Gender and World Religions +
Witch Hunts

Gender and World Religions

  • Ursula King: major world religions, but also beliefs and practices of ancient times and new religious phenomena.
  • Spirituality or faith are sometimes synonymous, but sometimes distinct from religion
  • Definitions of religions are often western-centric.
  • features:
    • address/answer big questions of human existence
    • Provide symbolic systems
    • Symbols, myths, metaphors conveyed through texts and oral traditions
    • Ritual, sacred places or objects
    • communal/individualised
    • Not monolithic, but syncretic

sex, gender and religion

  • In most religious systems, sex and gender are treated the same
  • Reform in gender roles does not mean a critique of sex/gender conflation.
  • Often marked by essentialism/dualisms/binaries
  • Ursula King: religions have created and legitimated gender, enforced, oppressed and warped it, but subverted, transgressed, transformed and liberated it.
  • Lisbeth Mikaelsson: in the shape of symbols and mythical systems, religion construes the nature of the world, humanities place in it, how life should be lived according to divine will, and what it is to be a man or a woman.

religion and patriarchy

  • Patriarch is a religious word > male power structures/leaders
  • Influential texts and teachings are done almost exclusively by men
  • Modern fundamentalisms are very patriarchal
  • Globally, women are more likely to identify with a religious faith, but this is changing and there are variations to be aware of > Pew Research Centre Sutyd 2010
    • Women are not universally more religious than men
    • Women who participate in the labour force tend to show lower levels of religious commitment than women who do not work outside of the home for pay
    • Among Christians, women attend religious services more often, but among women and orthodox Jews men attend more
    • More women pray daily than men
    • Muslim men and women are more alike in their religiousness compared to Christian men and women

historic appeal of religion to women

  • Wide-ranging- lots of different levels of engagement
    • Becoming a nun to escape childbirth in a time when childbirth was dangerous
    • Access to education and travel where otherwise not available
    • Spiritualism as a form of eroticism
    • More rights and mode of politics
    • The appeal of figures like Muhammad or jesus > friendly to women.

does religion oppress or empower women?

  • Too broad of a question to do justice to religious complexity
  • Hindu contexts help women assert their rights and identities and contexts where Hindu ideals of womanhood constrain and subordinate women to their husbands
  • In more communal societies where women may lack independent income to purchase freedom and autonomy may be considered neither desirable or desired
  • Religions often stress and provide freedom via interdependence rather than autonomy.
  • Western women have rejected religion to the point where they become deaf to the experiences of those who are religious, and some women are so multicultural that they stay silent when cultures oppress women in the name of religion.

gender and hinduism

  • The feminine in traditional India is define more positively in its own right (shakti)
  • Different starting point for Indian misogyny: feminine as terrifying and powerful otherness (eg Goddess Kali)
  • Conceptions of gender are often filtered thought caste (jati) as an organising principle of the multiplicity and diversity within Indian society
  • Unique nature of Hinduism: still polytheistic and has goddesses.
    • Goddesses as both benign and loving, but also fearsome and terrifying, capable of protecting devotees.
    • Women has having power but not authority; their power needing to be harnessed, controlled, or appropriated by men.
    • Representative of an emphasis on diversity and plurality in Indian society.

emergence of buddhism

  • Arose in India 6th century BCE
  • In opposition to, but also in dialogue with Hinduism.
  • Gender ambivalence > co-existence in Buddhism of love/hate for women OR a blurring of gender boundaries
    central points
  • No one orthodoxy imposed/enforced by any one institution
  • Like other world religions, the Buddhist order was male-dominated and it did exhibit misogyny at times.
  • Hinayana: difficult path to enlightenment (mainly restricted to clerics/monks)
  • Mahayana: seen as more egalitarian because salvation is open to all.
    • Sought to bring Buddhism’s message to all people, offering easier paths to religious salvation, including for, to varying extents in different sects, to women.
    • New emphasis on certain buddhas and bodhisattvas as saviours (not just the founder of Buddhism, Gautama)
    • Some schools were/are entirely focused on Amida Buddha, who made a separate vow to save women.
  • Buddhism did not set down patriarchal rules for ordinary followers
  • Doctrinally, Buddhism opposes dualism (conceptual opposites set up between things/people) > misogyny is contradictory rather than inherent
    Monotheisms vs Buddhism
  • Monotheism:
    • One central canon/orthodoxy (the Bible)
    • More centralised
    • One father and creator God
    • God, the absolute opposite of humans
    • Central emphasis on sin
    • Salvation, to live on, as oneself.

judaism

  • First of the major (surviving) monotheisms
  • Judaism (a more hierarchical religion than hitherto) said to have arisen around 900 BCE
  • Part of shift to agricultural societies
  • From the Hebrew Bible and the Torah: emphasis on patriarchal lineage as a source of identity
    • Often women in good/bad pairs > one vs the other.
  • Gender and sex in early Judaism:
  • Strong emphasis on keeping tradition and identity alive
  • Marriage and family law favoured men (eg right to divorce) but men had obligations
  • Rituals and regulations were weighted against women
  • Sexual pleasure was important (sometimes)

christianity

  • From Judaism, Christians retained Jewish beliefs about the acceptability of some practices and not others; Genesis
  • From Greco-Romans: extended minor strains, eg Ascetism
  • Aspects of Plato’s dualistic philosophy and Aristotles ‘scientific proofs’ of womens inherent inferiority.

Creation, the Fall, and the Garden of Eden

  • An origin of patriarchy myth
  • Eve as the women > subordinate, temptress, disruptive
  • Adam as the man > is alienated and condemned due to entanglement with women.
  • Feminist critiques of Christianity > the scriptures written by men, the Christian trinity is gendered masculine
  • Historical evidence of persecution and exclusion
  • Feminist critiques of engagements with religion
  • Critique religious studies, identify and eliminate ‘distorting lenses of gender’, do not leave masculinity unexamined.

protestant reformation

  • Sex was an integral part
  • Rejected celibacy and perched sex within marriage as vital to domestic harmony
  • Female convents shut down, but centrality of the Bible encouraged female education
  • Emphasis on exclusively masculinist God > rejection of Mary, witch hunts, etc.

Witch Hunts

  • No comparable phenomena elsewhere
  • Witch-hunts evidence of a shift in religious thought
  • Concern about witches varied according to class location
  • Stereotypes about witches predated this period and endured throughout
  • There was no one stereotype of the European witch, and even within specific locations witches did not conform to a single social profile
  • The absence of any clear sense of the identity of witches was reflected in the many different ways in which the crime of witchcraft was defined
  • It was considered unthinkable that some witches could be male

europe 1500-1800

  • ~1400 (before witch trials started)-1750 (when most ended)
  • Major religious wars taking place > protestant reformation, catholic reformation, spanish inquisition
  • Sexual behaviour of both the commonfolk and the clergy was a big feature of both Protestantism and catholicism
  • Catholics and protestants amped up social disciplinary aspects of religion
  • Key difference: place of sexual desire in marriage
    • ALL sexuality outside of marriage was marked as more deviant than ever before > prostitution, homosexuality, etc.
  • Approx 100,00 people in europe and colonial america were prosecuted between 1400-1775 with approx 50,000 executed
  • Overall, 70-85% were women > figures vary across regions
  • The popular idea of the witch shifted in this period

patterns and variations

  • 15th century: fewer and more sporadic; notions of diabolical witchcraft first developed
  • Lausanne paradigm > witchcraft as a new kind of heresy
  • Geography was a factor, but this argument has changed over time > urban vs rural
  • France: crime judged in secular rather than ecclesiastical courts
  • Demonology theory was very important
  • More men were accused in france compared to elsewhere.
  • Scotland: one of the most severe hunts in protestant europe; 85% accused were women mostly over 40.
  • Extramarital sex was a big issue > female witches were often depicted as having sex with the devil, but male witches were never.
  • German lands- “heartland of the witch-craze” esp in 1590-1630. Period of chain-reaction hunts.
    • Was at the front line of religious wars
  • Distinctive feature: familiar stereotypes broke down and more men were accused, though at the height of the trials 80% of those accused were women mostly over 40.
  • Nordic countries had considerable variations; sweden primarily target women, whereas iceland primarily targeted men.

why were the overall majority women?

  • Alison Rowland: gender shaped every aspect of early modern witchcraft and witch trials… statistics on the numbers of men and women tried should be the starting point, not the conclusion of analysis.
  • From the 16th century, images of mary’s breasts go out of style, and breasts become a strong feature of witch imagery > hags who are depicted as envious young fertile women.
  • Witches were represented as women, highly sexualised, often in highly misogynistic terms, and the opposite of acceptable/desirable femininity.
  • Lyndal Roper encourages analysis of the witch craze as an embodied and psychic phenomenon that was enacted/ articulated in highly sexualised terms:
    • ‘There is certainly a sexual undertow in this imagination. It is no coincidence that exorcisms took place on beds, nor that the spectacle involved women rolling around on the ground, her dress askew and her shame uncovered’ (p. 25).

shifting interpretations

  • Earlier historical investigations were to focused on religion
  • Women’s historians/radical feminists encountered gender-blind reading with some of their own emphases > witches were healers and midwives, etc.
  • Witches embodied everything “that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeaha woman who poisoned the master’s food and inspired the slaves to revolt” (Silvia Ferderici pg 11)