Chapter 15 Contemporary Issues in Religion

Chapter 15Contemporary Issuesin Religion

The Women’s Studies Perspective in Religious Studies

The Status and Role of Women within Religious Communities

All of the theories presented so far have been those of European and American male scholars.

A. European and American men dominate religious studies from its inception until the mid-20th century.

B. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the rise of feminist thought began to have an impact on the methods and models of religious studies.

Carol Tavris

Carol Tavris, in her book, The Mismeasure of Woman analyzes self-help books aimed at women that are written by men. 1. She sees these self-help books as deficient because they counsel women to emulate male virtues, and poorly at that. 2. She wonders what it would look like if self-help books were written for men that took women’s characteristics as normative. 3. These exercises demonstrate that the only problem women face might be inappropriate judgment by male standards; in reality, there is nothing wrong with women at all. 4. This idea is the basic thrust of the feminist critique of religious studies.

.Starting in the 1970s, writers such as Valerie Saiving and Rita Gross have critiqued the study of religion through the eyes of an all-male academy, and their analysis has had a profound effect on more recent scholarly approaches.

Fundamentally, feminist scholars argue that such past, androcentric analyses have not been merely insulting or politically incorrect but bad scholarship. Field researchers, being mostly men, have largely been denied access to female informants, and so the information they have on the female experiences and practices of religion have been filtered through male interpretations.

This has led theorists to take a male norm to be the human norm, and when gender differences are noted, the feminine becomes a deviant form of humanity.

In 1976, Valerie Saiving published a now-classic article critiquing religious studies from a feminist angle.

A. Saiving argues that androcentrism is a male bias that pervades religious studies.

B. She spells out the ways in which this bias works in the study of primitive cultures.

1. It was difficult for fieldworkers to gain access to native women for their point of view; thus, the informants were largely male, even when the questions were about women.

2. The ethnographers were prone to utilize androcentric models in formulating questions and interpreting answers.

3. The theorists of religious studies who depended upon these ethnographic reports were also prone to androcentric biases.

Saiving’s conclusion is that we need to go back out to the field and begin collecting data on women.

Since sociological data consistently shows that women participate in religion at much higher levels than men, the female perspective on and experience of religion needs to be recorded and studied to a greater degree.

Part 2The Status and Role of Women within the Major

Religious Traditions

Women are often central participants in religious activities and services….

…yet their status in religious communities has generally been as low as is generally accepted in those societies in which the religion operates.

Women in Hinduism

Domestic duties and role as a good wife are often central.

3 low status indicators: Men select girls to be wives, and

at an early age (11 up) Isolating women in a special room

or house (purdah) after menstruation and childbirth, returning after a ritual bath,

Widows seen as harbingers of danger…

Laws of Manu p. 362

Upper class Hindu Widows

Tonsure Wearing white (no

colors, jewelry or flowers)

Not allowed to attend certain auspicious events

sati: widow suicide on husbands funeral pyre (ended by British law in 1859).

Women in Buddhism

Theravada Buddhism has more traditional views of women, similar to India itself.

Mahayana Buddhism (China, Sri Lanka) is more female and lay oriented.

The real divide in Buddhism is between the laity who marry and the monks/nuns who do not marry.

The Buddha didn’t see any real difference between men and women’s path to nirvana or their inherent ability to become arhants (spiritual masters)

Late in his life, he established female monasteries.

Mahayana Buddhism

Achieving emptiness = sunyata. …involves leaving behind traits,

identity,ego, etc. Being male has traditionally been

considered a life closer to achieving enlightenment than female.

Both maleness and femaleness must be left behind to achieve nirvana.

Avalokitesvara: a bodhisattva savior-goddess. Teachings are found earliest in the Lotus Sutra.

Changes sex from female to male before achieving enlightenment.

Tantric Buddhism involves ritual sex in which the female has high status (symbolizing wisdom), while the male symbolizes compassion.

Western Civilization

Patriarchy was built into both ancient Greco-Roman and Judaic culture and institutions .

Jewish images of God are male. Christianity…God the Father.

Both Christianity and Judaism was male centered in leadership until the 20th century.

Highlights the spiritual role of women often overlooked in Bible stories: female judges in OT and female deacons in NT.

Points out the how the texts often ignore or malign women.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

1898The

Woman’s Bible

FeministChristianAuthors

“If God is male, then male is God.”

Argues that the early Christianity of Jesus and the apostles was radically egalitarian, and that Paul’s theology made it more traditionally patriarchal.

1. Mary Daly1973

Beyond God the Father

2. Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza

1983In Memory of

Her

3 New Testament female scholars

FeministChristianAuthors

served a head of the Catholic Theological Society of America and the American Theological Society. She was one of the first female theologians church authorities allowed to receive a doctorate.

Professor of Theology at Fordham University, a Jesuit institution in New York City and a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood.

3. Sr. Elizabeth

A. Johnson1994

The Mystery of God in Feminist

Theological Discourse