Women and religion: an invisible story

This book aims to discuss some aspects of the relationship between social change, religion and women's lives and self-definition in the contemporary world. Using international and interdisciplinary perspectives reflective of different religious traditions, this collection pays attention to the specific experiences and positions of women, or particular groups of women, to understand current patterns of religiosity and religious change.

Women have played and are playing an active role, albeit underexplored and underestimated, in the construction and consolidation of religion. All religions depend heavily on the contributions of women to maintain and transmit religious values and tradition, even if these are largely invisible from the perspective of its officially credentialed leaders: priests, ministers, teachers and organizational authorities (Keller and Ruether, 2006). However, as pointed out by different scholars (see for example King and Beattie, 2004; Woodhead, 2007 and 2008), dominant theoretical frameworks within the sociology of religion often remain gender blind. The reasons for this are manifold, such as: androcentrism; the fact that women's studies in the field of religion have been slow to develop (King, 2005) and that their development have been restricted to a limited number of themes; and the vexed relationship between feminism and religion.

Due to the patriarchal dispositions of societies in which religions emerged, women scholars of religion were faced with the problem posed by the pervasive influence of androcentrism on all religious cultures. Androcentrism originates from a male monopoly on cultural leadership and on the transmission of culture: androcentric scholarship proceeds as if women do not exist, or as if they are passive actors, objects rather than subjects, and the voice of women is rarely heard. Men have monopolized priestly and teaching roles of religion and excluded women both from the exercise of these roles and from the education that such roles require (Gross, 1977; Ruether, 1987). A number of scholars underline that, prior to the advent of women's studies (which emerged as a new field of inquiry across a number of academic disciplines in the late 1960s and early 1970s) the study of religions and historical religious development was primarily the study of men's religion and of the elite males who had shaped religions (see for example Gross, 1977):