Women and Religion

This chapter looks at the ways by which women in Western Europe, Britain, and the United States were associated with religion. It addresses the fact that the discourse of secularism, despite its promise of universal equality, made women's difference the ground for their exclusion from citizenship and public life more generally. However, the chapter suggests that it was not because religious ideas about women were left in place. Instead, the apostles of secularism, in France and elsewhere, offered what they took to be entirely new explanations for women's difference from men, rooting them in human nature and biology rather than divine law. Gender difference was inscribed in a schematic description of the world as divided into separate spheres, public and private, male and female. In fact, in this context the association of women with religion was not a relic of past practice but an invention of the discourse of secularism itself.