Possibly no force in recent centuries has changed and challenged religion as much as feminism. Feminism’s effects are everywhere as women have shifted teachings, hierarchies, and sometimes even physical space, demanding a greater say in spiritual life and religious communities. And while some communities have warmly embraced feminism and others have been more inclined to resistance, there are almost no communities unaffected by it. Our previous blog began looking at the relationship between women and religion, noting women’s higher levels of religiosity as well as noting some issues with patriarchy and other factors. Today, let’s look at the tremendous transformations of the feminist revolution.
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Transforming Teachings
For untold centuries, men have controlled and shaped the doctrines and teachings of various traditions. This is not to imply that women played no role in these traditions but there’s no doubt that men controlled many of the levers of power. But, suddenly, in recent decades, new, female voices have not only successfully claimed the right to speak, they used their voice and their intellect to show how male bias has shaped and distorted religious teachings.
Some key pioneers were Christian scholars like Phyllis Trible, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Cumulatively these authors found previously overlooked feminine imagery for God in the Bible, provided theological justifications for why the divine should not be conceived of as male, and showed how early Christian communities were notably gender-egalitarian. They, and other scholars, highlighted the previously overlooked presence of female leaders in early church communities and female saints in the Medieval period. Cumulatively, their work impacted Bible translations as translators acknowledged that egalitarian words in original languages had been masculinized. These pioneers shifted the terrain for everything that came after them.
Image left to right: Phyllis Trible, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Source: Fandom – CC-BY-SA, Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons – Copyrighted free use
Similar work has been done in Judaism and recent decades have witnessed excellent work in Islamic studies. A giant figure on this front is Amina Wadud. Her 1999 book Qur’an and Women claimed that the Qur’an was not sexist, but had been interpreted as such by its almost exclusively male interpreters. She and other Muslim pioneers – such as Laleh Bakhtiar, the first woman to translate the Qur’an into English – have inspired others in their wake. Similar to the Christian scholars above, these female Muslim scholars have brought attention to the influence of early Muslim women such as Umm Waraqah, a companion of Muhammad’s who was an early reciter and memorizer of the Qur’an, and Aisha, Muhammad’s wife, who became a key source of hadiths (the recorded sayings and deeds of Muhammad which are vital to Islamic law).
The scholars above have altered the very language of scripture, conceptions of divinity, central teachings, and revived key figures who had been silently removed from our consciousness.
Transforming Practices
Feminism has also changed religious practices.
In Judaism, boys are circumcised on the eighth day but there has been no equivalent widespread ritual to celebrate the birth of a baby girl. However, a few Jewish communities did have a naming ceremony which has now become more popular amongst Jews in the past 50 years (called Simchat Bat). Another Jewish example of women gaining access to rituals is the well-known Bat Mitzvah whereby young 12-year-old girls read Torah for the first time publicly, in front of the congregation. Beyond including females in a key life-cycle ritual, this particular event is vital because women were historically forbidden from studying Torah. Given how central Torah is to Jewish life, this one ritual changes the place of women in the tradition.
Importantly, the feminist revolution in religion is not limited to just liberal congregations. It has gone further there but if you follow Encounter’s newsletter, we have frequently featured stories about women gaining prominence in various religious, including in more conservative arenas. Thus, the Bat Mitzvah ceremony started in liberal Jewish congregations but is now often done in Orthodox circles. And the broader idea, that women should study Torah is quite widespread.
This has even affected architecture. Orthodox synagogues have traditionally had women in the balconies, far away from the Torah and with no need to pay attention. At Encounter, we frequently take our groups to an Orthodox synagogue where the women’s section is on the main floor with seating arranged such that everyone, men and women, are sitting participating in the service.
A Hindu parallel to the Bat Mitzvah example is the upanayana ceremony. While traditionally done for young boys at age eight, growing numbers of young girls are undergoing this ceremony which initiates one into studying the Vedas (again, gaining access to scriptures much like the Bat Mitzvah situation described above). In addition, some women are becoming Vedic chanters, another role traditionally reserved only for men.
Image: Parents of twins conduct Upanayana for boy and girl. Source: www.newindianexpress.com
Similar stirrings are happening in Islam. There is a tradition of female Qur’anic reciters in some Muslim countries but in others, it is strongly forbidden. Today, female Quranic reciters are finding their voice and doing so sometimes online. In other cases, women have performed the adhan or call to prayer which is traditionally reserved just for men and Amina Wadud, the ground-breaking scholar mentioned above, lead prayer and gave the sermon in an event that garnered global attention in 2005.
Another issue for many Muslim women is that women and men pray separately which has created two issues. First, in South Asia and diasporic mosques connected to South Asia, women have had to fight to have access to the mosque as many discourage female attendance altogether. In other mosques, the spaces dedicated to women are sometimes shabby and poorly designed. To put it mildly, women have noticed.
The social media account side entrance publishes photos of women’s prayer spaces in mosques with the tagline “the beautiful, the adequate, and the pathetic.” Similar Muslim women’s organizations are fighting this issue in other countries, including Turkey, India, and the UK. And there has also been a surge of women-led study groups in Islam, covered by academic works like The Politics of Piety and Soft Force, both of which highlight Egyptian Muslim’s role in that country’s piety revolution, where women are not passive, but active agents defining faith and devotion, and creating networks of community and support.
Among Sikhs, the discipline of Khalsa is an elective path that requires greater commitment to the faith. Nothing forbids women from doing this but traditionally, the Khalsa were virtually all men. Today, however, especially in the diaspora, more and more women are starting to become Khalsa Sikhs. A Khalsa Sikh never cuts any hair on their body (hence the turbans) which provides extra challenges for women in that some women will develop facial hair which does not fit our cultural norms. But you do find women with some whiskers who refuse to bow to social norms. Most memorable of all was a young university-aged woman in Vancouver who spoke to a group we had brought to the gurdwara to learn about Sikhism. She was Khalsa with very noticeable facial hairs and yet was completely comfortable and self-confident. It is rare to see such self-composure. But to do so at such a young age, happily defying cultural norms was really impressive. She was so open about her choices and generous with her time.
Finally, a desire for more female-oriented rituals has led some women to leave the traditional faiths they were raised in. There’s some evidence amongst Gen Z that young women are leaving religion more than young men, unhappy with attitudes towards women and towards LGBTQ+ folks. Others find other homes. Wicca has both male and female adherents but has proven quite popular with women who have found space in this newer religion to create female-centred rituals around a woman’s monthly cycles or a croning ceremony to honour an older woman’s wisdom.
Transforming Hierarchies
Women have been been transforming hierarchies in secular society and the same pattern is evident in religious structures. In liberal denominations, women occupy every possible position from the current Archbishop of Canterbury to the wide prominence of women ministers and female rabbis. Indeed, many liberal seminaries and rabbinical schools are close to or at gender parity (1, 2).
But again, even more striking is the change afoot in very conservative denominations. In Israel, Orthodox Jewish women have gained the right to take the rabbinical exams which, even where they are prevented from being rabbis, grants them access to other religious positions and jobs requiring academic religious credentials. And a revolutionary Orthodox school in the USA is ordaining female Orthodox rabbis.
These changes are occurring in many traditions. The Zoroastrians, who traditionally have only male clergy, have in a few places ordained women, temple priestesses are now a small but growing movement in Hinduism, and in Buddhism, where the ancient tradition of nuns had died out in two of Buddhism’s three branches, ordinations have begun included that of the path-clearing woman Dhammananda Bhikkuni.
Image: Bhikkhuni Dhammananda at international conference in St. Ottilien, Germany. Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
In those religions where clerical roles are still reserved exclusively to men, women are nonetheless gaining more administrative power. A Pew study found the percentage of American mosques where at least a quarter of board members are women had grown from 14% to 21% from 2011 to 2020. In Canada, the National Council of Canadian Muslims, the country’s most prominent Muslim advocacy group has nine women among its 21 staff while the very prominent Canadian Council of Muslim Women (whose wonderful CEO, Nuzhat Jafri, we recently profiled) is entirely female-led.
In the Sikh faith, women can occupy any role a man can but, in practice, the cultural norm has been for leaders to be men. This carries over today in many gurdwaras but again change is visible. For example, the World Sikh Organisation in Canada, the national voice for Sikhs in this country, shows eleven women amongst its twenty directors on its board.
Conclusions
Let’s sum up some of what feminism has accomplished in the world’s religious traditions. A few notes:
- We have gotten used to women’s prominence in society (thank goodness!). But we should not forget how much change has occurred. Devotees living a hundred years ago would be stunned at the transformation in women’s role in religions across the globe. The work of many, many women (and supportive men) has made this possible.
- Those changes are ongoing. By 1990, there were more gains than in 1970, and more today than in 2000. Progress is never certain however as any cursory glance at modern politics shows. We hope these trends will continue but they will require the effort and support of everyone engaged in religious life.
- There is much resistance too. Nowhere is this more evident than the sometimes vehement opposition to female clerics. Some of the opposition is doctrinal. Some is culture misrepresented as doctrine.
- The West is a laboratory for change. Modern feminism emerged in the West first. Today, feminism has impacts around the globe but diasporic communities in the West are nonetheless often key laboratories for change for the simple reason that where one routinely encounters women in positions of authority, it naturally impacts how they think about their devotional life. Anti-immigrant rhetoric often says how “they” (immigrants) are changing “us” but the story of cultural mixing is always, well, one of mixing. Immigrant communities are certainly diversifying the religious makeup of our neighbourhoods. But Western Hindu or Muslim communities may in turn introduce new ideas and take different forms. There is nothing invalid about this – religions have always been influenced by culture, including degrees of patriarchy and egalitarianness. And with social media, these influences are reaching across the globe.
- Finally there is an obvious generational factor. The young are more committed to gender equality, having been raised in environments where women routinely demonstrate excellence, leadership capacities, and devotion.
The struggle for gender equality is ongoing. That it is still necessary can sometimes be discouraging but any glance back in time should also encourage us. Enormous gains have been made and not only for women, but for everyone. How much better is it to participate in religious life with our sons and our daughters. How much better is it to listen to brilliant women rabbis and to have women’s wisdom help guide our mosques and gurdwaras.
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Our religions and our societies are deeply connected and profoundly influence one another. Here is hoping the gains of recent decades will continue to gain momentum, helping us create more just communities both inside and outside our places of worship.
Brian:
You cover a tidal wave of change in just a few decades. It is truly remarkable! I wonder if feminism is not the only driver, however. Mass education, post-war labour force entry, birth control access and lower fertility rates–these social and technological changes play a large role in the transformations of which you write.
There is also a backlash or a holding out for a certain demographic in almost every religion. There is something that they deeply value that is being lost in the feminist worldview. Many of the most feminist of religious groups are often those on the decline numerically. How do we understand the conservative or orthodox side of religious groups (which remains the majority) without pathologizing them? How does Encounter encounter these groups–is there a position that Encounter takes from which to evaluate different religious groups on their gender doctrines and practise?
I know its a big topic and there is much more to be said.
Thanks for this Peter! So thoughtful as always!
I think the factors you list are all important and often not separate from feminism but enmeshed. Birth control was huge for women and a game changer in so many ways. So was access to university and the potential to not be economically dependent. It’s an interesting question to imagine what feminism would have looked like without these societal changes but hard to know.
And yes, as you say, many groups feel feminism has taken something of value from them. When we cover more orthodox groups (and visit them), we try to explain the religion as it’s understood from the inside. There are limits to this (there is no singular insider view of course) but we share perspectives we’ve heard from within the community. This is true on many fronts, not just gender, to try to accurately represent how the community views gender or sexualiy or some aspect of theology. We try to do this faithfully and without endorsing or condemning the specific positions. Literacy is always our primary goal.
Thanks again for this thoughtful response!