Paganism is experiencing its moment now and, alongside appearances in popular culture and a rise in adherents, this has meant an uptick in scholarship about this corner of the religious landscape. Shai Feraro’s Women and Gender Issues in British Paganism, 1945–1990 is a welcome addition to this development. It is one of the few historical analyses of the tradition to look at trends over a long period time while also taking a lived religions approach, focusing equally on the institution and individual. Feraro examines an array of data in each chapter, telling a story that includes characters and traditions explored from different directions.Feraro’s focus on gender and women speaks to the heart of much debate in Pagan communities. The roles of the Goddess and priestess are seen as important innovations, while a focus on reified gender norms as a driving force in ritual creation and theology creates ongoing controversy. Feraro focuses on “how British Wiccans and Wiccan-derived Pagans reacted to the rise of ‘second wave’ feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement” (1), and particularly how these influences moved back and forth over the Atlantic, often originating in the United States.The first two chapters of the book are a genealogy of gender issues in British Paganism. The first chapter focuses on Victorian magicians such as Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune, the second on founding figures in early Wicca like Gerald Gardner and Alex and Maxine Sanders. These figures made room for the Goddess and priestesses in their tradition and gave lip service to the power of the divine feminine, but Feraro concludes that nearly all institutional power, and much of the ritual power, was still held by men.The third chapter focuses on the role that second wave feminism played in the evolution of Paganism. Feraro is interested in radical and cultural feminism, defining radical feminism as a reaction to liberal feminism’s focus on achieving societal equality. Cultural feminists argue that “women…must break away from male institutions, culture, and language and form a new women’s movement” (8). Radical feminism goes further and embraces a biological difference between men and woman, urging women to leverage their innate qualities and fix the world in ways men cannot. These ideas entered British Paganism primarily through the work of Z. Budapest, whose Dianic Wicca excluded men from all rituals, and her disciple Starhawk, who advocated for a more open practice and did more to spread Wicca around the world than anyone else. Somewhat ironically, Feraro addresses a topic that is often the focus of conversations around women in witchcraft: the role of men.The fourth and fifth chapters cover the locations and people involved with the adoption of these new forms of feminism in British Paganism. Feraro uses archived letters, public records, and personal interviews to paint a picture of this influence. Here, Feraro’s specific area of research becomes clearer. The anchor of most of the rest of the book is on the robust Pagan culture of Glastonbury in the 1970s and 1980s and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, a community that sprang up outside the Greenham RAF base to protest the use of nuclear weapons.The sixth chapter discusses the reaction of established figures in British Paganism to these innovations. The seventh tackles similar issues through the eyes of those outside leadership positions by drawing from Pagan-related zines, an underused resource in the world of Pagan studies. Many zines contain long letter sections where conversations play out among those who likely never met each other, but here Feraro concentrates almost entirely on the publishers of these magazines.One flaw of the book lies in the difference between its stated scope and its actual content. While it promises an exploration of women and gender issues in British Paganism writ large, the book ends up primarily covering the debates surrounding cultural and radical feminism occurring in Glastonbury and Greenham Common during the 1970s and 1980s—an important part of gender and women in Paganism, but not exhaustive. This book could have benefited from a more robust vision of gender in British Paganism. In a way, this is a trap of academia in general. Too often we are asked for a comprehensive study of a large field without straying outside of the relatively small data set in which we have become experts.Nevertheless, this book is a valuable resource about an important corner of Paganism’s history. It will be an important touchstone for this burgeoning subfield of modern Western Magick traditions.
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Jul 1, 2024
Molly Drummond 
Open Access