As an interdisciplinary program, Women's Studies has worked to address the complex, interrelated issues, events, and experiences in women's lives. As it comes into maturity, it is important to re-evaluate the successes Women's Studies has managed to achieve, and to target areas needing improvement. This essay emerges out of my own experience of shifting from Religious Studies to Women's Studies. It presents my concerns about the gap I have observed between the two disciplines, and it articulates a task I believe is necessary for Women's Studies to accept if it is to continue to provide a comprehensive and relevant analysis of women's lives.

My dissertation research on identity in feminist Witchcraft draws on both feminist theory and the study of religion. As many feminist religious studies scholars have pointed out, Religious Studies continues to marginalize feminist scholarship (see Shaw, Juschka, Warne). This is particularly true when one studies a new religious movement such as Witchcraft. Because of this marginalization, I chose to do my doctoral research in a Women’s Studies department. Where better to study a specifically feminist religious movement?

However, contrary to my expectations, I find my work is marginalized in Women’s Studies as well. I have been inundated with indications that religion is not a theoretically important area of research. Some members of my department have made it clear that they are antagonistic toward religion in general, while fellow students have questioned the validity of classifying religion as an identity category. The too-common response I get when explaining my project is ‘I knew a Witch once.’ These same people would not dream of responding to a scholar studying sexuality, ‘I knew a lesbian once.’ Sexuality is clearly, and rightly so, considered an important area of feminist research; religion, it would seem from my experience, is not. And yet religion is a major influence on the social systems and cultural worldviews of most of the world and needs to be taken seriously in order to interrogate these systems. In addition, a large portion of the world’s women are actively involved in religious practice. From my work, it is clear that religion and spirituality can be valuable resources for feminist theorizing. My essay will briefly explore these three main reasons for paying greater attention to religion in the larger field of Women’s Studies, draw attention to those already doing work in this important field, and conclude with an examination of the theoretical bases of feminist scholarship which point to the necessity of taking religion seriously.

Before I begin, however, I need to explain what I mean by ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’. The two terms are often used together, either interchangeably or as distinct, unrelated phenomena. I do not take either position. As I define them, religion is the outward, social, often institutional, aspect of the search for, or interaction with, Ultimate Meaning—whether that is taken to be a personal deity, an impersonal life force, a sense of self-divinity, or whatever. Spirituality is the inner, personal, more individual aspect of the same search or interaction. Religion and spirituality are not the same thing, but they are integrally connected. Of course, these are somewhat simplistic definitions, which lack the nuance they deserve, but for the context of this short essay, they will have to suffice. When I talk about taking religion seriously, I am pointing to both aspects of religious/spiritual life. I am calling for an inclusion of religion/spirituality in feminist scholarship that does not necessarily assign any particular value to religious practice (i.e. that all religion is good), but rather recognizes that it exists and can, and in fact does, have multiple meanings for women’s lives.

Thanks largely to the writings of Simone de Beauvoir who argued that religion “confirms the social order, it justified [woman’s] resignation, by giving her the hope of a better future in a sexless heaven” (de Beauvoir 624), religion was deemed by many second wave feminists as necessarily patriarchal and therefore irredeemable. Not all feminists, though, wanted to reject religion. Some agreed that the established religions of the world were patriarchal but that new, feminist religions could be developed such as Goddess worship and Witchcraft. Others wanted to stay in the established religions and try to bring about change from within. Still others, though perhaps unwilling to be religious themselves, recognized the importance of religion for other women.

However, feminist theo/alogians and feminist scholars exploring the meaning and practice of religions in women’s lives have not easily found a place in Women’s Studies departments. In some cases, this is due to the higher representation in Women’s Studies of social scientists over humanities scholars (although many Religious Studies scholars use social scientific methodology). In other cases, it is due to what Penelope Margaret Magee contends is a religious/secular binary maintained by many feminist scholars. Magee argues these feminist scholars believe serious, ‘academic’ scholarship must be secular, that is, unaffected by spirituality and unconcerned with religion. Religious scholarship, either as theo/alogy or the study of religion, is deemed ‘mystical’ and therefore less important theoretically. Magee suggests that this attitude is short-sighted and leaves much important material unexplored (Magee 115).

The first reason for taking religion seriously in a Women’s Studies context is that in order to understand and disrupt patriarchal systems, feminists need to know the worldviews these systems are based upon - many of which are religious or influenced by religion. This means interrogating the mythology and religious ideology of different cultures and societies to discover their involvement in shaping women’s roles and constructing identity. If religions have indeed contributed to women’s subjugation, which they clearly have, feminists need to understand how these stories, symbols, and images are working and how they can be disrupted, either by leaving them behind or by transforming them into something more useful to feminism.

Imagine trying to adequately grasp the complexities of women’s lives in the Islamic world without addressing religion. Islam, in this context, shapes all elements of social, political, economic, and religious life. This is made evident by Leila Ahmed who, for example, suggests that the choices Muslim women make (and cannot make) about the practice of wearing the veil are based upon cultural, political, and religious factors which cannot be separated (see Ahmed 1992). Unfortunately, I have had the experience of hearing feminist papers on the cultural or political implications of veiling (both in the context of Canadian immigration and multiculturalism, and in the context of Western representations of Afghan women post-September 11th) that never express the religious dimensions of this practice.

Of course, not only Islam has shaped societal systems; Christianity has done the same in the Western world. Christian feminist theologian Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza points out that it is especially important for Western feminist scholars to remember religion, perhaps because non-Western feminists have not forgotten it. She warns feminist scholars that their ignorance and/or rejection of Christian history will result in their continued enslavement to it. “Western women are not able to discard completely and forget our personal, cultural, or religious Christian history. We will either transform it into a new liberating future or continue to be subject to its tyranny whether we recognize its power or not” (Schüssler Fiorenza xix). She is not arguing that Western feminists need to be or remain Christian, but rather they need to recognize the role of Christianity in forming Western societies and cultures.

A second reason religion should be given more consideration in Women’s Studies is that a large majority of women do participate in religious practice. Recognizing this activity needs to occur as more than just a separate area of study—‘women and religion’—as if religion is not affected by or does not have an effect upon other aspects of women’s lives. For example, Anne Betteridge looks at the intersection of religious and social life in the rowzeh ceremonies held by Iranian Muslim women. Some critics discount these ceremonies as not religious enough because of their social dimensions, but Betteridge argues that such distinctions between religious and social life disregard these women’s lived experiences. She writes, “For many women religion pervades all aspects of social life, as witnessed by the variety of occasions on which vows may be made. To separate religion from social life would be to make a distinction not recognized in practice by many Islamic women” (Betteridge 110).

Similar arguments about the integration of religion and/or spirituality in the rest of women’s lived experiences are made by Lisa Pertillar Brevard and Delores Williams with regards to African-American women. Brevard shows the significance of the sacred song tradition in African-American women’s struggles for freedom and civil rights. Figures such as Harriet Tubman and Fanny Lou Hamer point to the integration of the sacred and the political in Black women’s struggles for justice (Brevard 42, 45-46). To disregard religion leaves the study of these women’s lives with a big, gaping hole. Williams explores the spiritual power Black women get from the teaching of the ‘Old Folks,’ which helps them find their strength and power to persevere in the conditions of oppression and struggle. According to Williams, one cannot understand Black women’s ability to cope, nor their activity to ensure liberation and empowerment, without addressing their religious and spiritual heritages, beliefs, and practices (Williams 191).

A third reason it is important to address religion within Women’s Studies is to reclaim religion and spirituality for feminist purposes. Religion and spirituality are not solely the domain of patriarchy, nor are they only important as part of women’s daily practices; religion and spirituality can be understood as integral parts of the feminist movement. Mary Daly sees the feminist movement as a spiritual movement. In fact, one of her reasons for writing Beyond God the Father was to

In my critique of Women's Studies' lack of attention to religion, I do not want to imply that there are no feminist scholars who take religion seriously. But I have noticed an interesting trend. Except for those feminists working explicitly within Religious Studies, those who most understand religion and spirituality as relevant to feminist scholarship tend to be women of colour and those engaged in postcolonial studies.

Religion and spirituality can also be used as resources for feminist theory as story or metaphor. In “The Sound Barrier,” Himani Bannerji focuses on the problems immigrant women in Canada have in speaking their experiences in a language and culture which is foreign from their own. She illustrates her point by weaving throughout the essay a story which draws from the imagery and myth of Hinduism. Religion here becomes something to draw on to further a particular feminist voice, regardless of whether that religion in its whole is practiced by the scholar. It is part of Bannerji’s language, because it is part of her history (Bannerji 159-179).

Engaged in a personal account of her own creation in and interaction with culture, bell hooks talks of the spiritual as part of an aesthetic legacy in Black women’s experience. Cultural production such as art and writing, for hooks, are both political and spiritual acts. The importance of spirituality is seen particularly clearly in hooks’ discussion of Black women’s fiction where “healing takes place only when black female characters find the divine spirit within and nurture it” (hooks 342). Fighting oppression, making a new space for oneself, and bringing about one’s own and others’ empowerment are all spiritual acts. And in Audre Lorde’s classic essay, “Uses of the Erotic,” the spiritual and the political come together in the erotic. She posits the erotic as a source of power for women, and this power can only be accessed, she argues, by bridging the gap between the spiritual and the political (Lorde 210).

As mentioned earlier, it is still possible to find scholarship that interrogates responses to Western colonialism in the Islamic world without addressing religion. In Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse, edited by Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-lan, there is clear indication, as well, that religion was a motivating factor in the colonial project, not just the response to it. Yet religion has multiple roles in colonial and postcolonial situations, not all of them oppressive to women. In this volume, Miriam Cooke suggests that Islamic feminists are able to critique both Western hegemony and Islamic patriarchy without abandoning their own religious identities. Laura Levitt proposes a “connection between postcolonial, feminist, and Jewish critiques” which interrogates the loyalty given to liberal (colonial) states by those (“in this case, Jews, women, and Jewish women” in France) who are continually Othered by these states (Levitt 162). In both examples, religion is a complex and shifting identity category which shapes colonial experiences and anti-colonial resistance.

If feminist scholars want to address women’s lived experiences, they cannot ignore religion. Fortunately, the theoretical framework of much feminist scholarship opens up the possibility of including religion in Women’s Studies as an identity category in intersectionality studies. In this sense, religion can be understood to be an additional category of analysis, another way to bring silenced and marginal voices into the centre, and another method for further coalition building among women.

The idea of feminism as partaking in intersectionality studies is well supported by many feminist scholars. Himani Bannerji argues that separating oppressions (such as race, gender and class) is counter-productive, leading to the mistaken assumption that “since the aspect of gender is not constitutively related to other social and formative relations,” all women experience the same oppression—as women—regardless of their race or class (Bannerji 50). Anti-racist feminism, argues Bannerji, requires the intersecting of these issues. Elizabeth Grosz also points to the importance of looking at race, gender, and class together, but she prefers the language of “mutual constitution” to the language of intersection (Grosz 19-20). That is to say, as Grosz does, “[o]nes’ sex cannot be simply reduced to and contained by one’s primary and secondary sexual characteristics, because one’s sex makes a difference to every function, biological, social, cultural, if not in their operations then certainly in significance” (22, italics original).

While Bannerji and Grosz are looking at race, gender and class here, other categories of identity and experience, such as religion, can arguably be included under the same argument. In fact, Patricia Hill Collins does just this in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, when she claims that “social theories reflect women’s efforts to come to terms with lived experiences within intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation and religion” (Collins 9). Furthermore, if, as Grosz makes clear, “one’s sex makes a difference to every function, biological, social, cultural” because of their mutual constitution, it follows that these biological, social and cultural functions make a difference to one’s sex. In other words, if religion is understood as a function of women’s lived experience (which Collins points out is true at least for many Black women), then its intersection with gender, race, class, ethnicity, age, and ability shapes those identity categories as much as religious experience is shaped by them. A fuller consideration of religion is therefore necessary for a more thorough exploration and understanding of what it means to be a woman in specific times and spaces.

Collins also talks of the silencing of Black women’s voices by scholars. She is clear throughout Black Feminist Thought that many Black women value religious/spiritual knowledge; therefore ignoring religion is a de facto marginalization of Black women’s knowledge. Keeping religion and spirituality out of feminist scholarship “works to suppress the ideas of Black women intellectuals” which in turn helps “to protect elite White male interests and worldviews” (5).

Feminist theory which takes into account intersecting oppressions and/or mutually constituting identity categories is generally fond of coalition building—a recognition of difference which allows for coming together and not just maintaining rigid boundaries between groups. Emily Culpepper believes that, “The women’s movement needs many women with many tools, and no one of us can know each and every source that inspires another” (Culpepper 158). Coalitions allow for a broader picture of what is going on in women’s lives across the world. Collins also point to the importance of coalitions by emphasizing situated knowledge. She writes:

Feminist scholars who are concerned with intersectional analysis and addressing women's lived experiences need not radically change their theoretical approaches in order to take into account the integration of religion/spirituality with other aspects of women's lives. Rather, they need only move away from the idea that religion is necessarily patriarchal and/or irrelevant to women today, recognize that many women are religious, and acknowledge that religion/spirituality can be a useful resource for ideas. Addressing women's religious lives/experiences very simply adds another category of analysis to a theoretical approach that already calls for multiple categories of analysis.