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Editors' Note Women and Religious Politics The important role of women in the recent global rise of religious politics—or what is sometimes referred to as "fundamentalism"— is evident. Less clear, and baffling to some, is why women are attracted to movements that are frequently conservative and inegalitarian in their attitudes toward and policies on women and the family. Scholarly works often give scant attention to women and gender in religiopolitical movements . Questions such as veiling or abortion may be discussed, but attention usually shifts from women and gender to more "male" subjects such as political control and terrorism. This special issue adds to the small but growing literature on women and gender in religious politics in various parts of the world. Although only two of the articles, those by Martin Riesebrodt and Kelly Chong and by Nikki Keddie, compare the role of women in religious politics of different cultures, and one, by Valentine Moghadam, compares two Muslim countries, all provide analyses that can lead to a better understanding of comparative questions. In the scholarship on women that has flourished in recent decades, comparisons have usually been global—all women have shared in certain kinds of subordination—or within contiguous or culturally similar societies —women of Africa, Western Europe, the Middle East, and so forth. Additional insight may be gained when women from different cultures are compared, as this special issue makes clear.1 Religious politics is only one modern global political arena in which women have come to the fore. Nationalism has had a particular resonance among women, while socialism , in various forms, often has been seen as eliminating the injustices women face, including inequality with men, through the radical reorganization of society. Fascism, Nazism, and other forms of secular right-wing politics have had many active women devotees, as recent books have shown. Women's movements also have become global phenomena in recent decades. The socioeconomic context that created new possibilities for women to enter political movements has common features in several parts of the world. These include the rise of capitalism and the onset of industrialization , which first separated the domestic and work spheres but also provided new needs and opportunities for women to work outside the home. In addition, women's lives changed as a result of the need for an educated workforce disciplined to do routine tasks in regular hours, which was one cause of the growth of public education; urbanization, which spread new needs and social patterns; and even wars, which brought women into the labor force. Although some women had operated in poli- 1999 Editors' Note 7 tics indirectly in the precapitalist past, women's organized, political participation is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of modern capitalist societies . Women's political views and participation have always been diverse, but women frequently have been associated with movements for reform and the betterment of women's position. In the United States, women took part in abolitionism, welfare programs, temperance, and such womencentered causes as woman suffrage. The pattern was similar in the global South, where women have advocated welfare, women's education, and legal reforms that would benefit women. The forces and ideas of modernization have been favorable to such efforts for greater equality for women: capitalist societies tend to promote opening the labor and consumer markets to wider groups and making fewer status differentiations than in the past. In all societies, these modern trends had to contend with centuriesold systems, originally based on the consequences of frequent childbearing , which placed men in superior positions and viewed women's mental capacities as inferior. Such gender inequality has been reinforced by nearly all religions, which have retained their cultural and ideological appeal to many people even after most of the conditions that gave rise to their pronouncements have passed. Recent trends, while giving more women a chance at education and work outside the home, also have had more problematic consequences for many women: more frequent divorce, migration patterns that may separate men from women, sweated labor, prostitution , and other factors disrupting the family, whose role is often less central than it used to be. The undermining of long-standing family forms (which are idealized by recent religious and...

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