Women In Religion

A fundamental and well-illustrated reference collection for anyone interested in the role of women in North American religious life.

Between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, women assumed public roles of unprecedented prominence in Italian religious culture. Legally subordinated, politically excluded, socially limited, and ideologically disdained, women's active participation in religious life offered them access to power in all its forms. These essays explore the involvement of women in religious life throughout northern and central Italy and trace the evolution of communities of pious women as they tried to achieve their devotional goals despite the strictures of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The contributors examine relations between holy women, their devout followers, and society at large. Including contributions from leading figures in a new generation of Italian historians of religion, this book shows how women were able to carve out broad areas of influence by carefully exploiting the institutional church and by astutely manipulating religious percepts.

Throughout history, religion has been used as a tool of female subjugation. Women have been deemed less worthy than men, have been prevented from owning property, and worse—all in the name of a higher power. In recent decades, women have made progress in terms of equal rights with men, at least in Western democracies, but still, why has the United States never had a female president? Why aren't more women heads of Fortune 500 companies? Why do politicians in the West continue to attack women's reproductive rights? As this volume explores, it would be hard to find a bigger culprit than religion when identifying the last cultural barriers to full gender equality. With topics ranging from the subjugation of women in the Bible to the shame and guilt felt by women due to religious teaching, this volume makes clear that only by rejecting the very system that limits their autonomy will women be fully liberated from its malignant influences, not just in codified law but also in cultural practice.

The place of women in the religions, both as expressed in the classical writings and as experienced in life, is carefully considered in this book. It deals with what part women can and/or do play in religious institutions; how relevant religion is to their general role in society; and the significance of cultural influences for attitudes to women within the religious traditions.Addressing important issues of the day, this series examines how each of the eight major religions approaches a particular theme. Constructed to be comparative, the books are both authoritative and accessible. Each chapter is followed by a selected bibliography. This book is ideal for undergraduate students.

Women's leadership in Spiritualism and Christian Science / Ann Braude -- The feminism of "Universal Brotherhood," women in the Theosophical Movement / Robert Ellwood and Catherine Wessinger -- Emma Curtis Hopkins, a feminist of the 1880's and mother of new thought / J. Gordon Melton -- Myrtle Fillmore and her daughters, an observation and analysis of the role of women in Unity / Dell deChant -- Woman guru, woman roshi, the legitimation of female religious leadership in Hindu and Buddhist groups in America / Catherine Wessinger. -- Part 3. Contemporary women as creators of religion: Ritual validations of clergywomen's authority in the African American Spiritual churches of New Orleans / David C. Estes --. - Twentieth-century women's religion as seen in the feminist spirit.

This innovative collection brings together essays on women's religious experiences in both Europe and the Americas during the colonial era.

"Too often the religious traditions of antiquity are studied in isolation, without any real consideration of how they interacted. What made someone with a free choice become an adherent of one faith rather than another? Why might a former pagan choose to become a 'God-fearer' and attend synagogue services? Why might a Jew become a Christian? How did the mysteries of Mithras differ from the worship of the Unconquered Sun, or the status of the Virgin Mary from that of Isis, and how many gods could an ancient worshipper have? These questions are hard to answer without a synoptic view of what the different religions offered."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

These stories, essays and poems by women examine the connections feminists are making between sex and God. The women write from very different perspectives, cutting across the spectrum of feminist writing about sexuality and spirituality within the Judeo-Christian tradition. Some writers, though critical, are determined to retain their radicality in the very teeth of patriarchy by remaining within the traditional forms of faith. Others – impatient, suggests the editor, with the ‘great inseminator in the sky’ – have moved on to what might be described as a post-patriarchal spirituality. Contributions indicate the exciting spiritual journeys women are currently making and focus on the following areas: monogamy and promiscuity; sex, politics and spirituality; childbirth; sex and healing in dying; feminist sexual psychology; lesbian identity; and feminist ‘embodied’ theology. The recent and continuing debate about women priests in the Anglican church uneasily echoes the rumblings of change at a fundamental level in the relationship between women and religion. This book, with its reflections on both the politics of Christian feminism and the more widespread expression of women’s spirituality, makes an important contribution to that change. First published in 1987.

This two-volume set examines women's contributions to religious and moral development in America, covering individual women, their faith-related organizations, and women's roles and experiences in the broader social and cultural contexts of their times. • Introduces readers to hundreds of women who became leaders within various religious faiths and denominations, including many who founded religious sects and organizations • Provides an understanding of women's developing roles in American religious culture, which continue to the present day • Enables readers to gain an understanding of the broad range of religions, approaches to religion, and attitudes toward religion in the United States • Documents how life's experiences can shape one's spiritual life and future development • Includes a timeline of the issues facing women that marks changing societal attitudes and individual women's accomplishments across history

Bringing the study of early modern Christianity into dialogue with Atlantic history, this collection provides a longue durée investigation of women and religion within a transatlantic context. Taking as its starting point the work of Natalie Zemon Davis on the effects of confessional difference among women in the age of religious reformations, the volume expands the focus to broader temporal and geographic boundaries. The result is a series of essays examining the effects of religious reform and revival among women in the wider Atlantic world of Europe, the Americas, and West Africa from 1550 to 1850. Taken collectively, the essays in this volume chart the extended impact of confessional divergence on women over time and space, and uncover a web of transatlantic religious interaction that significantly enriches our understanding of the unfolding of the Atlantic World. Divided into three sections, the volume begins with an exploration of ‘Old World Reforms’ looking afresh at the impact of confessional change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries upon the lives of European women. Part two takes this forward, tracing the adaptation of European religious forms within Africa and the Americas. The third and final section explores the multifarious faces of the revival that inspired the nineteenth century missionary movement on both sides of the Atlantic. Collectively the essays underline the extent to which the development of the Atlantic World created a space within which an unprecedented series of juxtapositions, collisions, and collusions among religious traditions and practitioners took place. These demonstrate how the religious history of Europe, the Americas, and Africa became intertwined earlier and more deeply than much scholarship suggests, and highlight the dynamic nature of transatlantic cross-fertilization and influence.

This book features a number of different articles and essays that focus on women as active agents of their spiritual lives—a topic that is often overlooked in most other world religion books. It explores how women from many parts of the world have thought about, acted, and have been treated as members of a religious tradition. Investigates how women of a variety of religious traditions (e.g., Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, etc.) practice their religion, how their beliefs differ from men, and how they have carved out their own place within their religious tradition. For anyone interested in how women are shaped by and how they shape the various world religions.

Patricia Crawford demonstrates how the consideration of gender is central to our understanding of religious history. Women and Religion has three broad themes: the role and experience of women in the religious upheaval in the period from the Reformation to the Restoration; the significance of religion to contemporary women, focusing on the range of practices and beliefs; and the gendered nature of religious beliefs, institutions and language in the early modern period.

Following the lead of a "hermeneutics of surprise" the book identifies, indeed, surprising new material, and offers unexpected new insights essential to the debate on the position of goddesses and women in ancient India.

Nineteenth-century American women’s culture was immersed in religious experience and female authors of the era employed representations of faith to various cultural ends. Focusing primarily on non-canonical texts, this collection explores the diversity of religious discourse in nineteenth-century women’s literature. The contributors examine fiction, political writings, poetry, and memoirs by professional authors, social activists, and women of faith, including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Harriet E. Wilson, Sarah Piatt, Julia Ward Howe, Julia A. J. Foote, Lucy Mack Smith, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and Fanny Newell. Embracing the complexities of lived religion in women’s culture-both its repressive and its revolutionary potential-Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion articulates how American women writers adopted the language of religious sentiment for their own cultural, political, or spiritual ends.

Modern scholars have seen women's most important religious activity in classical Greece as their participation in fertility rituals. Matthew Dillon's wide-ranging study shows how women's role in religion was more important than that of men.

The essays contained in this volume examine the particular religious experiences of women within a remarkably vibrant and formative era in British religious history. Scholars from the disciplines of history, literary studies and theology assess women's contributions to renewal, change and reform; and consider the ways in which women negotiated institutional and intellectual boundaries. The focus on women's various religious roles and responses helps us to understand better a world of religious commitment which was not separate from, but also not exclusively shaped by, the political, intellectual and ecclesiastical disputes of a clerical elite. As well as deepening our understanding of both popular and elite religious cultures in this period, and the links between them, the volume re-focuses scholarly approaches to the history of gender and especially the history of feminism by setting the British writers often characterised as 'early feminists' firmly in their theological and spiritual traditions.

An exploration of gender and power relations in Yoruba religion--both Christianity and Yoruba traditional religion. Drawing on a wide range of oral and written sources, this book shows that women occupy a central place in the religious worldview and life of the Yoruba people and shows how men and women engage in mutually beneficial roles in the Yoruba religious sphere. It explores how gender issues play out in two Yoruba religious traditions--indigenous religion and Christianity in Southwestern Nigeria. Rather than shy away from illuminating the tensions between the prominent roles of Yoruba women in religion and their perceived marginalization, author Oyeronke Olajubu underscores how Yoruba women have challenged marginalization in ways unprecedented in other world religions.

A study of women's roles and alternative patterns of sexuality in seven contemporary communal and millenarian movements. Based almost exclusively on interviews and first-hand data, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in communal and utopian studies, American religious history, and new religious movements. 10 illustrations. Index.

The Westminster Handbook to Women in American Religious History provides an affordable and accessible reference to over 750 outstanding individual women and women's organizations in American religious history.--From publisher description.