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Classic Feminist Critiques of Religion
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Women, Gender and Religion
In this course, Professor Linda Woodhead (Lancaster University) explores religion through the lens of feminism/gender studies. In the first lecture, we explore some classic feminist critiques of Christianity, including the work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) and Mary Daly (1928-2010). In the second lecture, we think about why women appear to be more religious than men. In the third lecture, we consider why some women living in gender-liberal societies choose to convert to gender-conservative forms of religion. Next, we look at the work of Fatima Mernissi. In the fifth lecture, we explore the work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. In the sixth lecture, we look to a range of women who took a more radical approach to the problem of misogyny in the religion they were brought up in. In the seventh and final lecture, we move beyond the major, institutionalised religions (e.g. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc.) to consider more 'everyday' religious beliefs and practices, e.g. checking one's horoscope in the newspaper, visiting a psychic or medium, etc. and exploring the extent to which these too are patterned by gender.
Classic Feminist Critiques of Religion
In this lecture, we explore some classic feminist critiques of religion, focusing in particular on: (i) the work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) and the creation of The Woman's Bible (1895, 1898); (ii) the work of Mary Daly (1928-2010) and her book 'Beyond God the Father'; and (iii) secular critiques of religion and its masculine bias.
Hello.
00:00:06My name is Linda Woodhead and I'm distinguished
00:00:06professor of religion and society at Lancaster University.
00:00:09And one of my particular interests is on women and gender and religion,
00:00:13because women have had such a huge role in religion historically
00:00:18and also have been reshaping and reforming religion in recent times.
00:00:22And religion is extremely important to women as well and
00:00:27helps to construct what it is to be a woman known
00:00:31and decide what masculinity, femininity and gender is, too.
00:00:33So whether you're interested in women, gender,
00:00:37men or religion and spirituality or all those things,
00:00:40these topics and what I'm going to say, well, I hope your interest to you.
00:00:45So let's start at the beginning, and I want to talk about how women are responsible
00:00:52for making very powerful criticisms of religion
00:00:59and particularly drawing attention to the fact that what we call religion is
00:01:03actually something that's been constructed by men for the benefit of men.
00:01:08Historically, that they've had the dominant positions in religion,
00:01:13and it was some powerful women thinkers and writers
00:01:16who first started to draw attention to that.
00:01:20The most important
00:01:24critique
00:01:26comes from the 19th century. Originally, when women start to be highly educated
00:01:28and to have access to learning
00:01:34and to be able to publish.
00:01:37And we often think of one of the first women,
00:01:41perhaps the pioneer in doing this work as being Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
00:01:43She was an American scholar,
00:01:49and she was born in 18 15 so early in the 19th century,
00:01:52and Katie Stanton was angry.
00:02:00She was angry at the way that religion and
00:02:04in particular Christianity because being in the USA,
00:02:07she was an American Christian.
00:02:11She was angry at the way in which religion was, in her view, being distorted
00:02:13and being used not for religious purposes
00:02:19but being used by men down the ages,
00:02:22to oppress women to further their own masculine interests.
00:02:25And to pretend that God was saying that
00:02:29men are important and women should be inferior.
00:02:33So Katie Stanton said about attacking and critiquing this view,
00:02:37using the tools of scholarship and historical scholarship.
00:02:41What she did was to go to the Bible,
00:02:46the authoritative Scripture
00:02:49for Christians
00:02:52and to critique elements of the Bible that were unfriendly and oppressive to women.
00:02:54And she did. This is very thorough and scholarly Way wasn't just polemic.
00:03:00She assembled team
00:03:04of scholars,
00:03:06and they went through the Bible and they literally
00:03:08cut and paste. In those days, that meant scissors.
00:03:10So they got the Bible, and they highlighted passages
00:03:14that were oppressive to women,
00:03:18and they cut those passages out.
00:03:20Or they wrote commentary on them and questioned interpretations.
00:03:23Some passages, they thought, were just inherently
00:03:27misogynistic. Anti women
00:03:30were cut out. Some passages, they thought were just been misinterpreted.
00:03:32Things like the fall in Genesis
00:03:37to blame that on Eve, just one way of reading the text.
00:03:40You can read it other ways, so they suggest a different interpretation.
00:03:44And out of all this work, Katie Stanton produced
00:03:47the Women's Bible.
00:03:50That's the title of her book, The Women's Bible,
00:03:52and it's a version of the Bible that is free of masculine oppression.
00:03:54And in the view of the scholars involved is a more
00:03:59historically accurate and more interpretive Lee
00:04:04accurate version of the Scriptures.
00:04:08But you can still get that book. You can still read that book.
00:04:12You can still see extracts of that book online. Very important historically,
00:04:14So that's Katie Stanton in the 19th century, starting everything off Well,
00:04:20actually,
00:04:24she's one of many women starting to critique Christianity and the churches.
00:04:24Let's just skip through, though, and take the story up into the mid 20th century.
00:04:29That's when you get a second wave of feminism.
00:04:35Katie Stanton is often said to be part of a first wave of feminism.
00:04:37Feminism really begins in the 19th century,
00:04:42and then it has a second flowering and a new energy.
00:04:44And lots of new ideas
00:04:48in the mid 20th century,
00:04:50particularly 19 sixties seventies eighties is often
00:04:52called the second wave of feminism,
00:04:56and it had big effects on how religion was studied and understood as well.
00:04:59Let's pick on one other figure
00:05:03in this period, and that is Mary Daly.
00:05:04Mary Daly was born in 1928 so she was very active in the second wave of feminism.
00:05:08She died in a in 2010.
00:05:15Mary Daly was a Roman Catholic Christian,
00:05:18uh, and she taught in a Catholic seminary, uh, employed by the Catholic Church,
00:05:23and she started off as quite a devout Catholic.
00:05:29But she became angrier and angrier with the Catholic
00:05:31Church for the way in which it treated her
00:05:34the way in which it treated women in general,
00:05:37and she wrote a very influential book called
00:05:39Beyond God. The Father
00:05:431973. Well, the title tells you like all good books, what it's about.
00:05:46She's suggesting that the very idea that God is male
00:05:51is a deception.
00:05:56In a famous quote, she says, If God is male, then the male is God.
00:05:57So Daley says, Why gender God at all? God can't have agenda.
00:06:03God doesn't have private parts. God doesn't have sexual organs.
00:06:08Why do we call God male if he hasn't got a body?
00:06:12Is it because he has male characteristics,
00:06:16like being aggressive or powerful or whatever whatever.
00:06:19Well, those aren't male characteristics. Women have them as well.
00:06:23There's no good reason for calling God father,
00:06:26as Christians often do.
00:06:30So that was, That was that was the main argument of her book Beyond God. The Father.
00:06:33And she goes through biblical text and shows why it's unnecessary and distorting,
00:06:37to think that God is male.
00:06:42And she argues that it's a kind of contract by
00:06:44men to make you think that the highest being is masculine
00:06:48and to think that she thinks is inherently oppressive to women and
00:06:53unless you get rid of that idea of a male god.
00:06:57Feminism is pointless.
00:07:00Nothing will ever work because even if
00:07:02you're not religious deep in your subconscious,
00:07:04you think
00:07:07the highest being
00:07:08is a man.
00:07:09So
00:07:10men are higher beings.
00:07:11So in her view, you had to exercise that view completely, in her view,
00:07:13come to a much more impersonal view of God as just a moving power and spirit
00:07:18in order for women to be liberated. That was, That was Mary Daly's argument.
00:07:24Now I've just focused on two important women thinkers there,
00:07:31Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Mary Daly.
00:07:35Because they had such a big influence on
00:07:38starting to get people thinking about whether religion,
00:07:40particularly Christianity, was inherently biassed and profiting men.
00:07:43I could give lots of other examples. I'm not going to do that.
00:07:48There are many secular examples.
00:07:51A lot of secular people are very critical of religion
00:07:53and think it's inherently sexist. You'll have heard those arguments, I'm sure,
00:07:55and sometimes that has that can also have an
00:08:00anti Islamic angle will come back to that point.
00:08:03So the idea that all Muslim women are oppressed by their menfolk is disappointingly
00:08:07a common idea in popular thinking in the West in Europe in America,
00:08:15so we'll come back to that idea as well.
00:08:21Um,
00:08:23so I'm just making the point that whereas there
00:08:24are feminists who critique the sexism of religion,
00:08:26they're also anti religious people who critique religion because of its sexism.
00:08:30So you get this critique of religion
00:08:35and gender coming from both committed religious
00:08:38people and from secular people who think you should get rid of religion altogether.
00:08:41
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Woodhead, L. (2021, August 23). Women, Gender and Religion - Classic Feminist Critiques of Religion [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/women-gender-and-religion/gender-radicals-and-spirituality
MLA style
Woodhead, L. "Women, Gender and Religion – Classic Feminist Critiques of Religion." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 23 Aug 2021, https://massolit.io/courses/women-gender-and-religion/gender-radicals-and-spirituality