Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: Feminism and Religion

Abstract

Characteristic of feminist approaches to religion is that of Rita Gross. In Feminism and Religion she offers basic definitions of technical terms, discusses the relation between descriptive and normative approaches to the study of religion, explores the historical interaction between feminism and religion, and examines four specific problems (referring to the exclusion of women from discussions of religion, the sexism in world religions, whether the latter is primordial, and what form a new religion should take). Like her feminist colleagues in the academic world, of course, Gross attacks male scholars. To her credit, she attacks some feminists as well (though more gently). The latter are ethnocentric, she argues, because they have not widened their scope beyond Christianity and Judaism to include the many other traditions studied by historians of religions. In any case, she succumbs to several rather serious fallacies. Some of these, after decades of feminist advocacy in the name of scholarship, had already