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3 WOMEN AND RELIGION: METHODS OF STUDY AND REFLECTION Rita M. Gross WHAT IS ROUTINE as we enter the twenty-first century —systematic study of and reflection about women and religion—was unheard of when the current senior scholars of women and religion began graduate training and careers. We, too, had been trained to use androcentric (male-centered) models of humanity and the generic masculine mode of language and research. If it occurred to us to inquire about women and religion, we were told that such inquiries were unnecessary; women were included in the generic masculine and therefore were already being studied. Alternatively, we were told that religion was something men did, so there were no data about women and religion we could study. If not put off by such answers, and we persisted in our inquiries, ridicule of our concerns was quickly followed by hostility and threats of loss of our careers. But with the second wave of feminism afoot, the desire to study and reflect about women and religion could not be thwarted. The earliest publications, articles by Rosemary Ruether and Valerie Saiving and The Church and the Second Sex by Mary Daly, came out in the late 1960s. The first meeting of the American Academy of Religion (the professional organization of professors of religious studies) to solicit papers specifically on women and religion was in 1972. Literature about women and religion increased exponentially during the 1970s. By 1980, two landmark anthologies had appeared, one in each of the emerging subdivisions within the field. Womanspirit Rising (1979) gathered early writings of many of the most prominent feminist theologians. Unspoken Worlds: Women’s Religious Lives (1980) is a descriptive account of women’s religious lives in a wide variety of cultural contexts. Since then, study of and reflection about women and religion have only intensi- fied and diversified. To understand what is at stake, methodologically, in the field broadly called “women and religion,” it is important to recognize that it encompasses two distinct subfields whose methods are quite different. If this distinction is not recognized, endless problems, both political and intellectual, are inevitable. On the one hand, the subject matter “women and religion” involves descriptive accounts of women’s religious lives and roles, cross-culturally and historically. This enterprise is fact and data oriented; the only value that comes into play is the claim that one cannot understand a religion or culture if one studies only its men. The question of what women’s religious lives and roles would be in a just and ideal world does not come into play when doing this kind of research. On the other hand, the subject matter “women and religion” also involves critical analysis of what religions have said about women and the options they have offered to women as well as constructing alternatives that are more just and appropriate. Such work, often called feminist theology, is value laden and controversial. Like descriptive studies of women and religion , these critical and constructive reflections about women and religion are relevant for all religions, but they are often restricted to Christianity and Judaism. However, both subfields owe their historical genesis to the second wave of feminism and depend on the same theoretical and methodological breakthrough that, though now commonplace, was difficult to envision in the early years of the study of women and religion. The early feminist critique of the field of religious studies was, in many ways, the first “postmodern” critique, although feminists have rarely been credited with this achievement. Simply put, the early feminists pointed out that universal ideas about “mankind” put forth by thinkers of the European enlightenment were, literally, about men. Women were only discussed as objects of men’s curiosity, manipulation, or enjoyment, not as human beings who had lives and ideas of their own. Typically , men’s religious ideas or ritual practices were described in great detail. The religious ideas or lives of women were almost never discussed, and their ritual practices were mentioned only when men required or allowed women’s presence in their own ritual space. Furthermore, such descriptions were always from the men’s points of view, never from women’s. Yet on that basis scholars claimed to have described religion in its entirety and to be in a position to present universal claims about “mankind.” Very quickly, feminist scholars and thinkers labeled this construct the androcentric model of humanity and proposed alternatives. Coming to the...

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