Mapping Feminist Histories of Religious Traditions

Abstract

In the past several decades, feminist historians of religious traditions have challenged settled assumptions about women's roles in historical societies. Feminist histories of religious traditions investigate a complex usually neglected even by women's histories, namely, the intricately imbricated effects of religion, gender, and culture. Indeed, attention to the gendered discourses of historical societies alters the questions historians ask and the evidence they seek, as well as their reconstruction of those societies Feminist history developed rapidly in the last decades of the twentieth century. It began with exposing the inadequacies and distortions of historical accounts that uncritically study males, the organizers and administrators of public life in their societies. Historians of women's experience added invaluable detailed studies of women's roles, writings, and activities. But the larger task of reconstructing inclusive histories remains to be done. This roundtable discussion focuses a conversation among feminist historians of several religious traditions on the topic of how inclusive histories of these traditions can best be achieved. It raises several fundamental questions about terms and methods. To mention just one example: in the text that follows, I use the terms feminist history, women's history, and inclusive history in slightly nuanced ways in relation to Christian traditions. These (and perhaps other) terms need to be defined more precisely in the context of different religious traditions Historians routinely read the writings of other historians working in different historical contexts for methodological suggestions. Some of these suggestions may indeed be detachable from the contexts in which they have been applied and may be usable in quite other inquiries; some may not. The conversation that follows will help to identify the advantages and problems entailed in [End Page 45] adopting and adapting methodological suggestions for feminist interpretations of religious traditions My contribution to the discussion takes as its starting point my own recent effort to construct an inclusive history of Christian thought. Writing The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Blackwell, 2005), I quickly learned that simply adding interesting and influential women was not sufficient to convey the complexity of the history I set out to develop. Rather, basic assumptions about historiography needed to be questioned. If women's experiences in Christian communities are taken seriously, for example, a triumphal narrative of Christianity's emergence from a small local cult within Judaism to a world religion and empire does not provide an adequate or accurate framework. In the past twenty-five years, many scholars have discussed Christian (male) leaders' ambivalence in regard to women. On the one hand, Christian women who acted on their commitment to their faith were considered exemplary and admired, and the few extant writings written by women testify that some women experienced authorization and empowerment in Christian movements. On the other hand, there is no dearth of evidence of hostility toward women, along with (largely successful) efforts by male leaders to control and constrain women's activities and to speak for them. At the very least, evidence from the first centuries of the Common Era demonstrates the existence of a vivid and complex debate over women's roles in Christian movements Feminist historians have usually found it impossible to claim exclusively either that women in these early Christian communities were helpless victims of a pervasive misogyny or that their faith provided new roles and opportunities; rather, both must be acknowledged and described. A feminist historian's task is further complicated by the ultimate impossibility of generalizations across geographical locations and centuries. Gillian Clark's Women in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1993) exposes the bewildering and irreducibly local variations of legal, medical, and religious attitudes toward women in the Roman Empire. We do not yet have similarly detailed studies for women in societies outside the Roman world Thus notions of "progress" and "development," the traditional interpretive lenses of historical theology, elide the fundamental ambiguity of Christian women's experience. In fact, once the inadequacy of ideas of progress...