.” Putting aside for the moment
the question of the truth of this statement, I agree with Mrs. Stetson
that in any social group of which such a statement is true the moral
tone of women, and therefore of men, will be a low one. In such a
state of society also it would be necessary, as Mrs. Stetson says, for
a woman, in order to earn her living, to make herself sexually
attractive. But before passing on I would point out that, at this stage
of the argument, the only part of this result which I would on the face
of it admit to be bad is that the woman in such a case frequently
falsely assumes attractive qualities which she does not really
possess, or conforms to a masculine standard of what is womanly
which she at heart despises. It is, in fact, the development of the
human qualities of fraud and hypocrisy which is to be deprecated,
rather than the development of feminine attraction.
But Mrs. Stetson makes the universal statement that women have
been developing femininity to a harmful degree, and to the injury of
the human attributes which should be common to both sexes. At first
imagining that Mrs. Stetson, like most women, was confining her
attention to the present and the near past, I was extremely puzzled
at this assertion. It seemed especially strange that it should come
from America, where even more than in England women have been
supposed to be developing their individuality in all kinds of
occupations hitherto supposed to be only suitable for men. But
suddenly Mrs. Stetson announces that after all she is only arguing in
favour of what many women are already doing, and have been doing
for the last half century or so.
Now to decide whether femininity has become excessive, we must
first know what group of women we are studying, and also with what
other group of women we are comparing them. Mrs. Stetson is not
apparently describing the present century as ending with a great
development of purely feminine qualities, and even if she were, we
might fairly ask her to tell us whether she includes Americans, Turks,
Hindoos, and Hottentots under the same category. But there is no
hint given of any great differences between women rendering it
necessary to limit the nations coming under review, nor do I find it
possible to date exactly the epochs chosen for comparison. On p.
129 we have the following condonement of the treatment of woman
in past ages:—
With a full knowledge of the initial superiority of her sex, and the
sociological necessity for its temporary subversion, she should feel
only a deep and tender pride in the long patient ages during which
she has waited and suffered that man might slowly rise to full racial
equality with her. She could afford to wait. She could afford to suffer.
Searching carefully to find at what period of the world’s history the
initial superiority of the woman was obvious prior to its temporary
subversion, I find on page 70 the approximate date given in the
following passage:—
The action of heredity has been to equalise what every tendency
of environment and education made to differ. This has saved us from
such a female as the gypsy moth. It has held up the woman and held
down the man. It has set iron bounds to our absurd effort to make a
race with one sex a million years behind the other.
Clearly, then, the decline and fall of woman dates back at least
one million years. In practical retrospection there must be a Statute
of Limitations. Neither Mrs. Stetson nor any one else knows what
men or women were like a million years ago, or even ten thousand
years ago. Nor is it permissible to turn, as Mrs. Stetson frequently
does, to feeble-minded contemporary savages. Darwin, unlike the
majority of those who quote him, did not profess to know everything,
or to be able to supply the history of events of which no record has
been left. We have no reason whatever for imagining that our
ancestors were lacking in fortitude and intellectual vigour, and we
have much for believing that no highly civilised race will ever be
developed from the savage tribes with which we are acquainted.
“From the good and brave are born the brave.” Horace knew
probably as much about heredity as most of us do, and the average
person’s principal debt to Darwin is his emancipation from the
bondage of Hebrew mythology.
While declining, therefore, to follow Mrs. Stetson in her wonderful
flights of fancy with regard to unknown times and races of mankind,
and acknowledging myself incapable of judging whether women
have become more or less feminine as compared with prehistoric
times, I agree with Mrs. Stetson, so far as regards a section of
American and English society, when she says (p. 149) that “women
are growing honester, braver, stronger, more healthful and skilful and
able and free—more human in all ways,” and that this improvement
has been at least coincident with, and to some extent due to, the
effort to become at least capable of economic independence.
But Mrs. Stetson takes a flying leap when from these premisses
she jumps to the conclusion that the wife’s economic independence
of the husband is necessary to prevent the evils consequent on
women being dependent on marriage for a living.
Mrs. Stetson makes no distinction between the effects of
economic dependence before marriage and economic dependence
after marriage. But provided that before marriage a woman is able to
support herself with sufficient ease to render her a free agent, and
that she retains the power of being self-supporting should economic
necessity from any cause arise after marriage, what is the objection
to pecuniary dependence on the husband? I see none whatever.
So that I find myself obliged to put aside all Mrs. Stetson’s stirring
appeals for a moral advance as very interesting, but as having really
no bearing on her proposed reforms, which must therefore be
considered on their own merits.
Criticism of the proposed reorganisation of domestic arrangements
I leave to the practical housewife.
It is only the fitness of the mother, or perhaps, for anything the
employer can tell, the about-to-become mother, for regular work
away from home that I wish to consider. Her own physical condition,
to say nothing of the liability of her children to get measles,
whooping-cough, croup, and mumps, will prevent her services from
being warmly appreciated in most skilled occupations. Then Mrs.
Stetson leaves us in the dark as to what these remunerative
occupations are in which mothers may earn a living in their leisure
hours.
On p. 9 Mrs. Stetson says:—
The making and managing of the great engines of modern
industry, the threading of earth and sea in our vast systems of
transportation, the handling of our elaborate machinery of trade,
commerce, and government—these things could not be done so well
by women in their present degree of economic development. This is
not owing to lack of the essential human faculties necessary to such
achievements, nor to any inherent disability of sex, but to the present
condition of woman forbidding the development of this degree of
economic ability.
While reducing maternal duties to a minimum, Mrs. Stetson admits
no disposition to evade them, and if she nevertheless considers that
women are hindered by no inherent disability of sex from equalling
the industrial achievements of men, it must be because she thinks
the interruption of work in early middle life is of no great importance.
The fact that whereas marriage generally stimulates a man to work
more strenuously, it lessens a woman’s power of concentrating her
energies on her profession or industrial employment, must always
handicap her in industrial competition with men.
Again, in advocating that the varied occupations of the housewife
or house servant should be exchanged for specialised employment
in large kitchens, in crêches, in the bedrooms of apartment houses,
she is really condemning women to a worse servitude than anything
necessarily imposed by domestic service. The girl who is successful
with two-year-old babies is to manage babies all day long, and for
life, for crêche experience does not qualify for admission to the
kindergarten or the high school, and marriage is to offer no release.
The good cook is to live in a restaurant kitchen, cooking meals for all
hours in the day. The professional chambermaid is expected to look
forward to being a charwoman always.
Mrs. Stetson has strange ideas about the effects of regular outside
work:—
“The mother,” she says, “as a social servant instead of a house
servant, will not lack in true mother duty. She will love her child as
well, perhaps better, when she is not in hourly contact with it, when
she goes from its life to her own life, and back from her own life to its
life, with ever new delight and power. She can keep the deep thrilling
joy of motherhood far fresher in her heart, far more vivid and open in
voice and eyes and tender hands, when the hours of individual work
give her mind another channel for her own part of the day. From her
work, loved and honoured though it is, she will return to the home
life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all
the fret and friction and weariness that so mar it now.”
This all sounds very beautiful, but is it true? This is not the frame
of mind in which men generally return from their work, but perhaps
that is because they are only fathers. Nor am I acquainted with any
well-paid work that one can love and honour all day long; at best it is
physically exhausting, and when it is not it is generally routine
drudgery. Again, children have a way of choosing their own times for
being affectionate, and the half hour or so their mother has to spare
before it is their time to go to bed may be considered by them an
inopportune time for endearments. The hardened babies who have
found the day attractive enough without anybody’s hugs and kisses
may perhaps find their sentimental mother’s embraces an irritating
nuisance.
I see no reason for believing that either wife, husband, or children
will be anything but worse off if the wife goes outside the home to
earn a living; nor do I know of any skilled work for educated women,
requiring daily assiduous attention for the whole day, in which
maternity, or the possibility of maternity, would not be a drawback in
the eyes of an experienced employer. It is conceivable that a married
woman with capital might be successful as an employer herself, with
the power to delegate her business supervision to others when
necessary; but I doubt whether she has ever done so with much
success, except in cases, as in France, where the wife has generally
been the assistant of her husband, or assisted by him.
But the real value of Mrs. Stetson’s argument is that by its
absurdity it brings home to us with striking force a fact of which most
middle-class people have only a sub-conscious knowledge—that,
unfortunately, in England at any rate, what Mrs. Stetson calls the
economic independence of the wife is in too many cases not an
ideal, but a reality.
Mrs. Stetson says that economic independence among human
beings means that the individual pays for what he gets, works for
what he gets, gives to the other an equivalent for what the other
gives him. “As long as what I get is obtained by what I give,” says
Mrs. Stetson, “I am economically independent.”
I do not accept this as a true definition of independence, but it is
sufficient that this represents the ideal of independence that Mrs.
Stetson desires.
Well, nearly all unmarried women in England are self-supporting.
The servant-keeping class is probably less than 12 per cent. of the
population; a considerable number of unmarried women even in
these classes support themselves. It is only in this servant-keeping
class that it has ever been true that there was no means for a
woman to get a living except by marriage. And if in the classes below
women have married in order to be relieved from working for their
living, they have found that the married woman’s life was harder, so
far as work was concerned, than that of the unmarried woman.
Domestic servants, accustomed to luxurious living and comparative
ease as professional servants, willingly consent to marry artisans on
25s. a week, and to work harder than any maid-of-all-work would be
asked to do. In factory districts a considerable percentage of the
married women go out to work; and there is no greater slave to her
husband than the woman who receives no support from him.
I am far from maintaining that a married woman should not do paid
work. In all cases where a wife knows herself to be decidedly below
par in housekeeping capacity, it is a natural enough thing that she
should wish to make up for her expensiveness in this direction by
earning some money by work for which she has more aptitude. But
even in this case, unless she has some specially strong aptitude for
some kind of highly-paid casual work, she would probably be wiser
to spend her energies in trying to make herself better fitted for her
position of house mistress.
“The development of any human labour requires specialisation,”
says Mrs. Stetson. But the direction of human labour requires
generalisation; and the married woman, by giving up her post of
general, will go down several grades in the army of workers. As it is,
she alone amongst skilled workers can watch the development of
human beings of both sexes at every stage; the best fitted
psychological laboratory in Germany cannot compete with the one
that every married woman has at hand in which to study human
nature, if only she has the intelligence to know it. Even the domestic
servant system at its worst has at least one merit—that it prevents us
from ever being able to shut our eyes to the great deficiencies in the
education of the working classes. Dismiss our servants to the
restaurant kitchen or the bedroom cleaners’ supply associations, and
who knows what sham admiration of the working classes, and real
apathy with regard to their welfare, may be developed?
The married woman who knows how to turn her experience to
good advantage may eventually become a person of high industrial
value. In a world where so many odd jobs which ought to be done
are left undone, because all the experienced workers are
permanently employed, the married woman with experience and
judgment comes in as the right person in the right place. She is
perhaps the only skilled casual worker. If there is no need for money,
she should prove the best philanthropic worker, her position as
mistress of a house making it possible for her to give a personal
service in her own home which the official philanthropist must often
regret she is unable to offer. And when her children really are old
enough to be quite satisfactorily left to themselves and their teachers
for the working day, I see no reason why the skilled married woman
should not enter the labour market, and undertake the direction of
one or other of those big institutions which Mrs. Stetson wishes to be
universal, and which most of us regard as in some cases necessary.
It is not permissible to serve two masters. The mother who thinks of
earning her living must choose whether her children or the earning of
an income shall be her first duty. If her children take the second
place, she is worth nothing as a mother; if they take the first place,
she is worth little as an outside worker. But in later life the two
occupations need not clash. But although the elderly married woman
may prove a valuable industrial organiser in the hotel, the residential
chambers company, the hospital, the orphanage, or the college, it
will only be by having served her apprenticeship, and taken honours
as a house mistress and mother.
I have not cared to discuss Mrs. Stetson’s views on housekeeping.
But I not only see room for improvement in the domestic organisation
of working women’s homes, but feel very hopeful of the power of
women in the working classes to arrive at, at least, a partial solution
of their difficulties by co-operation in removing them. The most
important result of the co-operative movement will, I believe, be the
improvement of the conditions of home life, and the better
organisation of the housework of the overtasked wives of our
artisans and clerks.
There is much truth in Mrs. Stetson’s criticisms of women’s failures
in every direction, but the remedy is better education and simpler
tastes. It is only for the sake of her thesis that Mrs. Stetson finds fault
with women or with men. She is generous in her estimate of the
actual and possible capacities of both, and is full of high-minded
delusions about them. “Woman holds her great position as the
selector of the best among competing males; woman’s beautiful
work is to improve the race by right marriage.”
And not once does it cross her mind that most women are neither
particularly attractive nor particularly good, and that they have
therefore neither the power nor the right to assume this lofty office.
She is never so childlike as when she imagines she is most
daring. And the charm of the book is its excessive femininity. What
she says, even when not absolutely absurd, may be of little
importance; but her feeling is so genuine and strong as to merit
respect and attention.
THROUGH FIFTY YEARS.
THE ECONOMIC PROGRESS OF WOMEN.
November, 1900.
Looking back fifty years for the best picture of the middle-class
woman’s outlook on life, spreading itself before her after some
startling shock of reality, none seems to me so true and so vivid as
Caroline Helstone’s vision of her own future given in “Shirley.” The
book appeared in October, 1849.
Although not so instinct with the flame of genius as “Villette,” yet in
some respects “Shirley” is Charlotte Brontë’s greatest work. Her
other novels present life only as it appeared to an exceptional
woman cut off by what was in those days called the “dependent
situation” of a governess from wholesome relations with those about
her. Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe are the morbid products of life in
institutions, and Charlotte Brontë, to whom family life was an
imperative necessity, was fully conscious of their abnormality. In
“Shirley” we have a broader, more sympathetic, in every way saner
treatment of men and women. And the protest against the
unnecessary tragedy of women’s lives comes not from the
passionate egotist of the schoolroom, but from the most lovable,
perhaps the only lovable, woman in Charlotte Brontë’s books.
“I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it,
so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be
that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to
many, and is becoming to me among the rest. Nobody,” she went on
—“nobody in particular is to blame, that I can see, for the state in
which things are, and I cannot tell, however much I puzzle over it,
how they are to be altered for the better; but I feel there is something
wrong somewhere. I believe single women should have more to do
—better chances of interesting and profitable occupation than they
possess now.... Look at the numerous families of girls in this
neighbourhood—the Armitages, the Birtwhistles, the Sykes. The
brothers of these girls are every one in business or in professions;
they have something to do; their sisters have no earthly employment
but household work and sewing, no earthly pleasure but an
unprofitable visiting; and no hope, in all their life to come, of anything
better. This stagnant state of things makes them decline in health:
they are never well; and their minds and views shrink to wondrous
narrowness. The great wish—the sole aim—of every one of them is
to be married, but the majority will never marry; they will die as they
now live. They scheme, they plot, they dress to ensnare husbands.
The gentlemen turn them into ridicule: they don’t want them; they
hold them very cheap. They say—I have heard them say it with
sneering laughs many a time—the matrimonial market is
overstocked. Fathers say so likewise, and are angry with their
daughters when they observe their manœuvres; they order them to
stay at home. What do they expect them to do at home? If you ask,
they would answer, sew and cook. They expect them to do this, and
this only, contentedly, regularly, uncomplainingly, all their lives long,
as if they had no germs of faculties for anything else—a doctrine as
unreasonable to hold, as it would be that the fathers have no
faculties but for eating what their daughters cook, or for wearing
what they sew. Could men live so themselves? Would they not be
very weary? And, when there came no relief to their weariness, but
only reproaches at its slightest manifestation, would not their
weariness ferment in time to frenzy?... King of Israel, your model of a
woman is a worthy model. But are we, in these days, brought up to
be like her? Men of Yorkshire! do your daughters reach this royal
standard? Can they reach it? Can you help them to reach it? Can
you give them a field in which their faculties may be exercised and
grow? Men of England! look at your poor girls, many of them fading
around you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is
worse, degenerating to sour old maids—envious, backbiting,
wretched, because life is a desert to them; or, what is worst of all,
reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice,
to gain that position and consideration by marriage, which to celibacy
is denied. Fathers! cannot you alter these things? Perhaps not all at
once; but consider the matter well when it is brought before you,
receive it as a theme worthy of thought; do not dismiss it with an idle
jest or an unmanly insult. You would wish to be proud of your
daughters and not to blush for them—then seek for them an interest
and an occupation which shall raise them above the flirt, the
manœuvrer, the mischief-making tale-bearer. Keep your girls’ minds
narrow and fettered—they will still be a plague and a care,
sometimes a disgrace to you. Cultivate them, give them scope and
work—they will be your gayest companions in health, your tenderest
nurses in sickness, your most faithful prop in age.”
And Mary Taylor—Rose Yorke in “Shirley”—added, “Make us
efficient workers, able to earn our living in order that we may be
good, useful, healthy, self-respecting women.”
How far have we travelled in these fifty years towards Mary
Taylor’s ideal? How far is it accepted as a right one? Is it now
considered a sufficiently ambitious one?
There is no doubt that we have travelled much nearer to it than
anyone in 1850 would have foreseen, and further than many
pioneers at that period would have desired.
We may safely assert that no middle-class woman of average
intelligence, educated in the high schools established during the last
twenty-five years, is unable to earn a living if she chooses to do so.
And one very important change has taken place. Whereas thirty
years ago it was the rule for many parents, although with little hope
of bequeathing an income to their daughters, to support them at
home in expectation of their marriage, this lack of foresight is
becoming rare. Our schools are no longer staffed by women who
have begun their work in life driven to it by necessity or
disappointment. More and more it is being recognised by parents
that girls should be fitted to be self-supporting; and the tendency
among the girls themselves is to concentrate their energies on the
profession they take up, and to regard marriage as a possibility
which may some day call them away from the path they are
pursuing, but which should not be allowed to interfere with their
plans in the meantime.
At the period of life, then, when there is the most opportunity of
marriage there is now the least excuse for the woman who marries
merely to obtain a livelihood. The economic advance has at least
been sufficient to enable women to preserve their self-respect.
Next it must be admitted that the work which educated women are
paid to do is in the main useful and satisfying work. They no longer
think of supporting themselves by acting as useful companions to
useless women; nor do they have to spend their time in imperfectly
imparting valueless facts in the schoolroom. The teaching and
nursing professions, which include more educated women in their
ranks than any other, have made great advances. In both every
worker who wishes to be efficient can make herself so, and while
youth and health last those occupations are absorbing enough in
themselves to be worth living for.
At the same time, the women who succeed in either of these
callings must be above the average in ability. The merely average
girl must turn to some occupation in which more people are wanted,
but for which less exceptional skill is required. Generally she looks
for it in one of two directions: she either becomes a clerk or some
kind of domestic help. Failing marriage, the latter occupation offers
chances, but not certainties, of making warm friends, and having
abiding human interests. But clerical work in the case of the average
woman can rarely be in itself satisfying; it is a means, not an end.
And here lies the great difference between men and women in the
labour market. All that the average man demands is that his work
should be honest and remunerative. It need not be interesting, or
elevating, or heroic. Most women, on the other hand, who look
forward to a long working career must have an occupation to which
they can give both heart and mind. The reason is simple. The
woman is living an isolated life; unless her work involves the
exercise of what may be termed her maternal faculties, she is living
an unnatural life. Men, on the other hand, whatever be their
employment, are generally husbands and fathers. What they earn is
of more importance than what they do.

Full Ebook of The Routledge Handbook of Religion Gender and Society 1St Edition Caroline Starkey Editor Online PDF All Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Full Ebook of The Routledge Handbook of Religion Gender and Society 1St Edition Caroline Starkey Editor Online PDF All Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Routledge Handbook of Religion

Gender and Society 1st Edition Caroline

The The Routledge Handbook of Religion Medicine and

Routledge Handbook of Religion and Politics 3rd Edition

The Routledge Handbook of Property, Law and Society 1st

The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to

Epistolary Narratives of Love Gender and Agonistic

Gender and the Law 1st Edition Judith Bourne Caroline

The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study

Routledge Handbook of Russian Politics and Society,

Caroline Starkey is Associate Professor of Religion and Society, School of Philosophy,

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION AND ANIMAL ETHICS

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF MORMONISM AND GENDER

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF ISLAM AND GENDER

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION AND JOURNALISM

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION AND CITIES

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF HINDU-CHRISTIAN RELATIONS

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION, MEDICINE AND HEALTH

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION, MASS ATROCITY, AND GENOCIDE

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION, GENDER AND SOCIETY

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-

Edited by Caroline Starkey and Emma Tomalin

1 Introduction: the continuing relevance of religion for understanding

2 Gender in religion, religion in society: the agency and identity

3 The feminism conundrum: a contested term for the study of religion

4 Oppression or liberation? Moving beyond binaries in religion and

5 Gender, religion, and postcolonialism: the Birhen sa Balintawak and

6 Buddhist nuns and civil activism in transitional Myanmar 88

7 Reclaiming public and digital spaces: the conundrum of acceptance

8 Social media and online environments: Muslim and Mormon

10 Bodies and embodiment: the somatic turn in the study of religion

11 Narrative approaches to religion and gender: a biographic study with

12 When my work is found wanting: power, intersectionality,

13 Butch lesbians, femme queens and promiscuous clergy: queering the

14 Gender variance and the Abrahamic faiths 208

16 Religion and intimate life: marriage, family, sexuality 234

17 Age, gender and de-churchisation 249

18 Gender, religion and childhood: towards a new research agenda 261

19 Mothers, bodhisattvas and women of tomorrow: religiously connoted

20 Articulating the neoliberal motherhood discourse: visions of gender

21 Women, religion and the state: a gendered analysis of the Catholic

22 Religion, gender justice, violence, and peace 321

23 Religion and sexual violence 339

24 Religion, gender and international development: searching for game

25 A decological way to dialogue: rethinking ecofeminism

26 Religion and gender in Europe: thinking through politico-social and

27 Religion and masculinities in Europe 402

28 The legacy of colonialism and the regulation of gender in

29 Troubling the demonic: anti-Blackness, heterosexual Black

30 Religion and gender dynamics in Latin American societies 442

31 Latin America—religion, gender, masculinities and sexual diversity 457

32 Women, religion and social inequality in India: intersectionality,

33 Hindu muscular nationalism: politicized Hinduism and manhood

34 ‘A monster had eaten me whole’: religiously inspired charitable

35 Masculinities and religion in Southeast Asia 514

36 Reform, continuities and conservatism in the Middle East and

37 Toward a comprehensive approach to understanding the construction

38 Exploring tensions: gender and religion in Sub-Saharan Africa 551

39 Religions and masculinities in Africa: power, politics, performance 566

40 Women and religion in Oceania 576

41 Masculinity, religion, rugby and society in Oceania 593

Nadine Bowers Du Toit

6 Buddhist nuns and civil activism in transitional Myanmar 88

14 Gender variance and the Abrahamic faiths 208

16 Religion and intimate life: marriage, family, sexuality 234

17 Age, gender and de-churchisation 249

18 Gender, religion and childhood: towards a new research agenda 261

22 Religion, gender justice, violence, and peace 321

23 Religion and sexual violence 339

27 Religion and masculinities in Europe 402

30 Religion and gender dynamics in Latin American societies 442

31 Latin America—religion, gender, masculinities and sexual diversity 457

35 Masculinities and religion in Southeast Asia 514

38 Exploring tensions: gender and religion in Sub-Saharan Africa 551

39 Religions and masculinities in Africa: power, politics, performance 566

40 Women and religion in Oceania 576

41 Masculinity, religion, rugby and society in Oceania 593