The application of women's rights to the religions of the world have prompted highly contentious debates. This volume explores the many intricate issues raised in such interactions. The chapters in this volume are authored by women scholars of religion from diverse regions of the world, representing a plurality of religions, including indigenous religions. To enrich this already complex undertaking, four philosophers and legal scholars have also contributed. Their chapters help to clarify present challenges and envision innovative possibilities. The volume identifies archaic attitudes involving exclusionary regulations and controversial gender-specific practices. More contemporary impasses, such as individualism, so prevalent in western rights debates, and the unitary model of human rights, where "one size fits all," as promulgated in the west, are also appraised. Current constructive moves, especially expanding the notion of rights to involve relationships, are acknowledged. A primary concern of this volume is that of fostering future such collaborations of women advocates of gender justice.

This edited collection provides interdisciplinary, global, and multi-religious perspectives on the relationship between women’s identities, religion, and social change in the contemporary world. The book discusses the experiences and positions of women, and particular groups of women, to understand patterns of religiosity and religious change. It also addresses the current and future challenges posed by women’s changes to religion in different parts of the world and among different religious traditions and practices. The contributors address a diverse range of themes and issues including the attitudes of different religions to gender equality; how women construct their identity through religious activity; whether women have opportunity to influence religious doctrine; and the impact of migration on the religious lives of both women and men.

Most of the early literature concerning women’s religious experience is about exceptional women; those who diverged from the traditional female role to become nuns, mystics or charismatic leaders. While women were permitted to be prophets and visionaries they rarely played an important part in church organisation. This paradox is explored in this book and a number of themes emerge: in particular, the dominance of male symbolism within the great religions. The question of whether men and women apprehend religious systems and signs in the same way is also explored. In considering the contemporary scene, the book is able to look at the ways in which religion affects the lives of women in different societies and in different historical periods; this gives us a larger view of the ways in which our own perceptions of ‘femaleness’ have been constructed out of the religious world views of both the past and the present. First Published in 1983.

"Drawing on a wealth of scholarship by second-wave feminists and historians of religion, race, and colonialism, Scott shows that the gender equality invoked today as a fundamental and enduring principle was not originally associated with the term "secularism" when it first entered the lexicon in the nineteenth century. In fact, the inequality of the sexes was fundamental to the articulation of the separation of church and state that inaugurated Western modernity. Scott points out that Western nation-states imposed a new order of women's subordination, assigning them to a feminized familial sphere meant to complement the rational masculine realms of politics and economics. It was not until the question of Islam arose in the late twentieth century that gender equality became a primary feature of the discourse of secularism"-- Publisher's description

This book introduces the special dynamics of women and their close relationships with the gift in both past and contemporary religious settings. Written from a cross-cultural perspective, it challenges depictions of women’s roles in religion where they have been relegated to compliance with specifically designated gendered attributes. The different chapters contest the resultant stereotypes that deny women agency. Each chapter describes women as engaged in an aspect of religion, from that of ritual specialists, to benefactors and patrons, or even innovators. The volume examines topics such as sainthood and sacrifice so as to refine these ideas in constructive ways that do not devalue women. It also examines the meaning of the term “gift” today, embracing the term in both figurative and literal ways. Such a collection of diverse women’s writings and activities provides a significant contribution to their quest for recognition, and also suggests ways this can be understood and realized today.

Covering India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal, Rethinking New Womanhood effectively introduces a ‘new’ wave of gender research from South Asia that resonates with feminist debates around the world. The volume conceptualises ‘new womanhood’ as a complex, heterogeneous and intersectional identity. By deconstructing classification systems and highlighting women’s everyday ongoing negotiations with boundaries of social categories, the book reconfigures the concept of ‘new woman’ as a symbolic identity denoting ‘modern’ femininity at the intersection of gender, class, culture, sexuality and religion in South Asia. The collection maps new sites and expressions on women and gender studies around nationhood, women’s rights, transnational feminist solidarity, ‘new girlhoods ’, aesthetic and sexualised labour, respectability and ‘modernity’, LGBT discourses, domestic violence and ‘new’ feminisms. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including gender studies, sociology, education, media and cultural studies, literature, anthropology, history, development studies, postcolonial studies and South Asian studies.

This second edition of Women, Knowledge, and Reality continues to exhibit the ways in which feminist philosophers enrich and challenge philosophy. Essays by twenty-five feminist philosophers, seventeen of them new to the second edition, address fundamental issues in philosophical and feminist methods, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophies of science, language, religion and mind/body. This second edition expands the perspectives of women of color, of postmodernism and French feminism, and focuses on the most recent controversies in feminist theory and philosophy. The chapters are organized by traditional fields of philosophy, and include introductions which contrast the ideas of feminist thinkers with traditional philosophers. The collected essays illustrate both the depth and breadth of feminist critiques and the range of contemporary feminist theoretical perspectives.