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At the opening of an ambitious conference held on April 3 and 4 on “Gender and Religion: Authority, Power, and Agency,” co-organizer Ann D. Braude declared it “both fitting and fascinating” that Radcliffe and Harvard Divinity School should cosponsor “an exploration of the tangled histories of women and religion.” Noting that both schools were constructed on the margins of Harvard’s nineteenth-century campus, Braude, who directs the Divinity School’s Women’s Studies in Religion program, quoted Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard when Radcliffe was established. Although Eliot believed the “critical study” of religion should be pursued by men, “for whom its practice is a private and individual matter,” he felt strongly that “women should have their religious motives and aspirations shaped by the College.” He was therefore adamant, said Braude, “that the Divinity School and Radcliffe should remain separate and distant from each other.” 

Harvard’s current president, Drew Gilpin Faust, obviously was of a more interdisciplinary mind when she conceived the recent conference during her tenure as the Radcliffe Institute’s founding dean—as were the twenty-five speakers and more than four hundred attendees who gathered to consider topics as diverse as medieval Japanese Buddhism, religion and slavery in nineteenth-century Sudan, religion and conservative politics in the United States during the 1980s, the struggle for gender equality in the context of Islam, and challenges to women’s leadership in today’s global ecumenical movement. Speaking during the opening day of the two-day conference, Faust convened a panel inspired by the work of Caroline Walker Bynum AM ’63, PhD ’69, BI ’84, LLD ’05, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, whose research has been instrumental in introducing the concept of gender into the study of medieval Christianity.

Faust called Bynum’s watershed book Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (University of California Press, 1987) “a touchstone” for younger scholars. Written while Bynum was a Bunting fellow at Radcliffe, the book explores images of women, food, physicality, and the body in medieval Christianity. Carol B. Duncan, who teaches religion and culture at Wilfrid Laurier University, was among several scholars to note Bynum’s influence. She said Bynum’s work on “women’s religious subjectivities” had informed her own research on the way that modern women living in the African diaspora “have forged authentic religious lives for themselves in environments that are often hostile to their very existence.” R. Marie Griffith AM ’92, PhD ’95, a professor of religion at Princeton University, called Bynum’s assertion that it is “a mistake to take the ideas of male theologians and biographers about women as the notions of women about themselves” a guiding tenet in her effort to develop a feminist framework for understanding conservative Christian women and their notions of gender and power. One aspect of Griffith’s research highlights the paradox of evangelical women  “who passionately embrace the rhetoric of traditional femininity and the practice of female submission to male authority, even while they subvert both.”

Paradoxical Evidence
The concept of paradox surfaced repeatedly during the conference. In a panel titled “Gender and Challenges to Religious Authority,” Michelene Pesantubbee, a professor of religious studies at the University of Iowa, described changes in the matrilineal Choctaw nation in response to the encroachment of seventeenth-century French and English colonizers. Often kidnapped and enslaved by white settlers, high-ranking Choctaw women became less visible in sacred ceremonies and council circles when Europeans were present. While this seems to indicate a loss in status, Pesantubbee believes the restructuring of these gatherings might actually have been “a negotiated way of continuing the tribe’s horizontal, complementary gender roles” in an environment that had become dangerous for women.

New York University medieval history scholar Fiona Griffiths RI ’04 analyzed paradoxical female symbolism in two well-known medieval texts, the St. Alban’s Psalter and the Hortus Deliciarum. Although male priests and monks officially held more authority in medieval Church hierarchies,  images from the texts show women in closer proximity to heaven; one illustration depicts nuns introducing monks and priests to Jesus Christ. The texts “invite us to reconsider our easy assumptions concerning the apportioning and exercise of spiritual authority within the medieval Church,” Griffiths stated.

Reminding participants that religion and gender issues look different when viewed through a non-Western, nonmonotheistic lens, panelist Barbara Ruch noted that Japanese Buddhism has no religious laws or precepts that enforce gender inequality. Indeed, said Ruch, who is director of Columbia University’s Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies, Buddhist monks and nuns dress alike and shave their heads to erase apparent gender differences. Yet even in a religion where the ideal is to become a genderless “Golden Buddha” in the afterlife, women believers must overcome centuries of misogynistic commentaries, written by Chinese and Japanese monks who depict women as demons. To do so, “women choose their techniques carefully,” said Ruch, whose presentation focused on the work of a dynamic thirteenth-century abbess who was able to restore two crumbling convents by convincing supporters that the empresses who had founded them many years before were themselves deities. The abbess “made no attempt to argue against or challenge” negative female stereotypes, Ruch explained. Instead, she ignored them and created “a persuasive image of women as pure and potent.”

Feminism’s Impact
The influence of contemporary feminism on traditional views of religion sparked interest among a number of scholars. Boston College professor Lisa Sowle Cahill noted that Catholic women who came of age during Vatican II and today’s young Catholic women tend to “talk past each other” when it comes to issues of change. Older women’s feminism—born of the confrontational political culture of the 1960s—often is geared toward altering Church infrastructure and rules about ordination, birth control, and divorce. Cahill observed that younger women may favor the institutional change called for by their mothers, but because they came of age in a “pluralistic, unstable, and confusing” popular culture, their focus is more on finding a personal “sense of purpose and meaning” within the Church.

Panelist and Virginia Commonwealth University scholar Amina Wadud’s search for meaning within Islam’s male-dominated hierarchy has led to her “female-inclusive interpretation” of the Koran, based on a belief that each person has a “direct relationship with the sacred unmitigated by any external authority.” Wadud, an activist in the movement to reform Muslim family law, asserted, “In the Koran’s discussion of cosmology and the judgment, it is clear that women and men are completely equal.” Analyzing the Torah’s emphasis on male authority, as well as the notion that the text is literally the word of God, Tamar Ross, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Bar Ilan University, noted the “profound theological question that feminism poses for traditional Judaism.” She advocates a “cumulative view of revelation as a basis for acceptance of an emerging worldview that allows for feminist themes.” “God does not speak by vocal chords,” Ross ventured, “but through the dynamics of history and the developing human understanding triggered in its wake.”

As an éminence grise at the gathering, Caroline Walker Bynum reflected on the range and creativity of the scholarly presentations. “We are light-years away from where we were when Holy Feast and Holy Fast was published,” she said. “Today there is a more complicated sense of textuality, a more self-conscious use of method. In the last twenty-five years, the study of religion and gender has made enormous progress, and you can see that here today.”

The event was the Radcliffe Institute’s sixth annual conference on gender. Plans are currently under way for next year’s conference, which will address gender and law.

Deborah Blagg is a freelance writer.

Photo by Tony Rinaldo

For video of the conference proceedings, please see http://www.radcliffe.edu/events/calendar_2008religion.aspx.

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