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25 - Women and religious change

from Part V - Religion, Society, and Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Merry Wiesner-Hanks
Edited by
R. Po-chia Hsia
R. Po-chia Hsia
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
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Summary

Every religious tradition has ideas about proper gender relations and the relative value of the devotion and worship of male and female adherents; every one stipulates or suggests rules for the way men and women are to act. In many religions these messages are contradictory and ambiguous, providing ideas that support gender hierarchy as well as complementarity and equality. This was true in Christianity from New Testament times onward, and was certainly true in the early modern period. On the one hand, God was thought of as male, the account of creation was understood to ascribe or ordain a secondary status for women, women were instructed to be obedient and subservient, the highest (or all) levels of the clergy were reserved for men, and religious traditions were used by men as buttresses for male authority in all realms of life, not simply religion. On the other hand, women used the language of religious texts and the examples of pious women who preceded them to subvert or directly challenge male directives. For Christian women of all classes and all denominations, religion provided a powerful justification for independent action; women who were not Christian also found support in their own religious traditions – Judaism, Islam, and in colonial areas indigenous religions – for actions opposing or undermining Christian authorities.

The Protestant Reformation

Scholars differ sharply about the impact of Protestantism; some see it as elevating the status of most women in its praise of marriage, others see it as limiting women by denying them the opportunity for education and independence in monasteries and stressing wifely obedience, and still others see it as having little impact, with its stress on marriage a response to economic and social changes that had already occurred, and not a cause of those changes.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Christianity , pp. 465 - 482
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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