Studying gender and religion: A look back and a look forward

Abstract

Feminist scholarship in religion began with the first wave of the women’s movement in the nineteenth century, but became much more extensive with the second-wave women’s movement in the 1970s. This scholarship first explored women’s religious experiences, and then began to investigate the relationships between gender and religion more broadly, what Ursula King has described as a ‘double paradigm shift’. It is now clear that without using gender as an analytical category, religion can no longer be fully described or evaluated. Gender issues permeate religion in very complicated ways, manifesting themselves at levels from the local to the universal, and gender also intersects with other categories of analysis such as race, class, or ethnicity. Gendered study of religion and feminist theology have had a great impact on both scholarship and religious practice, though less impact on the development of main/malestream theology than one might have hoped. The full evaluation of the intersection of gender and religion will transform scholarship and religious understandings in ways that will go beyond where we are now.