RELS 131

Christianity/Woman and Religion Podcast Transcript

Hi everyone. It is Danielle, and I wanted to talk today about a topic that I always enjoy talking about, and that is the topic of Women and Religion. And if any of you have seen my biography material in the course notes or any of my comments or feedback on Moodle, you might have learnt that my primary area of research has always been Women and Religion, sometimes referred to as Gender and Religion. I started out studying Women in Buddhism and Hinduism and have always more generally also studied the topic of The Way We Study Religion in Women and Religion and the effects that feminism has had on that study. So, one of the reasons why I want to talk about this, in addition to my personal interest, is that the topic of Women’s Religious Lives has often been seen of as sort of an afterthought to the study of religion more generally. So often see both in our textbook, in the Fisher textbook, and even sometimes in my own notes, and I always struggle to fix that. We often see the topic of Women in Religion as an afterthought, so we’ll have a chapter or a unit, or I’ll read an article about a particular religious community or a ritual or text, and it will, the article will present an issue and then at the end or in some small section they’ll also consider that issue from the perspective of women. Traditionally, that’s often been a small paragraph at the end of a long chapter where you would have a, you know, many, many pages about traditions of Hinduism and then at the end a small little paragraph on what women in Hinduism means. And clearly, women’s religious lives are, they’re not afterthoughts, so we need to ask ourselves the question why, why is that always an afterthought? So, my hope is that as we continue more and more to study religion in new ways in light of theories of gender, of feminism, of different ways of understanding history that we’ll start incorporating the history of both men and women and, of course, other people and communities who have been marginalized, without them feeling like they’re an afterthought.

So, to talk about Women and Religion, to study this, I think the best way to start is to say, is to ask ourselves the question, why are women absent from so many religious texts and from within the traditions themselves, and why are they absent from the scholarships, the research that we read on religious lives and religious communities? Why are they absent from all these records of religious life that we have from, you know, these many thousands of years? And I think there’s a couple of reasons for that that are really important. One is that women’s lives were segregated lives, much in the same way that they are in various religious communities now. They have for a long time, and even more so, been divided by gender lines. So, there were very clearly demarcated lines within society, within homes of women and men where men and women had different responsibilities, and the religion that often has been studied has been those lives that were segregated into the men’s area. And there are a few reasons for this. One of them is modesty reasons. Women’s communities within their larger communities with the men, women, and children, but women’s part of those communities have often been segregated for reasons of modesty. So, their traditions have been kept private, and so men and women’s religious lives were separate, and so the question is how were those accessed? Another issue is that there was always the question of controlling sexuality.

So, women’s religious lives, whatever they were, whatever their contributions were to those traditions, were often kept in a different place, whether that be texts that weren’t made public, communities that were restricted in terms of men and women not being able to live together and contribute to religious communities together. Another issue is the division of public and private life. So, men’s life, historically, has always been a part of the what we call a public life, so that’s the life that is involved with government, with public education, with writing the history books, with the sort of public faces, a public face of the community. Whereas the areas that women have often been a part of for the most part have been relegated to what’s called the private life, so, home, children, quiet religious practice in terms of, you know, being out, you know, living a life away from the broader community. And so that division of public and private, when we think about, when we think about where the women were working, where the women were developing and practising their religious lives, it wasn’t in the public space. And this leads us to the second issue of why we don’t have a lot written about women’s religious lives, and that is that scholars and researchers for the most part have always been men. Of course, that’s not the case in the last 50, 40 or 50 years, many, and even before that, of course, there were a few, but for the most part up until about 40 or 50 years ago, men were the ones doing the research. So, let’s consider two things: the first, maybe they just didn’t ask. If we listen to feminist critique, which we’ll talk about a little bit more in a few minutes, the issue of women’s lives wasn’t of primary concern. They, these segregated lives, these lives that were sort of hidden from public view, they were considered less interesting, less valuable. The work that women did was considered menial, mundane, not pertaining to high religious life, and so they, a lot of scholars just didn’t ask the questions. They didn’t consider it relevant to their study of religion. But on the other hand, they also just didn’t have access to it.

Like I mentioned before, a lot of women’s lives were segregated for reasons of sexuality and modesty and privacy, and so these male scholars, since they were primarily the ones doing the research, they weren’t welcomed into the communities, into those private lives. Let’s think about some examples from religions where the division between sexes is very important. Let’s think about studying Judaism. Men and women in Orthodox traditional Judaism, they don’t mix the same way as we do right now in most communities. Women’s lives and men’s lives, religious lives I’m talking about here, they were kept very separate, and the way that the women contributed to the tradition was within the home. So, it would certainly take a lot for women in a home to invite a male scholar in to come and observe their private rituals, especially if we’re talking about rituals involving reproduction, birth, situations where the, you know, the rules of privacy are very important. They’re talking about times where women are vulnerable, where they are showing parts of themselves that they generally don’t show to the public view. So, scholars wouldn’t have been introduced. They wouldn’t have been welcomed. And so there’s a lot of things that contribute to the fact that women’s religious lives aren’t, haven’t been, but are slowly become more studied.

So, this is changing a lot now. We are studying, you and me, we are looking at religion within a time period and from within a time and place where we’re looking at the questions of history a little bit differently. We’re recognizing that the history that we have today may not be the whole story. We’ve come to learn that marginalized communities, women included, historically, have been silenced, have been kept on the margins, on the borders of the status quo and have not had access to write the books on religion. So, for women in religious communities, their restricted access to those opportunities really limit what we have today to learn about those traditions, so we don’t get a lot of women writing religious texts that were published and promoted by religious traditions. We don’t have a lot of models of religious life from women’s perspectives because these weren’t often written down.

So, we get a chance now today to look back on these traditions as best we can to try to ask those questions after the fact. One of the ways that we can learn more about women’s religious lives is to look in the places that we haven’t looked before. So, we can, for instance, we often when we want to go back and learn about the details of a religion, if you want to learn about the beliefs and the practices and look at the historical imprint of all those practices, we go back to what we’re used to. We go back to religious texts. We go back to records, historical books, and we look at long-held traditions that are still around today, and we sort of go back in time to learn how those traditions developed. So, all of those things, those three areas, the texts and the rituals and the traditions that are still ongoing, they’re all within, they’re all in public view, and like I mentioned before, it was in that public realm most commonly controlled and populated by male religious practitioners, or male believers, we don’t find women there as often. So, if we want to go back and find more about women’s religious lives, maybe going back to those three areas isn’t always the best place to go. There are lots of ways that scholars have done really interesting things to read texts in new ways and to deconstruct traditions to find where the, where the marginalized show through. But we can’t always get a lot of answers that way, so what scholars have done, what researchers have done is they’ve started looking in other areas where it turns out there are vital religious practices, but we just haven’t been looking.

For instance, scholars haven’t often paid a lot of attention to what goes on within the home, not just in the care of the home but in the relationships within a home, and in many traditions that’s where women’s religious strength comes out. It’s within the home where women might have more control, might have more say in what goes on where they might not in their public religious face. In a private, that’s their domain. This isn’t me who are saying that women’s domain is in the home, of course, what I’m saying is that if we’re going back historically the home has been a place where women’s religious rituals have developed, sometimes including the entire family, including the men and the women and extended family, and sometimes more private. We can look at home life in Judaism where it’s written into the Torah and the Talmud, into these religious texts, that women’s commandments take place in the home. Where the men are called to go and study Torah all day, it’s the women’s responsibility to maintain all of the religious life of the home that’s so vital to Judaism to keep kosher, to insure that the children are being raised, that they aren’t being sent out every morning to study Torah, that they are, I mean, at the very basic level that they’re being fed and looked after. And so, and within that home as well, there are, the women are looking after the commandments and the rituals that surround reproduction and sexuality and childbirth. They’re going to the Mecca to wash themselves and clean themselves after menstruation and after childbirth. They are ensuring that the laws of purity are being maintained in the home. So, if we look to the home instead of just looking to the text, we might be able to find these daily religious rituals or traditions that are being built that we just, we’re not seeing when we’re looking at public, the traditional kind of public scholarship on religion.

Another example might be that if we’re interested in learning about Buddhism and their Monastic traditions, so the traditions that have been growing and building since the time of the Buddha of studying, of becoming ordained, of, you know, giving yourself over to the three jewels, to the Dharma and the Sangha and to the Buddha. If we want to learn about Buddhism and Monasticism, which is such an important part of Buddhist history and with Buddhist tradition building, we will see for the most part texts that speak to men’s obligations to step away from their family life to go and renounce the social world to go meditate. We’ll see men’s philosophical texts. We’ll see this, all of this evidence of men’s tradition building within these monastic borders. What we don’t see at first glance is the communities as the community of women that developed behind those more public faces of Buddhist Monasticism where, even within traditions where women weren’t formally recognized as nuns, that women have for years been gathering together, living together. We now are seeing their social life the same way that men have, and living and dedicating themselves to living the way that Buddha taught. And so we can learn a lot about gender dynamics and the development of those social relationships within Buddhism by looking further back, off sort of the public record. We can learn, you know, we’ll see that they survived without very much support because financially they were really unable to support themselves because they, the men were the ones who were able to go teach and get paid for that teaching, and it was the men that those communities supported with giving offerings of food and shelter. But we can learn about those communities if we look a little bit further.

So, in the texts, which are getting better every year, but in the texts when we learn about monastic communities, we most often hear about the men, and we need to take, we need to remember to take that step further back to look, to sort of extend that lens to see who we’re missing when we’re only looking at one, in one place. The one, the other last thing that I wanted to talk about before I finish this was more specifically about the role of feminism in the study of Women and Religion because studying women’s religious lives itself, some might argue, isn’t a feminist act. It’s not a feminist type of scholarship. But others would argue that choosing to focus, choosing to expand that lens, like we said, it’s that is a feminist act because it’s making a conscious decision to look beyond the status quo, to look beyond that public face of what religion is. There are a lot of definitions about what feminism is, but for the purposes of my research and for the purposes of this course, feminism is a recognition that the world is a gendered place. And by gendered, I mean that we see the world and everything in it with, through a gendered perspective, whether that means having defined roles for men and women within families, within work, within religions, within, you know, all of these things, whether that means assigning masculine and feminine traits and qualities to ideas and characteristics. Basically, it means that a gendered world is a place where gender matters, where it matters if you have a male body or a female body. Excuse me, I need a tea. So, from this perspective, feminism is really important to how we study religion and has been really a key in how the study of religion has developed over the past 50 years, let’s say from the 1960’s when feminism really started to show up in public view within universities and within research.

So, when we decide to look at religion through a feminist lens, or building on a feminist perspective, which, let me make clear too, studying religion from a feminist perspective does not mean only studying women. It means studying religion from a perspective of gender mattering. So, for example, let’s talk about Buddhism again. There are texts and texts and texts within the Buddhist tradition that make distinctions between male bodies and female bodies, but it wasn’t really until feminist scholarship in the 1970’s where people started paying attention to texts that made specific reference to enlightenment being able to take place in a male body or enlightenment being able to take place in a female body. We find texts written, you know, 2000 years ago that detail that men are able to follow the Buddhist path and that path having attained the wisdom to for that and attained enlightenment. And in those texts it explains that women too can attain enlightenment, but they first need to take rebirth to take a new life in the body of a man before that final step to enlightenment can happen.

Now, this text isn’t new. This text has been around for 2000 years, and within the traditions of Buddhism, right, that rely on this text it has been active and influencing, and we could talk for hours about what that might mean for Buddhists, men and women practitioners, to read about those texts. But it hasn’t really been until more recently, like I said, in the 1970’s, that scholars in religion, who are taking this to task to consider the different aspects and affects and influences and consequences of all these scope of religions, have paid attention to things like that. And looking at these texts that tell us that a woman’s body isn’t suitable for enlightenment whereas a man’s body is, that tells us a lot about that religion and that, more broadly, what that culture has to say about women, and it’s part of the reason why we’re doing all of this study. One of the reasons why we used to get press like this is to find out what’s going on within religious traditions, within communities and rituals, what’s going on in all of those places that’s influencing the way we’re all living together.

And so, certainly, from my perspective, understanding how we understand men’s bodies and women’s bodies has a very big impact on how we understand each other as human beings. What does it teach children, what does it teach men, what does it teach women to see bodies that way? And I’m just choosing Buddhism as a, I’m just pitching on Buddhism here, well, because it’s the area that I know best from my own research. It’s certainly not unique to it. So, I guess what I want to leave you with today, if you choose to let your reflection assignment on this, is what interests you, having taken this course and having, you know, we’re almost at the end. We’re only about a month away. So, having taken this course and gone through all of these different units and having gotten these short glimpses into the traditions of the world, what has been missing for you in terms of questions of gender or women? Was there a unit for you? Was the unit on Christianity, was it missing something that you wanted to learn about women’s role, gender roles, and what kind of questions do you have about it? What does it mean to you for those questions to be lingering, that they weren’t answered in the course? I’m curious. I’d like to know more about that. I want to know on a selfish level what things I can include, and if you have a ques-, or if you have an answer, I’m sorry, to that problem as Women and Religion as an afterthought, what’s your solution to that? If we see that problem in so many texts and articles where we talk about a religion, and then we talk about women at the end, how do you propose that that sort of segregation of research, how do you suppose that that ends? Maybe you can come up with an idea for those writers of textbooks. So, I’m leaving you with that.

I don’t have an article for you to look at in particular, but I am going to put up a few resources on the first website, not for your use in this reflection because I am really more interested in this assignment just to hear what you have to say. But I will put up some resources in case you are interested for future work. I hope that many of you will take other religion courses in your time with me, and so you will have many opportunities to ask some of these questions with more opportunity. Like I said at the beginning of this course in the notes, this course asks a lot of us to cover an entire globe of traditions in such a short time, and it seems so terrible to only have a few weeks for each tradition. And of course, we’re not even covering all of the traditions. There’s so many that we could be including. So, I’ll leave you with that. I’ll stop talking now, and I really look forward to hearing your reflections. Thank you.

Last updated: 6/2/202 By TS

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